\n\n"}\n\n\n\nkind of weird how many stories from the\u00a0\u201860s and\u00a0\u201870s believed that in the future everyone would have psychic/telekinetic powers though, where the heck was that coming from.
In the early 20th century spiritualism began to be absorbed into the scientific domain via ESP and parapsychology; we were superstitious enough to still think stories of such things might reflect a real phenomenon, but substitious enough that we supposed such phenomena, if they existed, would naturally be tractable to the scientific method. And, I suppose, lacking a good understanding of emergent phenomena or thinking concepts like \u201celan vital\u201d might actually be a useful model of the universe, positing plenty of different abstract forces which might arise from or influence the mind wasn\u2019t that crazy, either. There was always a telic flavor to that stuff, a ladder-of-evolution, Teilhard-de-Chardin-style optimism about it, so it seemed natural to think that not only did it exist, in the future there would be more and more of it. But parapsychology faltered as it failed to uncover any reproducible phenomena, and eventually science had to concede psychic powers didn\u2019t exist. But these changes always take a while to fully percolate through the pop culture depictions, as indeed they still haven\u2019t\u2013psychic powers still crop up from time to time (and hung around in older properties like Star Trek), because the scientific-cultural history there has stamped that stuff firmly with the label of \u201csciencelike\u201d phenomenon, so long as you use the right terminology and locate it in the right place (i.e., the brain and not the soul).
\nThis is one line of argument for SF and fantasy being mostly aesthetic trends. They take the same underlying material (speculative worlds, big what-ifs, commentary on our own world through reflection and distortion), but the difference is whether they\u2019re cast in sciencelike or mythlike (really, folklore-like or Romance-like) terms.
\n(Now the culture casts that same brand of spiritualism in terms of other scientific phenomenon\u2013the whole \u201cbecause of quantum\u201d thing\u2013but it doesn\u2019t have even fringe support among science, really, so this becomes the province mostly of New Agey types and outright scams. There\u2019s definitely a desire to take the prestige of the scientific method of knowledge and use it to explain experiences which aren\u2019t usually felt to be tractable to it, as a way of validating the importance they have to those who undergo them.)
\nthe one possible thing I can imagine is that if you had something that was vanishingly rare, say one in a billion, then for most of human history it simply would never have happened, but now with the population pushing eight billion there could be a handful of such cases walking around; Makes You Think.
\n