Speculation: Societal Impacts of the paranormal

[Corplos]

Every major advancement in science bring with it equally or greater effects in society. Electricity, automobiles, the radio, nuclear physics, the internet, genetic engineering, stem cells. Each one changed how we live in definite, observable ways.

So many of these psychics, paranormalists & other woo's make such extraordinary claims that you have to wonder. What if these abilities were real & could be scientifically proven without a doubt. How would society react to such claims if they were certifiably proven? How would the world change?

example: Would we see warrants for telepathy like we have for wiretaps?

I am in no part endorsing these whackjobs, I just want to provoke a little speculative fiction.

[Jimbo07]

If I had telepathy, I'd be able to stop paying my cell phone bills! :D

[sat556]

Let's take the afterlife and all that goes with it then.
Ghosts wouldn't make a big difference would they? Mind you, at least people might stop sending me photos of 'orbs'...
Mediums would go out of business, as we'd all figure out how to do it. So that would be a good thing :D
People wouldn't be as scared of death. This I see as a potential troubled area.
However, if the afterlife is all 'love and light' as the spirutal types tell us, that would mess up religions somewhat, or at least the ability to threaten us heathens with fiery hells.
No death penalty, as there wouldn't really be such a thing as death as we know it, and you wouldn't even have to miss your loved ones once you got there, as they'd all be mediums.
No need to worry about how you live your life now, as you'll get another one, whether reincarnation or just the next 'level'.

Flip, I could go on like this all night I think. So I'll stop now.

[steve s]

What if these abilities were real & could be scientifically proven without a doubt.


If any of these abilities were real, don't you think they'd have already made as big an impact as electricity, or cars...?

Steve S.

[Corplos]

[/QUOTE]
If any of these abilities were real, don't you think they'd have already made as big an impact as electricity, or cars...?

Steve S.

Uh, yeah. That's what I'm trying to get at.

The woos claim that their delusions are the real thing. But if they were, we would have seen a major upheaval on society, for even the most minor of feat. But there hasn't been any sort of impact made, despite the abundance of paranormalists out there, presenting themselves as The Real Deal. If they were as authentic as they claim to be, the world would've changed dramatically, practically overnight. But since we're still living in a society that hasn't been altered, despite their claims of actual superhuman powers, says a lot as to the veracity of their arguments.


hmm. this probably wasn't the best way to introduce myself. first impressions are everything, right?

I'd like to repeat that I don't believe in Sylvia Browne, John Edward and thier ilk. I venomously despise them.

[Roboramma]

I think the answer to the OP depends upon the imagined efficacy of this real telepathy (or other paranormal phenomenon).

If it could be shown that some individuals, when trained, were able to read the minds of others, there would be a lot of money put in to developing these people and their talents, for the simple reason that they would be useful. They would constitute a whole new industry. This industry would stretch from mundane uses (maybe therapy, as seen on star trek), to important (lie detection in court rooms, for instance), to the revolutionary (can't think of an example off the top of my head, let me get back to you).

On the other hand, if telepathy (or whatever we're discussing), were shown to exist but not to be effective (similar to what the parapyschologists claim, that people can give each other vague notions about things through thought alone), that is, if it were shown to be very difficult to even detect let alone put to use, I think that it would have some impact, but world changing. The uses it could be put to would depend on it's properties. Does it follow the inverse square law? What is the speed of it's communication? These would be important questions, and depending on their answers, it might turn out that even a very weak form of telepathy could be very useful - or not.

Probably one of the biggest impacts such a discovery would make would be a huge surge of woo thinking, not to mention scams.
After all, if it were shown that telepathy of a very weak and almost useless sort existed, woos everywhere would use that to support statements of very strong and effective telepathy.

That's telepathy, but I think similar points could be made about almost any woo phenomena. The ability to predict the future, for instance, would be world changing (and not necessarily in a good way) if it were effective. But if it were only shown to be a statistical effect that requires a huge number of predictions before we see that they tend to be right more often than we'd expect... well, it would be interesting, it would open up new frontiers to science, and some use would probably come of it. But to what degree? Actually, the ability to predict the future is an interesting one, because even if it were only a statistical effect, I can imagine large companies or governments getting enough people making enough binary predictions, looking at the results, and getting an almost certain prediction from it. What's scary to me about that is more than one group predicting the future. I don't even know what that would mean. It seems like a complete paradox to me. One more reason I doubt it'll ever happen.