Did you see that amazing photo of two entangled photons? If you did maybe like me you had no idea what you were looking at, just that it’s amazing to even think that it would be possible to do such a thing! Maybe it’s a hoax like NASA landing on the moon (not!). What is entanglement anyway? Even Einstein didn’t believe in it. Yet, here it is surfacing it’s strange little head. What could it all mean?
If you have been brave (desperate?) enough to read any of my posts, you will see that I occasionally (often) drown my toe in esoteric areas of science. My last post (“Are some headaches caused by gravitational waves?”) was in a field that is now called quantum biology. The new photo I mentioned is about pure physics as far as I can tell. But hey, who ever let a good story go to waste even if it wasn’t true? Let the photo be about quantum biology too! So now we get a story! My business is really about entertainment!
So, here’s my train of thought. We now can (I’m still shell-shocked about it) see two entangled photons. And we now know that entanglement is not just about two photons being entangled, but that macro objects can be entangled too (comment; this is amazing too, it was donkeys’ years while we believed that entanglement was only for singles, now we know that they can date en masse too!)
And (yet more relatively late-breaking research), we also know that these macro effects can also apply in certain biological systems. Fellas, that includes us truly too!
So presumably one of these days, scientists are going to come up with more jaw-dropping photos of a mass of entangled molecules inside an animal, maybe even a human, system. We can take that as a given.
But my question is: what would these entangled macro systems be doing anyway? Especially if they were designed by humans rather than being a natural product like photosynthesis or animal navigation?
In other words, what use can we put this to in actual practice? Beneficial, nefarious or otherwise: the sky’s the limit! What can we dream up to make entangled macrobiological systems useful? Even if it destroys us or the planet in the process? Isn’t that the normal outcome of human inventions anyway?
So, here’s my entry into this competition. My thesis is that the whole of mankind is just one massive uber-marketing competition. So far Google has been winning but there’s lots of other contenders like Tencent and Alibaba, Facebook of course, Beyond Meat soon no doubt, and so on. But it’s likely that new competitors will emerge. What will their special gig be?
My money is on neuromarketing. These days that’s kind of old hat. But what about quantum neuromarketing? What if you could create memes – which is commonplace these days globally – and sneak them into our brains via quantum effects? You got it! By entangling the memes into our brain circuits via macro quantum entanglement! Piece of cake really.
Of course, what you would be trying to sneak in would be (getting started anyway) brand memes, like sugar and vaping being wholesome. But it doesn’t have to stop there. Obviously, the real aim of this is political where a political party, interest group or lobbying association penetrates your brain circuits so that it can have its way with you. It’s limited only by the imagination.
Quantum marketing everyone!
Now you might think this is all potentially horrible, and so it is. But thinking that isn’t going to stop it happening. The train has left the station, as they say.
There’s going to be lots of applications and uses and with absolute certainty we can say that I haven’t even scratched the surface here. There are countless smart people in business, advertising, biology, the military all paid to think things like this and once they see this, off they’ll go, if they haven’t already done it.
And there’s other stuff. How about human networks of entangled memes? Think what you could do with them. There’s a whole new areas of knowledge to emerge in quantum psychology that we haven’t thought about yet, but that entanglement will quickly make possible.
To be sure, some of these new areas might even be good. They could well open up new avenues for improvement in the human condition. But we are all so inventive that we will still find the bad in it, sooner or later. Look how social media went from being the savior of the planet to its nemesis.
“Weaponization” was the word I was looking for. I started off being amazed and proud that humans could come up with a photo that is so emblematic of human greatness. But once I think of how good we are all at weaponizing everything we create, the rot sets in.
Entanglement was great while it lasted. It will be death of us all yet.