Since I don’t drive, my research in this area has relied on the good offices
of the Greyhound Bus company. “Riding the dog” is both an economical form of
transport and a fascinating social lottery. You never know who you might end up
sitting next to: a German exchange student with an intriguing if over-elaborate
philosophy of life; a Hopi man and a Cheyenne woman chatting amiably; a lout
from Chicago boasting of his sexual intentions. Sometimes you suffer, sometimes
you hit the jackpot.

The old man sitting next to me last January looked and sounded like a
Marlboro man in his twilight years. For a fair part of our trip south from
Flagstaff—where Percival Lowell first saw the canals of Mars—that
was more or less all I knew of him. But in the end we got to talking. He was a
ranch hand by trade, or had been until age and emphysema had their way with him.
He had lived a pretty nomadic life, picking up work and skills here and there.
In the air force he had become a pretty good mechanic, overhauling jets for
Korea. And for a couple of years, he’d been a rocket wrangler.

In the early 1960s, he was out in the Mojave desert working for Rocketdyne on
the F1 rocket engine. He helped build them and he watched as they exploded. He
went back to the test rigs to find steel plates blown apart like Puff the Magic
Dragon’s paper tissues. He learned a respect for cryogenic fuels that matched
his respect for recalcitrant bulls. Before I was born, he’d played a small role
in putting the first men on the Moon.

At the time, Apollo was meant to be more than a highlight in a ranch-hand’s
life. It was meant to be a highlight of human history, but as a symbol of
technological reach the Moon programme backfired, overshadowed by the decision
to abandon it. In representing what can be achieved when a nation directs the
force of a fair-sized army at a problem, Apollo’s abiding rhetorical legacy has
been as the measure of human impotence in other fields. “If we can put a man on
the Moon…” is always followed not by a “why don’t we . . .” but by a sigh of
defeat and a “. . . why can’t we?”.

People still expect technological wonders in the 21st century—I do,
anyway. But we do not expect them to be brought about by massive, centrally
organised programmes like Apollo. We have learned that the technological changes
that matter tend to arrive by stealth, like the Internet, rather than because a
president asks for them. We expect developments to come from thousands of small
teams competing as much as they cooperate, not great armies ordered about in the
national interest. We have little patience for the centralised power of a
military-industrial complex. Technocratic command and control are out;
creativity and democratic oversight over expertise are in.

And that’s fine. But as the Sun sets on Sedona, there’s no denying a sort of
greatness to a century in which an old cowboy can look at the Moon and know that
he helped a nation to get there.

Self-serving rot, I’m sure you’ll agree, but sometimes it contains a touch of
truth. In Britain, vast numbers have been watching the BBC’s Walking with
Dinosaurs, and they do talk about it the next day. What’s more, it’s a shared
experience that could soon become global, there being no reason to think other
nations will not be similarly seduced when the series is broadcast in their own
land. Forget interactivity and all that Web TV new media stuff, the good,
old-fashioned mass market can still rule.

And yet, if you listen to the conversations inspired by Walking with
Dinosaurs in Britain, you will find that, in fact, the series makes the best
argument yet seen for fully interactive TV—TV that can be paused and
rewound and, most of all, questioned, TV with footnotes and all the rest of the
bells and whistles promised by digital revolutionaries.

Walking with Dinosaurs is, of course, based on the conceit that it is a
natural history show like any other, in which dinosaurs have been filmed doing
their thing in the wild. No scientists come on and tell us how these things are
known, and that is a brilliant touch: instead of talking heads contesting and
buttressing facts, we have the simplicity of imagery and story. A brilliant
touch—and a fatal flaw. Is a Liopleurodon really an all-round toothier,
fiercer and generally a worse proposition than a sperm whale, as the programme’s
animation of this submarine-sized (yet penguin-tailed) piece of late-Jurassic
bad attitude suggested? Was Diplodocus really a ground browser that
roamed in vast herds? “Says who?” I mutter again and again as the creatures on
the screen do unfossilisable things such as farting, communicating with their
tails or shouting at each other.

It’s not that I want the experts back on to the screen to mess up the
illusion, but I do want to be able to get at their undoubtedly fascinating
chains of reasoning more easily than by buying the book or visiting the website.
I want to pause and click on the screen for background, I want to see the same
scene according to different experts. I want to be able to spell Liopleurodon
correctly (the fact that I seem to have done so is thanks to some in-depth
research involving the back of a Honey Loops packet). I want to know why some of
the animation is so stunning while other bits have the feel of a 1960s B-movie
and make one expect the arrival of Raquel Welch at any moment.

In short, I want a real conversation, multilayered and contradictory and
going off at tangents, one I can learn from and then participate in at some
humble level. One that makes the story on the screen the beginning not the end.
Walking with Dinosaurs shows us something broadcast television can do really
well—and something that a smart interactive digital service should do far,
far better.

Apparently Kevin Warwick, the inventive and media-friendly professor of
cybernetics at the University of Reading, thinks we can. Warwick has been
talking about the potential for telepathy in the relatively near future. He’s
working on microchip implants that could give us a Spock-like bond with light
switches, computers and maybe even other people. The devices will work by
detecting nerve impulses generated inside the body and transmitting them in some
form to receiver chips elsewhere.

A new form of noise-free communication beckons, an unmediated communion of
minds, a window to the truth of the soul. Perhaps.

Stripped of its attendant hype, such technology clearly has some potential
for healing. Microchips attached to nerves, for example, might be used to convey
to paralysed strokes victims what different movements should feel like, thereby
helping them to recover. But where’s the fun in stripping things of hype?
High-tech physiotherapy is all very well; but mind-reading is what really
interests us. And the problem with this notion of telepathy through shared
feelings is brilliantly summed up in one of the spoof headlines for which the
American satirical magazine The Onion is justly famous: “President
feels nation’s pain, breasts”. Though linked, physical sensations and emotional
ones are not the same sort of thing.

Making sense of the physical sensations of our bodies—giving them
meanings— requires a great deal of mental interpretation, and it seems
pretty debatable whether we could interpret other people’s bodily sensations
with the precision needed to communicate any subtleties. You might get over this
by developing special codes to carry content; but once coding becomes necessary,
nervous-system-to-nervous-system telepathy is reduced to a complicated sign
language.

Nevertheless, if I were head of R&D for RADA or the New York School of
Performing Arts—or a politician or con-man—I would be fascinated.
Forget telepathy: these chips might be the key to a new technology of
untruthfulness. For sound evolutionary reasons, it is hard to look very sad, or
very happy, if you aren’t. Reliable communication requires good guarantees of
sincerity, and we’ve evolved to be pretty reliable. There are all sorts of
muscles that people use when behaving honestly that they don’t and mostly can’t
when lying—muscles that affect the quality of a smile or a grimace, its
smoothness, its all-over-the-faceness and so on.

If Method actors have an advantage, perhaps it comes from inhabiting the
emotions of a character so thoroughly that these muscles mobilise themselves.
Maybe they end up believing the artful lies they entertain us with are true.
When Oliver Sacks watched Robert De Niro playing one of his patients in the film
of Awakenings, he found the portrayal so good he wondered if it might be
detectable in De Niro’s brain chemistry.

What if, thanks to Warwickite chips, actors were able to feel how their
muscles worked in genuine displays of emotion while not being distracted or
confused by any attempt to portray the emotion itself? It seems to me that such
a system might make it a lot easier to mimic such displays. The ability to
deceive would be greatly enhanced.

Technological telepathy might not after all bring us any closer to the truth.
But Jack Nicholson and his colleagues would be able to handle their lies better
than ever.