Colin Barrett: Blog

First the Edenites disrupted the contact, now some of the humans do it.

Two at a time. Chapter 44 is mainly transition, but I think there's some interesting (if not necessarily politically correct) stuff in 45.

If we ever do actually contact an intelligent race of extraterrestrials, how will the contact go? On an equal footing? Or will one side have the advantage, and seek to exploit that advantage for its own benefit? Our human history of contacts between competing cultures doesn't augur well.

I've always been amused at the collective nouns that the English language applies to grouping of different sorts of animals. Alligators and their cousins, crocodiles, aren't the only ones to gather in congregations; so, oddly, do plovers (a shore bird). Some are merely curiosities, reflecting the nature of the critters themselves (a charm of hummingbirds) or some sort of onomatopoeia (a zeal of zebras). Others strike me as some sort of human commentary (a congress of baboons really does speak to our current political times). There seems to be no real sense to many others, but it's fun to check them out; you'll find long lists on the Internet.

To clarify the question of the Edenites' territorial limitation, I need to go back to my concept of telepathy being mediated by some kind of electromagnetic transfer of data. Once again, it's a major deviation from the traditional sci-fi notion of telepathy occurring by some sort of magical interchange without regard to the laws of physics.
It's easy to find examples of the limits of electromagnetic speed. Watch the national news on TV one night. The anchor is relaying to a correspondent halfway around the world. The anchor asks a question of the distant reporter. There's a noticeable delay before the reporter starts to respond. It's taken that long for the question to be transmitted across the distance, and that's why the time lapse-which is, of course, based on the speed-of-light limitation that governs the electromagnetic transfer time.
Well, if you figure that the same kind of delay would apply to telepathic transmission you can see the geographic limit that I postulate. The idea is that their telepathy allows the individual Edenites to coordinate and comprise a single collective mind. But if parts of that mind are far enough apart geographically, the coordination is lost in the information transfer delays. Think about the reflex times of individual bodies, caused by the very tiny time lags required for signals to move from receptor nerves in the extremities to the brain and then for responses to be transmitted back to muscle groups there. Multiply those delays by greater distances of Edenite bodies separated further. Thought processes would grind to a useless halt as the distances grew excessive. The Edenites need to be physically nearby for the concept to work.
It may seem odd to have a light-speed limitation governing telepathy in a story that has as one of its premises FTL (fater than light) travel. But my FTL concept is based on the Einstein-Rosen bridge (also called Lorenzian wormhole) notion, a very real scientific postulate in relativistic theory, which allows two physically separated points to become a singularity in certain circumstances.To suggest that these circumstances could be brought into existence by mere mental exercises would be pure fantasy. Thus, it's actually scientifically rational to allow physical travel to take place at FTL speeds while telepathic transfer is limited by the speed of light.