I think we say this a lot around here, but awwww, poor Zan. His complaint is not an exaggeration, either, as you may recall from the last chapter.
I will be at the literary speculative fiction convention Can-Con (this year playing host to the Aurora Awards) in Ottawa, Oct 4-6. I went to this show last year and enjoyed the smaller, laid-back venue (compared to, say, Fan Expo), full of enthusiastic folks all interested in some good stories. I’ll also be on a couple on panels: “Breaking Into Comics” on Saturday at 12:00pm, and “Webcomics” on Sunday at 10:00am. An event like this is all about the panels!
Finally, don’t overlook the new blog post, because if you do you’ll miss out on the cute sketches. 
Hmmm… what could Fusella be up to?
From what we’ve seen with Aria and Zan, it appears obvious that the effects of the Miesti infection increase with physical proximity. So…has teleconferencing been outlawed in the Galaxion universe?
Also, I must admit that I am quite puzzled that pretty much all the Galaxonians we’ve seen – folk from a technologically advanced, space-faring civilization who have recently been transported across either vast distances or dimensions – seem unprepared to even consider the idea that some form of telepathy might be taking place. It’s hardly an inconcievable supposition to us here in the lowly 21st century. How is it that a crew packed with nerdy scientists and engineers could be so profoundly incredulous? It would take all of 30 minutes to set up a simple test!
Re: telepathy and skepticism.
It’s worth remembering that even today, telepathy (as well as other “ESP” abilities) are at best a fringe science – there’s been no conclusive evidence in favor – or even suggesting a hint of such abilities – for over fifty years. If there has been no further evidence in favor of telepathy in the centuries between now and the era of Galaxion, then telepathy has probably been relegated to the same place as such concepts like phlostigon, medical humors and the aether.
It’s also worth noting that responsible scientists are not just curious, but skeptical as well. When confronted with a new phenomenon, scientists will work through all the simpler possibilities before considering stranger ones. This tends to help avoid cases of “ready fire aim” that can ruin careers. For negative examples see: Pons and Fleischmann’s cold fusion confusion, and NASA’s Amazing Arsenic-Based Life That Ain’t. It’s only when the simpler explanations have been ruled out that more far-out possibilities can be considered, and those will likely need further evidence – and experimentation – before they can be accepted.
Carl Sagan said it best: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” An alien drug that makes people telepathic is a very extraordinary claim.
I’m sorry, but there is most certainly (admittedly controversial) research supporting the possibility of types of “ESP”. And we actually have commercially available machines right now that can read and identify specific patterns of thought. So I can’t imagine mankind losing interest in the idea that a person’s thoughts might be detected and understood at a distance (aka telepathy). After all, for nearly a hundred years we’ve had ever-accumulating proof that nothing in the universe travels faster than light – and yet we keep investigating whether there are ‘hacks’ around that limitation.
As to your Sagan quote – implicit in it is the acknowledgement that true scientists (as opposed to keepers of orthodoxy) are prepared to test extraordinary claims – they do not eliminate testable hypothesis simply because a positive result would be unsettling. But so far I see little evidence that the people on the Galaxion are prepared to even consider that two of their most gifted crew members are not insane or lying, but rather have encountered a legitimately new phenomenon – pretty strange for a crowd that spends their lives searching for alien life!
(Btw, as an MIT alum and an emerging technologies consultant, I found the ref to cold fusion ironic. Yes, P&F made premature and hyperbolic public claims – under pressure from non-academic bosses. And it’s true that the fallout was spectacular. However, contrary to current popular belief, research into ‘cold fusion’ is quite active – many 10s of million$/yr being spent in Japan and Europe, and even at MIT (which holds several of the very few US patents allowed in this category). For political reasons, the patent office has decided to deny all applications using the phrase ‘cold fusion’ so now most of the work is on ‘alternative nuclear physics’ et al. Look into it!)
This is a great discussion!
While I don’t want to fall into the hole of attempting to explain too much of the story here in the comments, it’s worth noting that despite the extreme lag time of the webcomic, from the characters’ point of view they’ve only had, at most, a couple days to think about what the symptoms presented may mean. For others on the ship, even less. (And some are trying really hard NOT to think about it.) Not to mention the other events calling their attention. You can’t rush good science! 
Still, some good thoughts here, and you’ve got me thinking more about it, too.
I think Palle has hit the nail on the head when he said “Zan and Aria are going to have to reveal their experience a bit more clearly”. Remember, we know a lot more about Zandarin and Aria’s experiences than they do (which were fuzzy and delirious to them) and certainly a lot more about them than the scientists on the ship. It is one thing for us to leap, with our knowledge of the situation, to the possibility of telepathy than for the scientists and doctors in the crew.
What the crew of the Galaxion know is that Zandarin and Aria were given some sort of drug and then started hearing intrusive noises in their heads. Even now, the preponderance of experience is that drugs frequently cause hallucinations. Drugs have not (yet) been shown to cause telepathy. Assuming that Earth has not yet discovered telepathy drugs in the future, that preponderance of experience will be even stronger.
Frankly, Occam’s Razor cuts pretty sharply here. I don’t think that the scientists have yet been given any information that would lead them to suspect anything other than drug-induced auditory hallucinations. In the absence of that sort of information, making such a leap would seem to me to be highly unscientific.
But that’s just the view from where I’m sitting, with what I know of the story. The whole point of this comment is that others, with different knowledge, may come to different conclusions.
Hey Tara! CanCon will be 3 blocks from my place, though I may have too busy a schedule to buy tickets. But if there’s any way I can get the books from the indiegogo campaign so you don’t have to pay for shipping, I’d be very happy with that!
Cool! I’ll be in the dealer’s room Friday: 6 to 9, Saturday: 10 to 7, and Sunday: 10 to 5, but if there’s a time outside those hours that works for you, come on by! If not, I can probably step out of the dealer’s room briefly for a quick handover. Best to email me with the details.
I guess unaided telepathy *is* pretty much on the level of pseudoscience at this point. Instead of getting to a point where we could send raw brain signals to each other, evolution has found it much easier to just implement communication by audio, vision and language
At the same time though, you’re right. We are developing methods of non-intrusively reading the electromagnetic emissions of the brain in increasingly more useful ways. We still need to get up-close and personal with the sensors, but from there on we can convert the signal and boost it with wireless technology.
Doing non-intrusive input is a lot more tricky. I guess we have ideas and even somewhat crude methods for how to do input, but it requires us to either generate a really strong electromagnetic field to affect the brain in any noticable way, or to drill directly into the skull to connect wires directly.
Some alien substance, like trenat? Maybe. But even if it did make you so hypersensitive to electromagnetic emissions that you might be able to pick up other people’s brainwaves, the base emissions of a technological civilisation would more than likely completely overpower it. In spite of everything we know about physics and biology, and all the cases we’ve tested, we still have no plausible mechanism or any confirmed cases. (But as a sci-fi reader, I have a relatively high tolerance for technobabble and implausible effects
)
In short, like Andrew, I cannot blame anyone on that ship for being a bit skeptical if that’s the way it goes. The sciences have probably progressed more since today, and maybe they know something we don’t, but everything *we* know right now at least, makes it very implausible.
If they think of it, they could do some initial, simple tests. But the implausibility does require a lot more rigour for actual confirmation. We have pretty well-established protocols for doing that, though.
But maybe most of all, Zan and Aria are going to have to reveal their experience a bit more clearly before the rest of the crew have any decent chance of catching on.
As negative as this may sound, by the way, science works because it successfully culls most bad theories and suppositions, and avoids spending too much time on fruitless lines of research. Even so, there’s usually a contingent of about 3-5% contrarians within the community, even in the face of broad consensus on a theory. Most of the time they really are wrong, but just for the very few times that they turn out to be right and upend everything, they tend to be worth it
This was obviously supposed to be a reply to the second thread. But I must have forgotten to use the reply link