The Reimagined History

By Kimberly Lucero

When I think of Sci-fi, I think of Nikola Tesla. The genius thinker and inventor who you have hopefully heard of before today. Nikola Tesla can be attributed to many accomplishments, not the least of which is our modern technology and power. But this article is not going to focus on what Tesla did do, this article is going to focus on what Tesla could have done, if given the right circumstances. (providing most of Tesla’s boasts were true)

Lets start with the Tesla Tower. The tower was built to give the world free wireless energy. Tesla wanted to power the world with clean, free energy, and felt he could get electrical currents around the whole world with this one tower. He even succeeded in building the tower, however, it was torn down when the funding party found out the tower could not be regulated and they could not charge people for using the energy it produced. Greed wins again. But just imagine the world today had Tesla been able to build and successfully operate a tower capable of providing the whole world with clean free energy. All countries could have electronics, all countries could have lights, all countries could have the opportunity to build a great city! Not to mention the possibility of fully electronic cars that would never have to stop and dock for power. You could drive around the world without ever needing to stop and fill up. Traveling would become so cheap in comparison, and so easy. Imagine if we had been advancing electric cars this whole time, instead of advancing gas powered engines. We might even have hover cars by now! I know you were thinking it, don’t you pretend you weren’t.

I know some of you skeptics reading this are thinking, how did you jump from an energy tower to flying cars? And to that I say, flying cars a cool, who doesn’t jump to flying cars? Really, it’s like the ‘Six degrees of Bacon’ game, give me any subject and I can get to flying cars in six degrees or less. But really, think about what the world could have already achieved if it had free energy 100 years ago. The technological advancements made within the last 50 years have been exponential, if we apply that logic to what could have been, than logically we would have hover cars today. You know I’m right.

Secondly, Tesla boasted about having made a hand held particle beam, otherwise known as a ray gun! Nobody ever saw this gun, and it’s unclear as to whether Tesla made one and it either got destroyed or hidden, or Tesla was just boasting things because of his quick descent into insanity. Regardless, the man was a mad genius, and I would not put it past his very capable brain to have made such an invention. You may be asking yourself,

(Tesla) once said that while experimenting with them he ‘heard voices’ and claimed he thought ‘aliens were trying to communicate’. Tesla was the father of radio astronomy, meaning he was the first person to record radio waves from outer space.

‘what is a particle beam and do we use them today?’ A particle beam is basically condensed energy into a beam, and YES we do random reader, we use particle beams very scarcely today since they are extremely hard to control, and the amount of energy it would require to make a weapon out of it would take three countries worth of power combined into the size of a car battery. But we do use them in science, most notably in the Hadron Collider. In 1958 the U.S military started a research group to try and build particle weapons, but gave up once they realized they didn’t have sufficient power to even start to experiment with them.

The thought of a ray gun is exciting… and a little terrifying. It’s something you read about in a lot of sci-fi books, and see dramatically shooting ships out of the sky in movies. But what if we actually had a ray gun? How different would our military be? How different would domestic crimes be? I think the most exciting part of thinking about having ray guns is the cool technology we would develop to reflect or stop them. The Anti Particle Beam Shield, or the A.Pa.B.S (Because who doesn’t like acronyms? It’s the future after all).

But forget hover cars for a second, forget ray repellent bubbles, and lets talk radio waves. Tesla did a lot of research into radio waves, and he once said that while experimenting with them he ‘heard voices’ and claimed he thought ‘aliens were trying to communicate’. Tesla was the father of radio astronomy, meaning he was the first person to record radio waves from outer space. He never found the voices he spoke of, and it can not be proven that he was in fact hearing aliens instead of perhaps other scientists from around the world who were also conducting experiments in radio waves. But lets assume for a second that Tesla was not just bat shit crazy at this point in time and he did in fact hear voices that were not ‘from this world’.

The implications that we are not the only intelligent life in the multiverse is very exciting. If there were attempts to contact our world, and Tesla had in fact over heard them… We could be looking at intergalactic travel today! Alien peace treaties, and space trade! How amazing would it be to get food and goods from another planet? Materials that you’ve never even heard of, and new exciting fruits or meats to try? It’s basically a sci-fi fantasy to assume Tesla heard voices from space, but I like to imagine there is a minuscule chance that he did, and we could potentially have interplanetary communication.

While all of our flights of fancy are interesting and fun, the truth is that Tesla believed in a lot of these ideas. While the man was incredibly insane by the time he had died, and may have only ever loved a pigeon who shot beams of light out of her eyes… He was still a genius that helped progress the world far into the future. And without his amazing flights of fancy to build things we only imagine in sci-fi books, we may not have ever had the technology today that we take for granted. July 10th is Nikola Tesla day, write a reminder into your calendar, and remember to thank the crazy genius for all the cool shit you use today!

• Kimberly Lucero