my favorite “silly-science” theory is that one day the strangeness of quantum physics will be useful. Like electricity, which was once just a strange force as poorly understood then as quantim effects are today.
Maybe quantum force-fields would let you pass an “electric current” through space-time. Maybe leave a message in another dimension somewhere, for someone else to pick up later. Maybe exchange thoughts without speaking. Sort of like psychics
Stephen Hawking posits that the nature of SpaceTime allows particles & energy to travel both forwards and backwards through Time. He even asks the question: “How is it that we can remember the past, but not the future?”
It’s possible that predictions of the future are exactly that – picking up random data from an event that’s taken place in the future. Which, of course, invents its own paradox – if I were to dream about, say, a plane crashing in the Hudson River, and that dream were causally related to the future event, that would mean the event has already happened. So, how could anyone prevent it??
Telepathy, in its current limited form, can be construed as an advanced version of empathy.
You can make up anything you want.
The only vaguely plausible-sounding explanation I can think of would be something having to do with elecromagnetic fields.
This is really a meaningless question. It’s not how science works. You can’t say, “What if this impossible thing happened?” and then do meaningful science on it. If something that was seemingly impossible was proved to be happening, THEN science could begin to try to figure it out. You can throw out hypotheses all you want, which is what this thread is really looking for, but without something testable, it’s pointless, and definitely not science.
IF that one day comes, we will have our hands full. But it hasn’t, so this is nothing more than a stupid, philosphical postulating session. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Four? Four million? None? How could you prove either?
It’s like saying, if crows are yellow, what would be the reason?
“But crows are black.”
“Yes, but if they were yellow, why would that be?”
Doesn’t sound any more worthwhile than the hoary koan, “What’s the sound of one hand clapping?”
It begs the question.
What about tunnel diodes? They’ve been useful for years.
The pheromone communication of the ethereal caste of the alien Tau race offers some possibilities - probably the best of those you list. Pheromone communication is well understood in simpler lifeforms such as insects and bacteria, so it’s a well established biochemistry principle that doesn’t require any sci-fi ideas to make it work. More to the point, pheromone communication in humans is not well understood at the current time so significant increases in knowledge here are to be expected. In the wider context of smell, the olfactory family of genes is one of the largest in the human genome and is the focus of much research - the Nobel prize for medicine was awarded in 2004 for this discovery.
It is likely that our understanding of human smell, of which pheromone sensing may or may not play a role, is in its infancy. So it is reasonable to posit large gains in knowledge here in the future that could in fact be relevant to human communication pathways.
That said, the use of pheromone communication by lower organisms sort of speaks against it ever being important for humans. Even if you imagined some sort of evolutionary miracle that lead to orders of magnitude increase in pheromone production / receptor complexity, it would still be the crudest of tools when compared to human’s visual and verbal methods of communicating.