Gimme Six!

At last I've got onto the one John Wyndham book which my wife has read and raves about. This one takes us beyond the usual JW Cosy Catastrophe and projects us hundreds or thousands of years into the future after some sort of apocalypse where mutations are seen as being against the will of God. People are made is His exact image and any deviation is treated ruthlessly with banishment to badlands. In this Amish-like setting, comes the ultimate in mutations - telepathy - which Wyndham was fascinated with.

Now this has me thinking. I don't believe in any of the usual new-age tosh and was rooting for Dawkins all the way in his Enemies of Reason World Tour. However, I suppose because telepathy relates directly to the organ which I use to think about it, I have a slight anti-reason view that there is possibly a perfectly acceptable real-world vector for it. If an eye can evolve to detect light and a firefly can evolve to give it off then why not imagine a creature which emits and receives other electromagnetic radiation? To our ancestors, communication by writing and reading would seem like telepathy - and better still it is telepathy that spans not only space but time as well. All human radio communication is, for all but the few centimetres between the mouth and the microphone and the speaker and the ear, telepathy. We only need to work on a direct link between the black boxes and the brain and the link is complete.

I suppose there must be a reason why organisms have evolved to use only certain parts of the electromagnetic spectrum to communicate - it probably is to do with wavelength in relation to the size of the cells capable of reacting to it - but I cannot see why we could not evolve (or even re-design ourselves) to broadcast and receive radio waves. The brain after all is an electrical device and we can read some of its output already by direct contact. Maybe two heads close together could already each get an idea of the general field state put out by the other. I am sure that devices to extend the range of this are not far away.