Let's Have Some Fun: If Astral Projection Was Real...

[Aepervius]

PS: should not this be in "humour" instead of the general paranormal forums ?

 

[Cuddles]

I recommend reading "The Light of Other Days" by Arthur C. Clarke.

Downside - Places that are economically dependent on the tourist trade, such as Nepal, would be devastated.

Not necessarily. Most tourism, certainly in Nepal, is about doing things, not looking at things. Looking at a mountain or river just isn't the same as climbing it or floating down it. Tourism in some areas would decrease, but I wouldn't expect tourism as a whole to suffer much at all.

 

[four elevener]

Because Hok and some other people responding to slipknot inspired me:

The pointed out that colonscopies would be unnecessary were astral projection real. They're right! So would MRIs and X-rays! Why is my insurance company paying UCLA Radiology a few grand when the techs could have just astrally projected in!

So!

Goal of this thread: to have fun speculating on how the world would be different if astral projection was real. Change history! Get rid of pesky invasive medical techniques! Find out if your daughter is really studying at Suzie's or is at Make-Out Point with Jimmy!

If this works out maybe we'll play with some other woo.

I dunno. They'd have to pay me a ton of money to astral project into someone's colon. I can just see the projector's first day on the job in the examination room:

"What do you see, Frank"?
"It's dark in here...stuffy...I feel like I can't breathe"
"Relax. It's all in your head, Frank."

 

[ExMinister]

Or travel to Mercury, as did a woman whose letter was included in Sylvia Browne's Book of Dreams (p. 88, softcover): "I was flying over what appeared to be the landscape of a volcanic planet. Jutting up from the gaseous terrain were these massive, jagged monoliths. I was flying in and out these spear-shaped mountains..." According to SB, she was "taking a tour of the planet Mercury." (probably kind of similar to Ingo Swann's tour of Jupiter, which James Randi wrote about in Flim-Flam)

Reading further, apparently we all astrally travel "2 or 3 times a week" (p. 73) during our sleep. And "It takes less time than the blink of an eye to travel astrally from one place to another, no matter how far away the destination is, so no place on this earth, the Other Side, or anywhere in God's infinite creation is beyond our reach while we sleep" (p. 74). Odd, at that rate, that all of the above has not been happening all along. Even if scientists were to awaken only once or twice a month with such experiences, by now we should have detailed accurate maps of planets, galaxies, atoms, cells...there should be very few mysteries left to solve.

 

[meg]

Thievery and identity theft would take on a whole new dimension, if anyone that wanted to could just astrally project into your house and start riffling through your purse, computer, day planner, etc.

It would be very difficult to keep a secret of any kind.

 

[Tumblehome]

Or travel to Mercury, as did a woman whose letter was included in Sylvia Browne's Book of Dreams (p. 88, softcover): "I was flying over what appeared to be the landscape of a volcanic planet. Jutting up from the gaseous terrain were these massive, jagged monoliths. I was flying in and out these spear-shaped mountains..." According to SB, she was "taking a tour of the planet Mercury."

If astral projection is real, then Sylvia Browne could go to Mercury to see that it isn't at all what the woman described in her letter. Or else Mariner 10 and Messenger visited the wrong planet.

 

[LostAngeles]

PS: should not this be in "humour" instead of the general paranormal forums ?

No, for a couple of reasons. While I hope that we'd have some fun with this, I think it's also interesting to simply explore the possibilities. I want to do other ones of these and then start combining them. If it was in humor, we'd all just make a lot of dirty jokes and it's not publicly viewable. Here, others who aren't forum members can take a look and maybe think through some of the consequences of such realities.

So the Internet as a means of communication wouldn't exist if we could all astrally project. We would just project to each other. In fact, I think a lot of our standard means of communication and travel would be gone or radically different. Why visit or call grandma when you can just project there.

 

[meg]

In fact, I think a lot of our standard means of communication and travel would be gone or radically different. Why visit or call grandma when you can just project there.

I don't know that it would really change the way we communicate, - would it? My understanding of astral projection is that you can look and observe stuff, but can't actually communicate, and no one in the room can tell you're there. So, if that's the case, I'd still want to physically go visit my grandma, to give her a big hug and sample her oatmeal cookies, show her pictures of the kids, etc., which I wouldn't be able to do just by astral projection.

 

[Tanstaafl]

No one would complain about long, boring meetings any more.

They'd just astral project to someplace more interesting.

 

[meg]

Hmm. I wonder if your body drools or snores or anything while you're astral projecting. Would you feel it if your coworkers painted a moustache on your face with a permanent marker while you were "out"?

 

[Tanstaafl]

We'd never know. They'd be out astral projecting too.

ETA: I suppose it's possible that not all meetings are as boring as the ones I attend...

 

[LostAngeles]

So, you'd figure if astral projection was real, people would have been doing it for a while. We're curious creatures so we'd certainly investigate its workings. How might our science change? It would imply that we have souls and that they have some sort of substance. Our thoughts have an energy outside the brain.

Would that get exploited? Might we have (or have had) factories of people just hooked up like in The Matrix?

I'm taking cryptography and I wonder what that might be like in a world with astral projection. I think that the difficulty of keeping secrets might push cryptography or what ever its comparative field in that world to whole new levels.

 

[bob_dezon]

Richard Bransons travel empire would become bankrupted over night.

Department of Homeland Security would be watching you shower.

Area 51 would be jam packed with UFO nuts.

 

[Cuddles]

It would imply that we have souls and that they have some sort of substance. Our thoughts have an energy outside the brain.

I don't think it would necessarily mean either of those. It would certainly mean that our brains, and the world, work very differently from how we currently think they do, but it would not show that there is anything seperate from or outside of our bodies. As long as it is the brain doing things, you don't need to introduce any kind of soul or external energy. Depending on the actual details it might make such things more likely though.

Would that get exploited? Might we have (or have had) factories of people just hooked up like in The Matrix?

No. The idea is, and always was, fundamentally silly. You only get out at most the energy you put in. Humans, and all life, is pretty inefficient, so you'd always be much better off just using the food you would use to feed them to produce energy rather than people. Even the Matrix acknowledged this by qualifying it with the rather fuzzy "combined with a form of fusion". OK, so that wouldn't actually help, but it shows that they at least saw the problem with the laws of thermodynamics.

I'm taking cryptography and I wonder what that might be like in a world with astral projection. I think that the difficulty of keeping secrets might push cryptography or what ever its comparative field in that world to whole new levels.

I'm tempted to say that cryptography would become obsolete, but thinking about it I'm not so sure. Things are encrypted so that only certain people can view them. The weak points are always the points at which the information is encrypted or decrypted. Obviously this is generally done in a place where only authorised people can see the unencrypted information. However, astral projection would mean that anyone would be able to see it, and therefore the fact that it is encrypted the rest of the time becomes irrelevant.

However, most cryptography now takes place inside computers where astral projection wouldn't help at all. Things like PINs and passwords won't work any more, but if things go the way they seem to be, people can just have a personal chip in a card, phone, implanted or whatever, which would allow identity verification without ever using anything vulnerable to astral spying. Since this seems likely to happen even without astral projection being real, I expect cryptography would remain largely the same.

 

[Kahalachan]

If astral projection were real, we would not need to leave the house to watch movies, travel to see what foreign lands look like, we could watch people undress, we could gather any sort of information we wanted.

Kinda like the internet.

 

[LostAngeles]

I don't think it would necessarily mean either of those. It would certainly mean that our brains, and the world, work very differently from how we currently think they do, but it would not show that there is anything seperate from or outside of our bodies. As long as it is the brain doing things, you don't need to introduce any kind of soul or external energy. Depending on the actual details it might make such things more likely though.

Yes, but I understand astral projection to be somehow sending a version of yourself out to another spot complete with sensory input and processing, along with thought. So while in our hypothetical universe, it may be the result of interesting particles having interesting interactions, we still have a self that is extra-self-ery(?), outside the self, sort of.

No. The idea is, and always was, fundamentally silly. You only get out at most the energy you put in. Humans, and all life, is pretty inefficient, so you'd always be much better off just using the food you would use to feed them to produce energy rather than people. Even the Matrix acknowledged this by qualifying it with the rather fuzzy "combined with a form of fusion". OK, so that wouldn't actually help, but it shows that they at least saw the problem with the laws of thermodynamics.

Yes, but the Matrix tried to ground itself in some form of reality. In this hypothetical universe, we're actually allowed to throw out/rewrite whatever physical properties we need to to get it to work. Astral projection itself is a fundamentally silly idea.

I'm tempted to say that cryptography would become obsolete, but thinking about it I'm not so sure. Things are encrypted so that only certain people can view them. The weak points are always the points at which the information is encrypted or decrypted. Obviously this is generally done in a place where only authorised people can see the unencrypted information. However, astral projection would mean that anyone would be able to see it, and therefore the fact that it is encrypted the rest of the time becomes irrelevant.

However, most cryptography now takes place inside computers where astral projection wouldn't help at all. Things like PINs and passwords won't work any more, but if things go the way they seem to be, people can just have a personal chip in a card, phone, implanted or whatever, which would allow identity verification without ever using anything vulnerable to astral spying. Since this seems likely to happen even without astral projection being real, I expect cryptography would remain largely the same.

Right, and I should have been more clear: I was hypothesizing a universe where astral projection exists alongside our maturing civilization and how that would affect the development of something we have. Yours sounds more like a world where astral projection is a (relatively) new thing.

That's not outside the scope of the thought experiment, by any means, I think we just approached the same thing differently.

 

[AmyWilson]

The reason people don't up and do it on purpose is because astral projection is a subconscious activity.

You may have experienced astral projection before but not realizing it was happening, writing it off as a lucid dream.

 

[arthwollipot]

So the places I visit in my dreams actually exist?

 

[Walter Wayne]

A lot more people would get dressed in the dark.

 

[arthwollipot]

Wait - would astral projectors actually be able to see in the dark? Doesn't Randi have a sealed box containing certain items that he challenges remote viewers to identify? Wouldn't it be dark inside that box? Have any remote viewers actually attempted the feat? Wouldn't that imply that they could see in the dark?