Human Superpowers You Could Have Soon

You know monkey has been able to control the computer with its brain. Just yeah, so your brain is composed of neurons. Neurons connect together and form a network that can talk to each other through synapses. They're the connection points between neurons, and they communicate using chemical signals known as neurotransmitters.

All of your senses, everything you experience in life, it's all just neurons firing electrical signals, or otherwise known as action potentials. When neuron spikes occur, these neurotransmitters are released. Information is then relayed across its synapses and eventually reaches another neuron. Now multiply this process by 100 billion, and that's your brain in a nutshell.

Electrodes are the way that Neuralink and other medical practices study your brain activity. By placing these electrodes close to neurons, the action potentials that create electric fields inside your brain can be detected and transferred to a machine that records and measures the data. Neuralink plans to use this to its advantage.

Your brain has two main systems: your limbic system and your cortex. These two are in a relationship with each other. Your limbic system is responsible for your basic emotions, your survival instinct; your cortex is responsible for your problem-solving skills, your critical thinking. It's where your consciousness exists. Neuralink is aiming to create a third layer to this. The implants would be a third wheel in this relationship but would increase our capabilities by multiple orders of magnitude.

They plan to increase the number of neurons that you can access regularly, that you can use to remember things or regain access to certain parts of your brain that may no longer be active. This is extremely useful for medical patients, some of which had absolutely zero options up until Neuralink became a reality.

The goal is to make this one of the most simple procedures there is, similar to people getting LASIK to improve their vision. But why do we even need this in the first place? Well, in most cases, it's a bandwidth issue. Now, many people hear this but don't exactly understand what that means. It's a speed problem. It's an energy problem. It's how fast you can get information into or out of your brain.

If you have something that you want to write down on a computer, you have to type it with your hands or speak it into a microphone—that's probably going to mess it up. If you want to learn something, it could take days, weeks, months, or even years to fully grasp. If we were able to solve this bandwidth issue, we could accomplish exponentially more in less time with much less physical effort.

Neuralink cuts out the middle man and allows input and output directly from your brain to whatever you're doing on a machine, or vice versa. It's like going from writing using a quill to having a pencil to having a keyboard, to having Siri, to now potentially having nothing but the power of your own brain. This is where brain-machine interfaces come in, and they change everything.

A brain-machine interface, or BMI, is composed of two things: a brain and a machine. The machine could be anything—a phone, a computer, a bionic arm—anything that provides you with sensory inputs from the outside world or an external source. These inputs are then returned back into your brain where you can process them. But you need something artificial in your head to return this data to.

Now don't worry, it's not like putting a CPU inside your head; it's actually quite tiny. Each Neuralink N1 chip is roughly 4x4 mm with 1,000 electrodes each. It's feasible to fit up to 10 of these inside your head in different areas, all to measure and affect different parts of your brain.

But companies and neuros alike can't just go around throwing anything they want into someone's head. It's usually a lengthy process to get these things approved by the FDA for medical purposes and later on public use. BMIs contain the potential to help people with a wide range of clinical disorders. Using just 256 electrodes, or about 2 and 1/2% the number of electrodes Neuralink eventually plans to use, human patients have been able to control computer cursors, robotic limbs, and speech synthesizers.

The full potential with nearly 40 times that amount of electrodes is hard to imagine. Currently, the best FDA approved BMI is used for Parkinson's patients, and it only has 10 electrodes. For Neuralink, this is just the beginning, and it's already a thousand times better than what is currently approved.

In version one, each electrode is inserted into your head via tiny threads that are roughly 5 microm thick. They're around 10 times smaller than a human hair and contain 32 electrodes each. It's roughly the same size as a neuron, which is a good idea. There's a size limit for things that you want to stick in your head. Something too large is inevitably going to cause problems, so the smaller the better.

Neuralink actually made a robot that is used to insert these with extreme precision, which is pretty much mandatory; humans couldn't do it if they wanted. This is a penny; it's pretty small, right? It's roughly the same size as the tip of my thumb. Now zooming in extremely close, this right here is the needle that will be inserted into your skull. Placing it beside a penny, you actually couldn't see it.

As the robot inserts each thread one by one, at the end there could eventually be up to 10,000 of these electrodes inside your head, each responsible for recording separate neurons, which can later on be analyzed. But not only can they read data from your brain, they can also input data as well. It's a two-way street; it's sort of like being able to upload and download things from your brain.

Brain implants aren't exactly new either, though—they go as far back as the 1950s. Hearing implants are a good example. Neuralink just plans to take the baton and continue down the path but in a different way. Other BMIs approach the situation differently; for deep brain stimulation—the kind of implants that were used to assist Parkinson's patients that I mentioned before—they essentially used larger, stiff needles that were pretty much just shoved into the brain to affect neural activity, just as the electrodes from Neuralink will.

It works well, but there's a pretty high probability that complications will occur over time—seizures, strokes, and even more. It may fix one issue, but it's probable that multiple other issues will show up. See, your brain doesn't sit still inside your head. It moves around with you. Even if you think you're sitting still, your brain moves with each breath, each heartbeat. This is what can cause issues and is why a robot is needed for Neuralink.

The procedure to be successful with Neuralink is taking a different approach, and it really isn't even a huge surgery. Your head isn't going to be completely peeled open for these chips to be inserted. Each chip will be inserted into your head through a small incision of 8 mm at most, so less than a centimeter. You won't need stitches, you won't need any of that—it's hardly a surgery at all.

By the way, those chips that are inserted are completely wireless, as you would probably hope. The craziest thing of all is that you won't need to go to a hospital or random place to hook yourself up to use this interface. There's no USB port sticking out of your head; you won't need a caretaker or anyone to help you. With the use of a single wireless, battery-powered computer behind your ear, it will actually be able to connect you to your smartphone, effectively making your phone an official part of you.

The options and potentials for this technology are limitless, and it's only going to improve over time. Now I don't want to overreach here and throw out ideas that are impossible, so I won't. But I will give some solid uses and some pretty cool ideas for Neuralink that can actually become a reality one day.

This is my computer; Ironide sent it to me a couple months back, and it is great for everything I need to do. It has a 2080 TI graphics card, an I9 processor, and 64 GB of RAM. I can edit much faster and more efficiently than I was able to before. I can play pretty much any game on ultra settings. But in order to do these things, I need to use my hands. Well, duh! I need to use a mouse and a keyboard to get things done in the way I want or to move my character in games.

But Neuralink may be able to change this. If a patient is able to control an arm with his or her mind, then it's not feasible to believe that one day you may be able to control characters and video games with your brain as well. Considering it's all Bluetooth, all wireless, it's not too much of a stretch to ask this, coupled with advancements in virtual reality, will cause video games and potentially even films to become almost fully immersive.

Let's take an example of where Neuralink technology could be used in a pretty cool yet practical way. Let's say you're about to take a month-long trip to Tokyo. You're an American, and as most Americans, most of us only speak one language. We'll have no clue how to get around any city that doesn't have street signs or directions completely in English. But luckily, Neuralink can help us out here.

Imagine there's a Tokyo local who's lived there his entire life. Looking at the action potentials of that particular person, studying their neuron spikes in a region of their brain called the hippocampus and in which order they occur, you can trace out a path throughout the entire city from when these neurons spike. And once this data is input into your brain, you'll be able to traverse the city like you've lived there your entire life.

Telepathy is no longer unrealistic. The electrode implants that detect neural signals wirelessly transmit their data back to the small computer behind your ear. So the idea of transferring data back and forth between these devices is relatively simple to imagine. And because the electrodes can both read and write data, you could theoretically communicate back and forth between people who also have Neuralink implants.

Now at the moment, the technology isn't exactly close to making this happen—maybe a word or two—but in theory, and with enough improvements, it is possible for high-bandwidth communication between two people using nothing but their minds. It may be an aggressive approach, as Elon tends to take, but you can see Neuralink implants in human patients by the end of this year, and once that happens, it's only up from there.

Improvements will slowly be added, and I can honestly see this becoming a big and common practice within the next couple of decades. You always hear that there's new technology coming out that will change our lives, but I'm serious when I say this: if this is taken seriously and can work in the ways we're studying and planning on at the moment, I see this as an invention that is on the scale of the internet.

It will change the world, the way airplanes impacted travel, the way antibiotics impacted medicine. Computers and the internet threw us into a brand new digital age. Phones and computers have become extensions of human beings; they can answer almost any question you could ask at a moment's notice. They've both been pivotal in connecting the entire planet. BMIs like the one Neuralink are creating are going to have a similar, and honestly even larger, effect than that.

As time goes on, as we enter a new decade, technology that we've passed off as unrealistic becomes more and more plausible. Things that we've written off as impossible end up being the same things that push society forward: airplanes, rockets, medicine—all things that used to be seen as wizardry or some voodoo magic are now things that we use every single day.

As Neuralink progresses and gets better and better, its cultural impact will grow larger and larger. Kids being born today will grow up in a world vastly different than the one we're living in today, the same way that we're living through a time vastly different than the previous generations. We will make mistakes along the way. The past shows that pretty well. However, humans overcome, we adapt, and we move forward.

If you think we're living in the peak of the digital age, you have no idea what's just around the corner. The date is October 23rd, 1593. The Governor of the Philippines had just been assassinated a few days after setting off on a journey from Manila. His ship and crew were overthrown by Chinese pirates on board. When the news of his assassination reached the Philippines, the government was shocked.

In the midst of all this panic, a new governor must be chosen, so a meeting was held at the governor's Palace. While business was taking place inside, guards were stationed around the outside to ensure the safety of everyone. This included many soldiers, including one named Gil Perez. After waiting outside and guarding the palace in the heat for what felt like an eternity, Gil decided to rest for a second—nothing crazy.

He stayed at his post, leaned against the wall, and simply decided to rest his eyes for a mere second. When he opened his eyes, he was in a place he didn't recognize. In literally the blink of an eye, he found himself in an environment that he had no knowledge of. He had no idea how he got there, wherever there was. Regardless, he continued doing his duties, watching out for anything suspicious, except he was the suspicion.

The local soldiers and citizens began giving Gil weird looks. He was wearing the palace guard's uniform that no one had ever seen before. Gil was just a random soldier in an unknown location—unknown to him at least. That is until the truth of the situation was brought to light: Gil Perez was no longer in the Philippines.

In what seemed like an instant, he miraculously ended up in a plaza in Mexico City—over 14,000 km away. Today, that distance could be covered in less than 24 hours, but in 1593, this voyage would have taken at least 2-3 months. Still shocked, Gil continued to explain his side of the story. He explained that he was a soldier from the Philippines; he explained how the governor had just been assassinated—except, of course, no one believed him.

The problem here is, in 1593, it would be months before any news of this reached Mexico City. He was immediately arrested for desertion and thrown in jail. A few months later, a ship from the Philippines finally arrived, carrying crew members as well as the news of the governor's assassination. What they found out is that the story Gil provided matched up one to one with what the crew members aboard the ship were saying.

On top of all that, several of the crew members actually recognized Gil and were able to even recall the day where he seemingly disappeared from existence. He was set free and returned to the Philippines to continue life as though nothing had happened. There's no real explanation for the story; it's over 400 years old. Many speculate that something paranormal had taken place. Some suggest that he was just a liar; others suggest that the story never took place and was just made up by someone.

Some suggest that it was an alien abduction, but a few suggest teleportation, and that is something that I find very interesting. Teleportation is a common part of science fiction. Characters in video games, movies, and books can travel from one point in the universe to another without ever traversing the space in between—faster-than-light travel, instantaneous travel—the implications of wielding a power this strong are unthinkable.

But is there more to teleportation than just science fiction? The more we learn about our universe, the more science fiction starts to look like actual science. The idea of teleportation has been talked about since before the 1800s. However, it was Charles Fort in 1931 who first coined the phrase. He combined "tele," meaning distant, and "port," meaning to carry. Decades went by as the idea lay dormant in science fiction—like, where do you even start with an idea like this?

That was until 1993 when physicist Charles Bennett and colleagues proposed something groundbreaking. The quantum state of one particle could be teleported to another particle on the other side of the universe without the particles themselves really moving at all. In other words, information could be transferred across vast distances in space without physically having to move to that point.

The team was able to take all the information of a quantum state, destroy it, transmit that information to another location, and then recreate the same exact quantum state as before. But before we dive into all that, let's take a step back. What are quantum particles? These are the particles at the subatomic level, and reality here is different from the reality you may know. There are many strange and honestly barely understood things that happen here.

For example, particles can be at two different states at the same time, and until the particle is observed, both states are real and exist. Once observed, a final state is taken, forcing reality to collapse into one. This is known as superposition, and its most famous example comes in the form of a cat—Schrodinger's cat.

But simply, it's a thought experiment. There's a cat inside a box and some radioactive material that has a 50% chance of decaying, poisoning the cat and killing it. If the material decays, the cat obviously dies, but if it doesn't, the cat stays alive. From a quantum approach, until the box is opened, we can't know whether or not the material has decayed or not. The cat isn't dead, but it also isn't alive at the same time. Of course, this makes no sense in the real world, but at the quantum level, reality is different.

This means that quantum particles can be in multiple states, rotating clockwise and anticlockwise at the same time until an observer forces it to decide a reality simply by observing it. But let’s see we recreated the experiment, but instead with two cats this time. Now we go from two options—the cat being dead or alive clockwise—to four options, where both cats can be alive or dead or where one cat's alive and the other is dead and vice versa.

Quantum mechanics gives us a little bit of help here in cutting down these options. It says that there is a system where you can pretty much eliminate the options where both cats have the same outcome: are both alive or both dead? The only ones that matter are the ones that are opposite of each other. Because of this, you can open only one box and have 100% certainty of what is in the other box—but this can only happen when the cats are in a specific state—an entangled state.

We now know that quantum particles can talk to one another, but only if they have a certain property to them. This interesting phenomenon in the quantum world is the reason that particles can theoretically be teleported. If they have this special kind of link to one another, they're what we call entangled. Entanglement is caused when two quantum particles are formed at the same instance of time and point in space. Hence, these particles essentially share in existence, and their connection is almost telepathic.

They affect each other despite the vast distance between them. Quantum particles have spin. This doesn't mean they're actually spinning, but they have an orientation in space as well as angular momentum. By measuring the state of one to be spinning up, or in the cat's case, alive, it could be directly deduced that the other is dead, or spinning down, despite it being on the other side of the room or the other side of the universe. They're linked from birth and when one is observed, the other one knows exactly when.

Einstein called this spooky action at a distance, and there's something fundamentally unsettling about scientific phenomena that are yet not entirely understood. Recently, scientists from China launched a photon receiver satellite into orbit. This satellite can detect quantum states of photons shot to it from the ground. From this, the longest-ever distance of quantum entanglement was measured.

But more importantly, this was the first time a photon was teleported from Earth into space. This works by transmitting the quantum information about one particle to its entangled pair; therefore, the second particle would quite literally become the first particle. The research team created 4,000 entangled photon pairs per second. They shot half the pairs, 1,400 km up to the satellite while keeping the other half of the pairs down on Earth.

Over the course of one month, they sent millions of photon pairs to the satellite and found success in only 911 cases. 911 out of millions of quantum pairs sounds like a huge failure, but actually, this is a very small but important step in teleportation. As scientists discover how quantum particles are used to make up matter, they could potentially find the keys to understand how to change these particles in order to fundamentally change the matter itself.

Rather than simply sending one encoded photon, could they one day send the exact construction of all the subatomic particles of, let's say, an apple? Perhaps. But with this comes a philosophical question. The teletransportation paradox dates back to 1775.

The average cell in your body is on average about 10 years old. Some cells get replaced more often, while others, like the carbon 14 in your DNA, never get replaced. So considering most of your cells are not the same as they were when you were born, are you still the same person? If every single atom of a person was taken apart and reconstructed, is the resulting construction still the same person?

We humans are simply a machine where our DNA script tells us how to replace dying cells until either the script or the machine fails. But if this script of how you're constructed is downloaded and correctly transcribed, maybe it could one day be used to create new versions of you on the other side of the universe—effectively teleporting you.

Wait, is this even teleportation? You're technically being recreated as opposed to actual transportation. What about if you wanted to bring your conscience with you? If you wanted to bring the thing that for sure makes you, you? What if simply reconstructing you in another place doesn't cut it? For that, we need another option, one that won't destroy you but simply relocates you. For that, we need to look at wormholes.

In 1935, Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen showed that, using general relativity, black holes across the universe could theoretically be linked together by a tunnel through space-time: a wormhole. Einstein's general theory of relativity states that the presence of mass or energy will warp the fabric of space-time around it. I covered this in more detail in my dark matter video as well as some others, but I'll cover it here as well.

A black hole has mass so dense that not even light can escape its strong gravitational pull. Scientists for decades have attempted to take pictures of a black hole; however, this has proven elusive because, well, light cannot escape and the lack of light makes it essentially invisible, like you're trying to take a picture of nothing. What about the light that doesn't get sucked in? What about the light that slingshots around the very edge of the black hole?

This will make a light ring of sorts around the black hole, and recently, in April 2019, astronomers revealed the first-ever image of a black hole. Einstein and his theories were proven right yet again. But what happens inside this hole? When we talk about holes on Earth, it's in the context of three dimensions, where someone walking down the road can fall downwards into an uncovered manhole, for example, which is basically a two-dimensional circle on the ground.

But in space, matter can fall into black holes from all three dimensions. Black holes are pretty much three-dimensional spheres. The shape changes a bit when supermassive black holes rotate at significant portions of the speed of light, but that's not really important. What is important is where does this hole finish?

I tend to think of them as funnel shapes where a wide event horizon eventually tapers off into one infinitely small point: the singularity. But what if this wasn't the case? What if a singularity wasn't needed? If a link could take place in the bulk to take you to another part of the universe, here Einstein and Rosen theorized that the extreme density of mass may be enough to tear space-time fabric itself and connect to another point in space—perhaps to another black hole.

Scientists are unsure of what happens or if this is even possible. If it is possible, the chance of it randomly appearing in nature is pretty much zero. The center of a black hole is perhaps the most sought after but yet least understood point in science, math, and nature itself. Here is where the laws of our universe, as we know them, begin to break. But assuming that wormholes are possible, what's going to hold them open?

What will prevent them from collapsing in on themselves, crushing whatever passes through out of existence? Math and nature! Dark energy is the reason why the universe is expanding at such an accelerated pace, and it just might be able to make wormholes much easier to create. Dark energy has an effect that is essentially like the opposite of gravity.

Gravity pulls things towards objects with mass, but dark energy is a repulsive force. It has a negative pressure and tends to push. Imagine having a headache where it feels like your head is being squeezed, but instead of the squeezing being inward, it's pushing outwards. If wormholes exist and are capable of bending space-time in such a way to essentially allow teleportation between points of space, there are still many barriers to cross.

We would have to figure out how to stop the intense gravitational pull from completely crushing our bodies or perhaps the wormhole collapsing altogether. We'd have to figure out if a trip through a wormhole is a two-way street. If we go through, are we going to be able to come back? In 1988, physicist Kip Thorne proposed an idea where wormholes may be able to be kept open longer.

He suggested that wormholes might be able to be kept open through the use of negative energy, but no one knew how to create this energy inside the wormhole in that very short amount of time that they'd be open. In his paper, Cambridge physicist Luke Butcher says that taking advantage of the Casimir energy that exists naturally in some wormholes could do the trick.

After many calculations, he found that if you have a wormhole that's much wider than it is tall (more like a worm slice as opposed to a wormhole), the amount of Casimir energy inside just might be enough to keep the wormhole from collapsing just long enough to send a photon through. As with most things, the more we learn and figure out how things work, the more we realize that we don't know much of anything.

More doors open up; more questions pop up, and not all of them have solutions. As you approach a wormhole, you'd be looking at a portal to another world. If you thought going to the moon or Mars was scary, traversing through a wormhole is essentially a suicide mission. The quantum world is strange and fascinating, and as scientists uncover more about the secrets of the universe by studying its most basic levels, there are bound to be breakthroughs and leaps in technology.

Teleportation may have been science fiction decades ago, but today it may just be a point of theoretical discussion in a growing body of study. In the future, we may be reconstructing ourselves through entanglement and using wormholes as portals to explore once unexplorable parts of the universe.

All good things come from compound interest. This includes friendships, relationships, finances, science—all of these things start out slow. When you meet someone new, you initially learn only the outermost layer of them as a person. As a kid, you have little to no knowledge of much. In science, we have our basic fundamental models, but over time, these things build up, and the returns we reap increase as well.

You connect deeper and build stronger relationships with people over time. The money you earn compounds over time to make you more money. The basic fundamental models that we have in science are used to discover new ideas, and those ideas help uncover even more ideas, making exponential progress. And that's why it's important to discuss topics like this when it comes to teleporting humans and other objects.

A question that comes up a lot is: will we have to have access to the other end in order to teleport there? Will we have to somehow reach that place, build a teleporter as a checkpoint of sorts, and continue to leapfrog around to other places in our case, the solar system, and eventually maybe even galaxies? With this, the more places we go, the faster we can exponentially expand.

Compound interest. Sure, teleportation seems bizarre and unlikely to happen, but similar words have been said about things that have changed the world in the past century. The Wright brothers, who were pioneers of modern aviation, had their doubts about humans ever traversing the Atlantic Ocean in airplanes or blimps. But yet, now we do this each and every single day.

People believe that Henry Ford would bankrupt his company by trying to lower the cost of cars in the early 1900s, but look at any parking lot today, and you'll see a Ford car sitting there. If you were able to ask anyone from 100 years ago what life would look like in 2019, not a single one of them would even come close to being correct.

So I'll ask you: what do you think life will look like in 100, a thousand, 10,000 years? People, of course, will doubt any kind of world that seems too good to be true, and that's fine. I'll let history do the talking. I'll see you on the other side.

At the end of the Korean War, The New York Times published a gripping story detailing how returning American soldiers may have been converted by communist brainwashers. The story became widely popular that some troops were allegedly confessing to war crimes while others adopted the communist ideology and even refused to return home. The fear of brainwashing or brain warfare both terrified and fascinated the American public at a time when political tensions were rising in the early years of the Cold War.

The CIA was convinced that the Soviet Union had developed a drug or technique to control minds, and as a response, they launched a top-secret program called MK Ultra. MK Ultra's main purpose was to conduct covert experiments centered around behavior modification. Human test subjects were exposed to electroshock therapy, hypnosis, polygraphs, radiation, and a mixture of drugs, potions, and chemicals to see whether any of these would be successful in controlling the human mind.

While the CIA believed that all these experiments could be potentially useful, there was one drug that stood out and became MK Ultra's obsession in the 1950s and 60s. The alleged race for manipulating the human mind had just begun, and the drug at the heart of it was discovered by accident in 1938. Albert Hoffman, a researcher working for a Swiss chemical company called Sandos, accidentally formulated a psychoactive hallucinogenic that would alter the course of history.

Hoffman initially wanted to synthesize a chemical compound that would stimulate the respiratory and circulatory system by combining lysergic acid with other molecules. On his 25th attempt, he inadvertently created lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. While this new discovery was useless to his research at the time, Hoffman noticed that there was something interesting about this new compound. The animals that were exposed to it showed strange levels of excitement and behaved oddly.

Not thinking too much of it, though, Hoffman shelved his new discovery for five years until the results of his testing piqued his interest again, and he decided to synthesize it in his lab once more. While in the final stages of synthesizing LSD during the height of the Second World War in 1943, Hoffman accidentally absorbed some of the substance. He soon experienced restlessness, dizziness, and a state of extremely stimulated imagination that prompted him to abandon his work for the day and go home.

The next morning, he returned to his lab with a burning desire to discover what had affected him the previous day. After ruling out all the possible contaminants, he came to the conclusion that he must have somehow ingested LSD and that what he experienced was similar to the animals he observed in his lab five years prior. To verify this hypothesis, Hoffman decided that there was only one thing to do: self-experiment.

So on April 19, 1943, Albert Hoffman embarked on the world's first acid trip. 40 minutes after taking the drug, Hoffman began feeling dizziness, anxiety, visual distortions, and a sudden urge to laugh while riding his bicycle home. He also reported that everything in his field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen through a curved mirror. When he finally reached the safety of his home, he collapsed on his sofa. LSD's psychedelic effects locked him in a frenzy of hallucinations that manifested in a continued animated motion driven by inner restlessness.

Hoffman was so frightened that he thought he was going to die, but soon the effects subdued, and the horror softened, giving way to a feeling of good fortune and gratitude magnified by an unprecedented display of colors and shapes behind his closed eyes. Everything glistened and sparkled in a fresh light.

He wrote the following morning: “All my senses vibrated in a condition of highest sensitivity which persisted for the entire day.” Today, April 19th is celebrated by recreational LSD users as Bicycle Day because of Hoffman's colorful ride home.

An acid and psychedelic are two terms that are forever linked thanks to Hoffman. "Psychedelic" is a combination of the Greek word "psyche," which means mind, and "delos," which is to reveal. Clinically, a psychedelic experience refers to a class of compounds that induce a mind-manifesting state in its users, sending them on a journey that often provides unique insights and emotions that they were otherwise oblivious to. This feeling can last for up to 12 hours and can be very dramatic.

Most individuals report a distorted sense of time, an altered sense of self, and dramatic changes in feelings and sensations. Some experience synesthesia, where their senses intertwine and add another dimension to their perceptions of the world, such as tasting music, seeing sounds, and hearing colors. An acid trip is a journey into one's own mind and can provide its users with deep and profound realization, but it can also be very unsettling with the ability to push the mind into dark and unexplored places that could have some horrific effects.

Scientists believe that LSD influences the receptors in the brain responsible for regulating serotonin, which is a chemical that carries messages between nerve cells and plays a key role in regulating mood, happiness, and sexual desire, among other things. While there was, and still is, no research that connects LSD with mind control, in the late 1940s, the CIA received reports that the Soviets were engaged in intensive efforts to reduce LSD, believing it to be the key to controlling an individual's mind.

So when the US government found out that Hoffman had created this mind-altering drug, they approached his employer, Sandos, and paid $240,000 to purchase the world's entire supply. What followed was reported by investigative journalist Steven Kinzer as the most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control. The CIA and MK Ultra began distributing LSD to hospitals, clinics, prisons, and other institutions, asking them to carry out research projects on patients and prisoners so that they could understand what LSD was, how people reacted to it, and how it could potentially be used as a tool for mind control.

Whitey Bulger, a prisoner who volunteered for the program in exchange for a shorter sentence, was told that the drug was being tested as a cure for schizophrenia. As part of the experiment, he was administered LSD every day for over a year. He later realized he was a guinea pig in an experiment aimed at testing the long-term effects of LSD and understanding whether it could make a person lose their mind.

Bulger wrote about his experience: he was closely monitored by physicians who repeatedly asked him leading questions such as, “Would you ever kill anyone?” That eventually drove him to the brink of insanity. The experiments were the most extreme trials conducted on any human being by any US agency, and Bulger claimed that he was never the same after he was continually haunted by auditory and visual hallucinations, violent nightmares, and anxiety so severe that he couldn't even sleep.

The CIA and MK Ultra believed that LSD had the potential to blast a person's mind, which would open up the opportunity to reprogram it, to either help extract people from the alleged Soviet mind attacks or, more likely, to make their enemy an enemy of himself. During the Cold War, the race for mind control was believed to be the most crucial of victories.

So the CIA and MK Ultra basically had a license to kill from the US government. They had the authority to requisition humans from all over the country and around the world and subject them to all kinds of abuse, even if it were fatal. Enemy agents captured in Europe and East Asia were subjected to all sorts of tests—from electroshock and sensory isolation to temperature extremes. These weren't designed to understand the human mind but to rather destroy it in order to rebuild it again from the ground up.

Perhaps the most notorious experiment of that era was Operation Midnight Climax. Government-employed prostitutes lured unsuspecting men to CIA safe houses where LSD experiments took place. The prostitutes dosed the men with LSD while CIA officials watched their minds unravel through a two-way mirror. As all this was underway, the agents themselves were also getting high and indulging in some unscrupulous behavior.

The agent heading the program, George White, later wrote, "Of course, I was a very minor missionary—actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, and cheat, steal, deceive, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?" Ultimately, after dosing countless people, MK Ultra concluded that LSD was too unpredictable to be used for mind control, and the program was ended following an inspection of its unorthodox and unethical methods.

Throughout its course, the program allegedly involved more than 150 experiments with many casualties and lives permanently ruined. The actual number remains a mystery because most of MK Ultra's files were destroyed. Ironically, the drug the CIA hoped to be their key to mind control ended up freeing people’s minds, sparking an anti-government rebellion dedicated to destroying everything the CIA held dear.

The movement focused on protesting the Vietnam War in addition to advocating for equal rights and environmental awareness. As the spread of LSD grew, it became the unofficial symbol for this movement. It was heralded as a means for people to connect to nature and bring about positive changes in society. Counterculture activists rebelled against the establishment and its participation in mind expansion, and experiments that acid was thought to provoke pressure created by the movement are also widely credited for the creation of the Clean Air Act in 1963, which was the United States' first and most influential environmental law to regulate emissions.

It also played a major role in conceiving the first Earth Day in 1970, which helped bring environmental concerns to the forefront of youth culture. Sadly, although the movement sparked a lot of positive change, its overuse of acid coupled with the US government's War on Drugs divided the nation and eventually hindered the positive experimentation of these hallucinogens.

So after the US Food and Drug Administration concluded that LSD was the most dangerous drug to have ever been created, possession of the psychedelic was made illegal in 1968. Still, there is no doubt that the counterculture movement at the time wouldn't have prevailed without it, making LSD one of the most influential drugs in human history.

More than 80 years after its discovery, LSD is still somewhat of a mystery. The fact that it's illegal in many countries makes it hard for scientists to conduct appropriate research to determine its long-term effects. That being said, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, began to conduct basic safety studies, and in 2014, researchers initiated the first scientific studies on human subjects in decades.

While acid's ability to control minds is still in question, researchers have hinted that the use of psychedelics could help people to stop smoking, deal with PTSD, fight depression, and even help terminally ill patients deal with their fear of death. The uses of LSD in psychotherapy have also intrigued scientists and psychoanalysts. The drug was found to assist patients in uncovering previously repressed memories from their subconscious, while also stimulating their imagination in a way that lowered their customary defenses and made them more accepting of the treatment.

This therapeutic application could be the beginning of a new era of openness. Scientists keep testing its effects on the human mind, but despite these new studies, we still don't have conclusive evidence on its long-term effects. A talented actor, Krie Grant, took over 100 doses of LSD, claiming that it allowed him to connect with the subconscious while breaking free from the usual disciplines one imposes on themselves.

Similarly, Sid Barrett, a founding member of Pink Floyd, experienced waves of inspiration while using LSD that propelled the band to fame at the end of the 1960s. But the same forces that unleashed Barrett's imagination led him down a path of self-destruction, as an overuse of the drug slowly drove him to insanity, becoming a shell of the man he wanted to be. Albert Hoffman wrote that his psychedelic experiences left him with feelings of ecstatic love and unity with all creatures in the universe.

However, he also did not shy away from the fact that the unpredictability of its effects was the major danger of LSD. The good mood and positive expectations of a trip could quickly turn to horrendous depression if the setting isn't properly controlled and monitored closely. From being a tool for mind control to becoming the symbol of freedom, today, LSD has undergone yet another public image shift, with some involved with Silicon Valley advocating microdosing to boost creativity.

With this new revival of the psychedelic in this era of technology, one can't help but ponder Hoffman's words upon his discovery of the drug: "I did not choose LSD; LSD found and called me." After World War II, the tension between the two emerging superpowers, the United States and the then-Soviet Union, was at an all-time high. The threat of nuclear war and sequentially the end of human existence as we know it was banging on everyone's door. Everyone's life was hanging on by a thread.

Neither side wanted to budge or fall behind the other in fear of losing power completely. Technological development didn't stop with the atom bomb; it continued to get bigger and bigger, like you were rolling a ball of snow down a hill. At the beginning of World War II, we were still using mediocre biplanes. By the end, we had fighter jets, super fortress bombers, and new technology. It was like when radio turned to television—a complete shift in focus.

It turned from bombs to chemical warfare to more biological weapons, weapons that could enter and change the mind itself. The most dangerous weapon is information. It was rumored that the Nazis, near the end of World War II, were doing research on the minds and behaviors of humans and that the secrets and answers to that research lay in the German scientists themselves.

Countries such as China, the Soviet Union, and through the mission code-named Operation Paperclip, even the United States took former German scientists and engineers back to their own individual countries. The United States was terrified by this—the thought of communist countries researching and developing mind control methods was the worst thing imaginable. The idea of being able to brainwash your citizens or anyone into believing in the communist agenda, or any agenda for that matter, is an extreme power.

Of course, the solution to this is to just beat the other side to the finish line, and that's exactly what the United States government attempted to do—mainly the CIA. The CIA was created in September of 1947, just a little over 2 years after the end of World War II. The goal: gather intelligence, information from both domestic and foreign entities.

In a 1951 CIA memo, it expressed the need to explore scientific methods for controlling the minds of individuals. The concerns of a Cold War world run by new Soviet mind control and brainwashing technology was an actual and genuine fear of the United States. Seriously, in an early 1950 CIA document, it states: "Hypnotism appears to have been used in some cases by the Soviets with the possibilities of lowering resistance against telling the truth, while also being able to induce specific action or behavior in a subject.

It is possible for a skilled Russian operator to bring about an interrogation yet leave the subject with no specific recollection of having been interrogated." The leverage you have for having this kind of power over other humans, whether they be spies, prisoners of war, or even normal citizens, is almost unrivaled. The thing is, this isn't fiction; this isn't some made-up conspiracy theory; they're confirmed facts.

In the mid to late 1970s, over 20,000 CIA documents were released regarding the United States' most illegal undertaking. This is the story of how a single government agency planned and attempted to control and alter the minds of those who inhabited the country that they run—how the United States government attempted to develop psychological, biological, and radiological weapons to turn both foreign and domestic spies into sleeper agents—and how it could still be going on today.

This is Project MK Ultra, and thus Project MK Ultra was born. But MK Ultra wasn't just one single project. Look at it as a web of experiments that were all interconnected with one ultimate goal: control. Project Bluebird, Artichoke, MK Search, and MK Naomi are just in name a few. But it goes much, much further.

Although it started earlier, MK Ultra was officially signed and begun in 1953 under CIA Director Allen Dulles. It was one of the largest projects ever known; over 150 sub-projects were created and handled by over 80 different institutions, universities, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies, all of which had little to no idea that they were doing work directly for the CIA.

However, that didn't stop some of the most creative experiments from taking place—many of these, as you might imagine, were very, very illegal. American as well as Canadian citizens were unknowingly and unwillingly tested on. Project Artichoke was a sort of continuation of Project Bluebird. Both of these projects focused on hypnosis in many forms.

In a 1975 CIA memo, it states: “Artichoke is the study and/or use of special interrogation methods and techniques.” These methods have been known to include the use of drugs and chemicals—so-called truth serums, hypnosis, and total isolation; a form of psychological harassment. They're looking for ways to control human behavior.

These methods were to be used for several different reasons, some to protect against foreign spies, some more disturbing than others. The goal of the research was best defined in a 1954 CIA memo regarding Project Artichoke. It states: “Can an individual be made to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily under the influence of Artichoke?”

Artichoke eventually evolved into the more well-known MK Ultra, and the sub-projects of MK Ultra attempted to find answers to that very question. Sub-project 68 is perhaps one of the most illegal of these entire sub-projects, but that's not saying much. Both American and Canadian citizens were used as test subjects against their will or knowledge at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal.

Dr. Ewan Cameron would lead one of the most twisted projects of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Sub-project 68 was fully funded by the CIA, who also paid Dr. Cameron $69,000—or, in today's world, nearly $600,000—to carry out secret CIA experiments. Dr. Cameron was heavily interested in being able to erase and reprogram the human mind, and the CIA could obviously use that kind of power in many ways.

These experiments would become so severe and damaging that patients who came into the hospital for symptoms such as minor anxiety and depression would leave with their minds fried. They'd experience amnesia; they'd forget how to talk; their brains would be completely wiped, similar to that of a baby. Cameron's patients were subjected to some of the most mind-altering drugs and methods known to man: LSD, electroshock therapy, up to 40 times the normal power, drug-induced comas for extended periods of time, and much, much more.

Take the case of Linda McDonald, a typical mother who was experiencing the harder parts of being an adult—depression, physical pain, lack of sleep, and so on. She visits Montreal to be assessed by Dr. Cameron and almost immediately he diagnoses her as a schizophrenic and sends her to what is known today as the sleep room. This is where it turns bad.

Cameron decided to put Linda McDonald into a drug-induced coma for 86 days straight. In the sleep room, patients were often subject to this electroshock therapy multiple times a day for weeks on end without any consent. Linda McDonald was subject to over 100 of these shock therapy sessions. As time went on, she went from being able to tell the doctors her name and information about herself to having her brain completely wiped.

In a 1998 documentary, she states, “I was had to be toilet-trained. I was a vegetable; I had no identity; I had no memory; I'd never existed in the world before—like a baby.” Just like a baby that has to be told. She eventually was dismissed from the hospital and went back home to her family; however, she had no recollection of these people or even knowledge that these people were even her own family in the first place.

This isn't the only case that happened at the Allen Institute, though. Various other cases took place. In many cases, patients would be recorded during therapy sessions talking about their families, or other people, or things that would bring them negative thoughts or have negative impacts on their life. These negative messages would then be cut up and played on repeat for these patients—sometimes over hundreds of thousands of times.

This exact thing happened to Robert Loi. He was admitted to the institute for a leg pain; they thought it was all in his head, and he was then sent to the sleep room. He was given LSD every two days, sometimes mixed with other drugs, and then while in a drug-induced coma, the message “You killed your mother” was repeated to him for 23 days. These experiments would take place on all ages—from children to old men and women. Many of the children at this institute were the victims of abuse, and in one case, one of the children was filmed performing sexual acts with multiple government officials as a plot to secure funding for these experiments.

Cameron died in 1967 without anyone in the public knowing about what he had been doing for the past decade. Sub-project 54 studied techniques to cause concussions and other brain-damaging experiments. It was supposed to be handled by the United States Navy. Why? Well, the project was to use suboral frequency blasts to cause concussions, and although the program was supposedly never carried out, there is still some evidence that might show some kind of work being done.

In the hearings before the subcommittee on health and scientific research in late September 1977, there's a passage that caught my eye. While talking about funding from various institutes across the country, Dr. Gasher, a CIA employee, mentioned something interesting. He first notes about a study on concussions where heads of animals were repeatedly rocked back and forth in order to cause concussions and then further amnesia. Next, however, is more interesting—there was apparently a later business, whatever that may be, that, through the use of radar, was attempting to put monkeys to sleep.

A senator present at the meeting asked, “Could they?” and Dr. Gik states yes, they could. He goes on to say that it showed if you got into too deep sleep, you injured the heat center of the brain the way you cook meat, and there was a borderline that made it dangerous. So basically, the CIA was using radio and electromagnetic signals to attempt to put monkeys and other animals to sleep, and they could not only that, but they could almost literally cook an animal's brain to the point to where they would go brain dead, and in some cases, even die.

Now, I don't know about you, but if this could work on monkeys and supposedly other animals as well, I would imagine that this very experiment took place with human subjects as well. The problem is, after this hearing, I couldn't find any other papers or documents that even remotely talked about the sleep experiment—an experiment that seems to have succeeded was washed away and never mentioned again, and the mystery of sub-project 54 fades away.

At this point, not much is out of the question when it comes to the lengths that the CIA would go to in order to conduct their experiments. Operation Midnight Climax was kept relatively a secret up until the mid-1970s. In cities such as San Francisco, California, and New York City, CIA-funded safe houses were built for one specific reason: prostitution. Well, not exactly that, but prostitutes did have a large role in this operation.

These safe houses were often hotel rooms, but not just normal hotel rooms—they would be equipped with one-way mirrors so that a person on the outside could see through it, but anyone inside couldn't see out. The CIA would often pay prostitutes in these cities a good bit of cash to bring men back to these hotel rooms so they could be observed.

But not normally. After these women would bring men back to the safe house, they would prepare drinks for them, but the women would slightly put LSD in the men's drinks. For hours on end, CIA agents would sit behind these one-way mirrors and observe how the LSD affected these various men and what kind of information could be extracted from them. These men were never informed or told that they would be taking part in these experiments. There were no doctors present at any of these encounters—just CIA employees sitting back and watching.

For the CIA, there's no downside here. They would often pay these prostitutes large sums of money, enough to keep their mouths shut and out of trouble, so no problems would arise there. The men led back to these hotels were also unlikely to speak out against the things that occurred and would never know that the CIA was even involved. What are the odds of one of them going to a news outlet claiming that the CIA drugged them with LSD and then forced them to follow a prostitute back to a hotel room? Practically zero.

It didn't end there. The operation soon expanded, and the CIA began to reach out and dose people in restaurants, bars, and even beaches—all of which took place on American citizens who didn't even have the slightest bit of knowledge that they were being experimented on by their own government.

On a foggy Wednesday morning in late November of 1953, a group of United States CIA operatives from Camp Dietrich took a weekend getaway to a lake house in Maryland—a little Thanksgiving retreat, we'll call it. The group contained many people: Frank Olson, an army scientist turned CIA employee; Vincent Ruitt, a friend and division chief of Volson; they were also accompanied by Sidney Gottlieb, head of the technical service staff at the CIA, his deputy Robert Lashbrook, and a few others.

The three-day getaway was just as normal as any other company getaway can get—jokes, laughs, good food, and much more. The group of men ate dinner, and then afterwards they did what men do best—drink two bottles of liquor, both the same, both indistinguishable from one another. Robert Lashbrook proceeded to pour drinks for eight out of the 10 men present, but afterwards, he poured himself and Sidney Gottlieb the same drink but from the other bottle. No one suspected a thing; besides, liquor is liquor, right? Everyone took the drink, including Frank Olson.

After the trip, life continued on as normal for everyone else; however, for Olson, his life changed drastically. He fell into a deep depression and felt as if his life had no purpose. He had doubts about the work that he was doing—a family man who fell into solitude. Olson decided that this was enough and met with Vincent Ruett. He said he was dissatisfied with his work and his performance at the retreat as a top employee at the CIA who happened to be deeply involved with the German warfare business.

He had enough and wanted to devote his life to a completely different field and wanted to resign. Vincent Ruett and Robert Lashbrook both attempted to talk Olson out of his resignation and suggested him a psychiatrist in New York City. He agreed, and Olson and Lashbrook set off to New York in hopes of help.

The story goes dark here; that is until over 20 years later when in 1975, the Rockefeller Commission reported on the CIA and its activities within the United States. In this report, it contained many things—29,999 pages of information. The CIA engaged in unlawful activities, domestic spying, wiretaps, the use of multiple drugs against unsuspecting US citizens, and much more.

It also contained the story of a 1953 CIA experiment on Dr. Frank Olson at that retreat. Olson was given LSD unknowingly by the CIA supervisors there—Lashbrook and Gottlieb. Their drinks were spiked with LSD while the supervisors observed the results. Just nine days after this incident, Frank Olson supposedly fell or jumped from a 10-story window out of a hotel room in New York City.

Olson's family would never see Frank's body again. He was immediately placed into a casket taken back to Camp Dietrich and kept locked up. The story was that his body was too gruesomely injured to be seen, which obviously makes sense—he had a close-casket funeral and his family would never see him again.

That is until 1993, when Frank's wife died. They were to be buried together, and a second autopsy on Frank Olson's body was performed. The 1953 autopsy stated that there were cuts and abrasions all across Frank's body; however, in a 1994 autopsy, there weren't any to be found. Instead, there were large swellings on Olson's head, as well as a large injury on his chest, but not from the fall.

It appears that the trauma had occurred before the fall. Again, the difference here between falling and jumping—these are two very different things. This then changes it from a suicide to a CIA murder. From falling out of the window to being thrown. The changes in the cover story over the course of 40 years have started to show, and too many questions are being left unanswered.

On the night of the incident, Olson's and Lashbrook's hotel room received a phone call only mere minutes after the event supposedly occurred. A number is dialed, and the person on the other end picks up. Robert Lashbrook is silent until he breaks it by saying, "Well, he's gone." The receiving end replies, "That's too bad." The call ends directly after. After doing some research, I found this document that was released with the Rockefeller investigation in 1975.

It appears that Lashbrook called Gottlieb before he called the desk, meaning that it was him on the receiving end of that phone call. Sidney Gottlieb's career goes much deeper than just entry-level CIA stuff. He joined the CIA in 1951 as a poisons expert. As an experienced chemist, Gottlieb was very involved with preparing lethal poisons and other mind-bending drugs. He eventually became known as the Black Sorcerer and the Dirty Trickster and eventually became a head of a secret, previously undisclosed government project: MK Ultra.

Over the course of his career, he devised plans on killing multiple large foreign government officials. He proposed multiple ways of attempting to kill Fidel Castro; these include poison cigars, exploding conch shells, and much more. So the thought of him being involved in a domestic homicide definitely isn't out of the picture. Seymour Hersh was a journalist who was deeply involved with this story for decades.

After his years of research in 2017, he said the government had a security process that would allow them to identify and execute domestic citizens who posed a risk. Olson is believed to have fallen under this category, and the CIA and other government agencies have been covering it up all along. If this is true, then the US government considered an accidental death resulting from illegal human experimentation to be a better cover story than the actual truth, and I honestly can't tell you which story sounds worse.

On top of that, after looking at the CIA's 1953 study of assassination, which, let's be honest, is basically the CIA's assassination manual, it even has a section for this very incident with the title "Accidents." The most efficient accident in simple assassination is a fall of 75 ft or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stairwells, unscreened windows, and bridges will serve this.

This wasn't about the LSD; it was about biological warfare, about interrogation, getting a means to an end. The LSD and other drugs were just a cover story to get people to look in the wrong direction—look over here so you won't ask questions about the other stuff, the deeper reasons behind it all. The Olson family had become pretty much celebrities, and there's no way you could just take them all out of the picture without anyone asking questions.

While they were out researching and diving into the story, the CIA and other agencies were just playing the long game until everyone involved with it faded out of existence. The events of Project MK Ultra are an enigma. Almost all the records were destroyed in 1973 by Richard Helms, the director of the CIA at the time. Every bit of information we have today is just a fragment of the entire picture.

But from what we have, obvious claims about the ethics of the entire project can be made. However, even the declassified release documents could just be another cover story. All of those documents, although still pretty disturbing, could just be like the Olson family—a distraction from what was really going on.

Also, just like Project Bluebird that turned into Project Artichoke, all they did was reskin the previous project into a new one. It's more than possible, and I think very likely that the same thing happened here. All of the documents we have today are just the tip of the iceberg.

Well, a much bigger story lies beneath. Many news sources you see will say that MK Ultra ended in 1964, but funding continued throughout the 1970s under projects called MK Search and MK Often, which studied things that I don't even want to talk about. All I'm saying is, whether you consider it a conspiracy theory or fact, more and more findings seem to keep showing their face.

It's entirely possible that these projects never ended and that the research that dominated the second half of the 20th century still continues on to this very day. This almost 70-year-long deep-rooted mystery may never truly be resolved.

Who is your favorite superhero? There are so many to choose from that it can be tough to pick just one. But for millions of people, the answer is undoubtedly Black Panther. Portrayed on the big screen by the beloved Chadwick Boseman, Black Panther was an instant global phenomenon. Millions of moviegoers from around the world flooded into theaters—some more than once—to escape into the colorful Afrofuturist nation of Wakanda and watch the daring exploits of King T'Challa.

It was, at the time, the most successful solo superhero movie to ever be released, beating out classics like Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. Today, it remains one of the most celebrated cinematic achievements in the entire Marvel franchise. It's undeniable; we love the king of Wakanda.

So much so that I'm sure many of us have found ourselves wishing that both he and the nation of Wakanda were real. How exciting would it be to live in a world where superheroes actually existed, where a rich and powerful African nation possessed technology light years ahead of anything currently available? Sorry to burst your bubble, but the reality would likely be much different than anything depicted in the MCU.

We love T'Challa because we see his journey. We go with him from his lowest point when he loses his father to him becoming king, tracking down a group of international arms dealers, and battling his long-lost cousin, Erik Killmonger, for the heart of his nation. But how would you feel if a foreign king you've never heard of suddenly revealed that he had superhuman abilities? And more than that, that his country controlled greater technology and more wealth than any other nation on the planet?

Would you still love Black Panther then? The question is more complicated than a simple yes or no, especially given the complex issues of race, colonialism, and cultural identity surrounding Wakanda. Black Panther tackled these issues head-on, offering audiences a candid examination of some of history's greatest injustices.

The central conflict of the narrative itself deals with the tensions created by the specters of racism and colonization. At the start of the film, the Wakandans are adamant about maintaining their isolationist politics, believing it to be the best way of protecting their nation from the chaos of the outside world. However, this view is challenged by the arrival of Killmonger, who seeks to upend the status quo.

After defeating T'Challa in ritual combat and assuming control of the throne, Killmonger delivers a speech to the Tribal Council in which he recounts the struggles of Black Americans and asks pointedly, "Where was Wakanda?" According to Marvel lore, while the rest of the African continent was swallowed whole by Europe during the age of imperialism, Wakanda stood idly by.

It watched as neighbor after neighbor fell to foreign invaders and did nothing as entire populations were enslaved and their land plundered for its resources. Wakanda continued to hide in the shadows as further injustices were committed against Black communities in the form of policies like segregation and apartheid and offered no assistance when it came to overthrowing these repressive systems.

While it's likely that many Black people around the world would welcome the sudden entrance of a hyper-advanced African nation onto the world stage, others might share Killmonger’s sentiments and harbor varying degrees of resentment. This can make for some awkward political situations, especially regionally. Wakanda's vast fortune and technological supremacy would immediately position itself as the head of the African Union, dramatically reorienting the continent's balance of power, to say nothing of the rest of the planet.

African leaders might demand that Wakanda share its advanced technology or even its wealth to make up for historic failures. Those not of African descent would probably be suspicious and maybe even fearful of the sudden change to the existing geopolitical order, even more so after learning that the country in question is led by a king with superhuman abilities, the nature of which would likely remain a highly guarded secret.

A massive PR campaign would have to be launched to try and portray T'Challa as a magnanimous and peaceful ruler. But undoubtedly, the idea of a literal god-king leading the world's most technologically sophisticated military would be too much for many people to accept. Critics would be quick to point out the lack of democratic representation in Wakanda, as well as the obvious problems of having a hereditary monarchy.

Sure, T'Challa may be a benevolent leader, but what about the next guy? What would happen if, for example, a long-lost relative who didn't share in T'Challa's humanitarian worldview somehow took control of the country? It wouldn't be too hard to imagine a scenario where a conquest-driven warrior king sought to expand Wakanda's borders.

T'Challa and, in fact, the entire nation of Wakanda would become a highly divisive topic, both among world leaders and individual citizens. In some ways, like nations like Saudi Arabia and Russia today, this could lead not just to anti-Wakandan protests but possible assassination attempts, as both disgruntled governments and fearful citizens aim to remove this new threat.

This exact scenario serves as a premise for the Amazon series The Boys—a superhero parody in which a band of vigilantes attempts to take down an Avengers-style group called The Seven. The Seven are a tyrannical and corrupt team of superhumans who use their powers to serve their own selfish desires while enriching their corporate benefactor, Vought International. Their exploits consistently lead to the injury and death of innocent bystanders, but this collateral damage is covered up by Vought, which markets the group as saviors of humanity.

The Seven's recklessness fuels public resentment, and a ragtag assembly of superpowerless vigilantes known as The Boys form to try and assassinate them. The Boys is representative of a very real fear ordinary citizens have of the ultra-powerful. It's safe to assume that most people would be suspicious of an elite group of individuals with genuine superhuman abilities.

It's important to remember that T'Challa isn't alone in the Marvel Universe; there's a whole ensemble of characters ranging from certified good guy Captain America to the genocidal Thanos. So if Black Panther exists, so should the others. With this comes a whole slew of new problems. By their very nature, superhumans create an imbalance in society.

There's them—people capable of flying faster than fighter jets or chucking cars like they were wiffle balls—and then there's the rest of us, barely able to make it through our morning commute. This inequality of ability would lead to widespread feelings of fear and resentment. Chief among people's worries would be the belief that these individuals might use their powers to establish a new social and political order.

To help prevent this, we'd likely see the formation of anti-superhuman organizations. These factions would push for legislation that might help level the playing field or at least establish a legal framework to protect ordinary citizens. Marvel's 2016 film Captain America: Civil War uses this idea as the central conflict of its plot.

Following the disastrous fallout from Avengers: Age of Ultron, the United Nations attempts to rein in Captain America, Iron Man, and the rest of the crew in the form of the Sokovia Accords. This legislation places the Avengers under the control of the UN and effectively ends any form of independent autonomy. This leads to a rift in the group, as half support the independent oversight while the rest believe it to be a potentially dangerous obstruction.

The film concludes with the Sokovia Accords still in place and half the team being forced into hiding. Civil War explores the anxiety felt by many people regarding the recent rise of powerful extra-governmental organizations. What do we do when entities like the Avengers impose their will on a country and its citizens? Who is responsible for the repercussions?

When the Hulk accidentally takes down an entire skyscraper, it's not a question with easy answers. But the Sokovia Accords are an example of how real-life governments might attempt to create safeguards against potential catastrophes caused by superhumans. It also clearly displays the impulse of international leaders to try and control this power as they would with biological weapons or nuclear technology, which of course would not stop merely at legislation.

In a world with superheroes, militaries, governments, and even private entities would attempt to either recruit or manufacture armies of their own superpowered soldiers. Entire industries could develop in the rush to create the next Hulk or Captain America. Sadly, the sudden rush for superhuman superiority would trigger a new global arms race as geopolitical rivals seek to fill their ranks with the strongest, smartest, and deadliest individuals that science can create.

It would be the Cold War all over again, but this time with superpowers instead of nuclear power. It's honestly a terrifying notion and one that we may soon be forced to contend with. Advances in gene therapy, robotics, and other cutting-edge fields have begun to open the door to a new world of human enhancement. In the next few decades, we may become capable of giving individuals abilities previously reserved for the realm of fiction.

Superhero stories may one day be viewed not as far-out fantasies but instead as foretellings of our very own real future. The problem with these kinds of technologies is that they rewrite the rules of what is possible. Societies operate based on the assumption that human beings have certain limitations. If these limitations are surpassed, it'll force us to reevaluate how our civilization functions on a fundamental level.

It might benefit us then to try and understand why exactly we're so obsessed with superheroes in the first place. While modern incarnations stem largely from the realm of 20th-century science fiction, the idea of powerful champions battling monsters and saving innocents dates back to the very beginning of human history. The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest surviving pieces of recorded literature, and it's basically a superhero story.

It tells of a legendary king with super strength, prophetic abilities, and unparalleled fighting skills who goes on a series of quests that culminate in the search for immortality. Over the course of his adventures, Gilgamesh slays demons, travels to the underworld, and undergoes a series of trials. But ultimately fails in his goal of learning the secrets of eternal life.

Though initially despondent, his defeat leads him to accept his human limitations and instead learn what it means to live a good life. The story is a template for the epics that filled ancient literature. Gilgamesh's character provided direct inspiration for the demigod Hercules and heavily influenced the Greek poet Homer, whose work is filled with seemingly superhuman protagonists.

These early heroes were created to serve as models of their society's virtues, instilling the values of bravery, fortitude, and honor in the citizens. And just like the superheroes of today, these characters weren't perfect; rather, each had tragic flaws that routinely led to disaster for themselves and those around them. Their strength wasn't in being able to perform astounding feats or slay countless enemies, but in their ability to face their flaws and learn from them.

In fact, the archetypal plot structure of these stories, known as the hero's journey, provides a clear formula for personal growth. By leaving a place of comfort, encountering obstacles, and confronting our weaknesses, we're able to change for the better, and hopefully return as a more complete version of ourselves.

At the end of Black Panther, T'Challa is able to reconcile his political beliefs with that of his cousin. Although he rejects Killmonger's call to wage war against former colonial oppressors, he realizes that Wakanda's period of isolationism must come to an end. Heroes like Black Panther and Gilgamesh serve as role models; we're meant to look to them for inspiration. They represent the best in us and provide examples of how we might overcome difficulties in our own lives.

We love superhero stories because they give us hope that we too are capable of great deeds and because they serve as a reminder that every single one of us has the ability to change the world. So what if Black Panther was real? We may never know. But what I do know is that you don't need superpowers to be a superhero. Dozens of people throughout history have proven that time and time again.

Wakanda forever!