BlackBerry Planet - Techno Telepathy

From BlackBerry Planet Web Support

"Applications and devices taking advantage of wireless networks will revolutionize the way people interact. These connected data devices will become the closest thing we have to mental telepathy on a world scale."—Mike Lazaridis

No original Star Trek techie worth his salt would be satisfied without taking a stab at creating a transporter, as Mike Lazaridis and his buddies did when they were growing up. Today, reality is catching up with their boyhood fantasies. Quantum physicists are already trying out a type of tele-transportation, where they can transfer the information in a photon from one location to another. Others have found ways of "cloaking" solid objects by bending visible light, or developing "complementary materials" which have optical properties that cancel each other out.

Captain Kirk with his Communicator, on Planet Hollywood

But what about quantum telepathy? Many of the Star Trek episodes Mike Lazaridis and his friends loved when they were boys touched on telepathy directly.

In the Return of the Archons episode, Captain Kirk and the Enterprise visit Beta III, where Landru, a gifted engineer and philosopher, had built a computer 6,000 years earlier to telepathically control the population of the planet to reach a peaceful, civilized future. But Landru had only programmed his scientific thoughts and memories into the computer, but not his wisdom. So for centuries Landru's computer had been operating a static, culturally dead planet, where no one was allowed to think creative thoughts.

In Requiem for Methuselah, a 6000 year old human named Flint has crafted a series of telepathically controlled robots that can respond to mental signals of distress or danger. On beaming down to the planet, Kirk falls deeply in love with Flint's beautiful ward Rayna, a physicist. Mister Spock has to use a Vulcan mind meld, a form of touch telepathy, to make him forget her, so he can return to his duties. (In the Star Trek universe, a touch telepath can communicate directly with the mind of another being, but only if in physical contact.)

In another episode, Return to Tomorrow, Sargon, Thalassa and Henoch are the last survivors of an extremely advanced civilization. But they exist only as disembodied thought, in robots their minds can inhabit and control. They telepathically summon the Enterprise to the planet and try to take over and survive in the bodies of Kirk and his crew. They ultimately fail. At the end, Sargon suggests to Kirk that his race once seeded earth with life, and that Adam and Eve were probably his descendants.

Several Star Trek civilizations were so diverse they could not converse verbally, so they had to develop mechanical telepathy. In Star Trek Voyager's Think Tank, an alien named Kurros is part of a group called the Think Tank who actively seek out problems to be solved. One of the thinkers is a humanoid alien whose language is too complex for Voyager's universal translator to translate. Another is a life form that appears as a floating marine creature suspended in a fluid-filled tank, another a bioplasmic life form and another a purely artificial intelligence. They are able to communicate among themselves using a telepathy machine.

Perhaps it was a descendant of the original RIM Telebrain.