Investigators of the Germanwings crash and the derailment of the Amtrak train in the United States should not discount terrorism.
They should look for evidence of a sinister new technology straight out of science fiction: mind control.
Brainwashed killers have long been a staple of Hollywood movies like the Manchurian Candidate with the hapless victims turned into the zombie tools of villainous foreign controllers.
But scientific reality has outdistanced the fiction of Pavlovian conditioning turning unsuspecting innocents into ticking time bombs.
The discovery that thought is just a form of electronic activity has opened the door to invasive mind reading and manipulating technologies.
At the most mundane level those technologies allow thought control of things like wheel chairs and computers.
More extraordinarily, they allow such manipulations at transcontinental distances.
It should be theoretically possible to communicate telepathically at the same distances and control not a just a computer but another brain, a la Obi-won Kenobie in Star Wars.
The person thus manipulated might be like one hypnotized, without volition or even memory.
The driver of the Amtrak train, by all reports an extremely responsible individual, says he has no recollection of accelerating into a bend at twice the permitted speed.
Who is to say the co-pilot of the German aircraft was conscious of what he was doing, or that it was he who rehearsed flying into the mountain?
Is this too fiendish to imagine?
Hardly so in a world that has seen the cold blooded use of nuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons.
If my speculation is correct, we could be far along on the evolutionary path H.G Wells foresaw when he wrote of a future in which a vicious minority of telepathic controllers exploited a large majority incapable of self defense.
The only dim consolation is that before such a future can come to be, ordinary folk will probably butcher scientists in the streets and send us all back to the family farm.
They should look for evidence of a sinister new technology straight out of science fiction: mind control.
Brainwashed killers have long been a staple of Hollywood movies like the Manchurian Candidate with the hapless victims turned into the zombie tools of villainous foreign controllers.
But scientific reality has outdistanced the fiction of Pavlovian conditioning turning unsuspecting innocents into ticking time bombs.
The discovery that thought is just a form of electronic activity has opened the door to invasive mind reading and manipulating technologies.
At the most mundane level those technologies allow thought control of things like wheel chairs and computers.
More extraordinarily, they allow such manipulations at transcontinental distances.
It should be theoretically possible to communicate telepathically at the same distances and control not a just a computer but another brain, a la Obi-won Kenobie in Star Wars.
The person thus manipulated might be like one hypnotized, without volition or even memory.
The driver of the Amtrak train, by all reports an extremely responsible individual, says he has no recollection of accelerating into a bend at twice the permitted speed.
Who is to say the co-pilot of the German aircraft was conscious of what he was doing, or that it was he who rehearsed flying into the mountain?
Is this too fiendish to imagine?
Hardly so in a world that has seen the cold blooded use of nuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons.
If my speculation is correct, we could be far along on the evolutionary path H.G Wells foresaw when he wrote of a future in which a vicious minority of telepathic controllers exploited a large majority incapable of self defense.
The only dim consolation is that before such a future can come to be, ordinary folk will probably butcher scientists in the streets and send us all back to the family farm.
No comments:
Post a Comment