In the Wired.com article on Pluribus, the author breaks down the speculative science behind the hive mind at the heart of the Apple TV series. The show imagines an alien virus that infects nearly all of humanity, merging individual people into a single collective consciousness known as “plurbs,” with only a handful of immune holdouts resisting assimilation. Though the series doesn’t explain the mechanism of this shared mind in narrative terms, the article explores one plausible in-world explanation: communication through radio waves.
The hive mind’s “Joining” appears to connect all infected individuals so that thoughts and experiences are shared unconsciously across the group. Think of it as a decentralized mesh network rather than a centralized brain; any transmission from one plurb echoes through the collective. This concept echoes real-world physics: radio waves are electromagnetic fields created by accelerating electric charges, and if a biological organism could emit and receive them, it might enable long-range communication.
Using rough estimates, the article notes that if each plurb radiated on the order of a few watts, signals could be detectable up to several hundred meters away, and perhaps farther if the sensitivity were higher. These transmissions wouldn’t be audible to humans because radio frequencies lie outside the audible range. Instead, the signals would function like digital data, similar to a mesh Wi-Fi network that could, in theory, carry complex information like thoughts or memories.
The article also considers narrative devices such as a Faraday cage, which blocks electromagnetic signals and could isolate a character from the hive mind. Even simple materials such as chicken wire could theoretically disrupt such transmissions.
By grounding Pluribus’s fictional hive mind in familiar physics, the article gives readers a way to think about collective consciousness in terms of waves, networks, and signal propagation without dismissing the show’s imaginative premise.