What if you had the power
to control things without touching them?
What if you could use your mind
for anything from bending spoons
to lifting cars,
even stopping bullets right in front of you?
Since the early days of spiritualism,
psychic mediums have claimed to contact the dead.
During these sessions,
their clients could see objects
mysteriously flying across the room.
Many people believed what they saw.
Only they didn't see the hidden wires
that the mediums used to fool their audience.
Telekinesis, also called psychokinesis,
has been debunked by skeptics like Harry Houdini.
In 1926, the magician offered $10,000
to anyone who could showcase psychic abilities
that he couldn’t mimic onstage.
Nobody left Houdini's show with the prize.
In the 1970s, telekinesis caught the attention
of the U.S. and Soviet governments.
They spent decades running tests,
but the only thing they could prove
is that telekinesis is nothing more than
entertainment for the masses.
But imagine what you could do
if you had a power like that.
Let's start with this:
telekinesis wouldn't be limitless.
Think of it as an invisible set of muscles.
The more you trained your telekinetic "muscles,"
the stronger you'd get.
Maybe you could handle
bringing a remote control over to the couch.
Maybe you could make yourself a cup of tea
without having to go to the kitchen.
Or you might make small things levitate, just for fun.
Once you got good at all that,
you could start practicing with something bigger,
like moving cars around in a parking lot.
This would tire you out pretty fast,
and might not happen on the first try.
Because, just like any workout,
practicing telekinesis wouldn't be easy.
You'd need to keep working on it.
Maybe you could master your telekinetic ability enough
to push clouds away and save your city
from a hurricane or a tornado.
Making yourself fly through the air would be harder.
That would require you to push yourself away
from the objects around you.
It would only work for short distances.
But it could come in handy during rush hour.
It would really be up to you how you'd use your powers.
But forget about lifting an entire building into the air.
I can't say exactly where your limit would be, but...
elevating something that's much bigger
and heavier than you are would
certainly be over that limit.
Using your telekinetic powers could
easily get out of control, and become dangerous
to everyone around you.
Most likely, it would require a lot of time and willpower
to do even the easiest tricks.
Maybe it's a good thing none of that
could actually be done in the real world.
The laws of physics dictate that
brain waves can't travel beyond the confines of your skull.
You can't bend metal with your mind,
make things fly, and...
you certainly can't levitate yourself.
But what if there was a way to give you
at least a tiny bit of this superpower?
But it would include implanting small wires into your brain.
Technology is already able to read your mind
by using an implant that translates
brain activity into speech.
Now, companies like Paradromics
and Elon Musk's Neuralink
are working on tech that could let you move objects
just by thinking about them.
Their research is meant to help patients
suffering from paralysis, blindness or locked-in syndrome.
People who suffer from paralysis
could use a brain implant
to control computer devices and artificial limbs.
Eventually, the implants could become as common as cell phones.
A device in the brain would transfer high volumes of data
through "threads" much, much thinner than a human hair.
It wouldn't be the kind of telekinesis you see in movies.
Instead, it would be a tech-assisted one.
And what if that would be the beginning
of us merging with our technology?
What if the next step involved becoming full cyborgs?
Well, that's a story for another WHAT IF.