Arthur C. Clark once said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". What technologies do we have today that would look like magic to people from the past?
I think lasers are pretty wack when you think about them through this lens. A small, wand-like object in your hand can make light appear from seemingly nowhere. If it's powerful enough it can set things on fire or blind people. Not to mention larger ones like laser cutters or the LLD, used to destroy missiles midflight. Thats sure to blow some feudal peasant minds
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I live in the here and now, and I’m still baffled by wireless internet. It’s modern sorcery
Little bots screaming 1s and 0s at each other really fast at a pitch you can't hear.
It’s not even sound, because it doesn’t vibrate air molecules. If that were the case, it wouldn’t work in space for communicating with things like GPS satellites.
They use light. Because wifi/radio/Bluetooth/etc are all just electromagnetic, which can be converted directly into light that is outside of the visible spectrum. The same way that a lightbulb works. And it only works because in higher bands most solid objects just sort of look like they’re made of glass. They don’t block those bandwidths, so the light is able to pass through them like a window. That includes things like your body. They’re just shining light directly through you.
It’s akin to your phone and router flashing Morse code at each other with invisible flashlights.
That's exactly how li-fi works https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Fi
It's even cooler than lightbulbs, though (assuming we're talking about incandescents) - you send electricity back and forth into a wire that's just the right length, and (RF) light leaks out without it getting hot!
Actually decent description
Haha. The bots are screaming in morse codes.
I remember finding out about wireless internet from an Intel TV ad. There was somebody with a laptop, browsing internet (probably an AOL page or something like that considering the era) sitting on a chair in the middle of a stadium, with no cable to be seen.
I thought “well that’s stupid, I know you can avoid the power cable for a while if there’s a battery, but if he’s browsing the internet, there has to be a network cable”. But the ad ran over and over on TV, clearly insisting there was no cable, so I was like “hm wait…”.
Eventually I read about wireless networks somewhere a couple of weeks later, and suddenly it all made sense.
I studied RF in college and it's still sorcery. You wanna see a cool of the dark arts? Read up on QAM...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulation
Smart phones. Not even Star Trek could predict we would all be walking around with a slab of glass that is exponentially more powerful than computers that took up entire rooms, can communicate with others sub-second via voice, images, video, or text, can access the sum total of public human knowledge at the blink of an eye, and can guide you to any location with a map for everywhere you want to go. It’s really powerful stuff and it’s in everyone’s hands.
You mean the PADD?
You know what I was thinking is weird about this the predicted tablet computers but somehow they didn't predict emailing the files to your superior.
Although there are people where I work that actually think that's how computers work.
I assume they mean TOS Star Trek
Dick Tracy predicted two-way wrist radios decades ago. My Apple Watch does that plus more.
We're getting close to 100 years on Dick Tracy, the comics started in 1931. Not even sure that was the first wrist communicator in fiction TBH.
I somewhat disagree. As you said people weren't idiots, they just lack the contextual understanding we have.
Take a car for example. Even if you'd never seen a wheel, it would surely be easy to understand how it works just by seeing a car roll by. You may not immediately understand how its moving itself but I don't think that means you would conclude its magic. You could think it's biological, but honestly concluding that it's a machine doesn't seem that unlikely to me.
Also the internet... I think most modern people just think it's magic really.
I once talked to a guy on Reddit who had a version of this turned up to 11.
I don't remember the exact times so I'll guess but it'll get the point across.
He boarded the New York Subway at 8:42am September 11, 2001, and got off at 8:50am.
Dude was just having a normal day walking onto that train and the next station was in a totally different dimension.
Judging from my years in networking, not only most people, but many in IT see it as magic.
Agreed, we're still intuitive creatures. An elevator may seem otherworldly for a moment but that feeling would quickly fade once you saw the cables and pulleys causing the cab to ascend/descend. It may be one of those "I've never thought of that but it makes sense" sort of revelations over "this is impossible"
Especially because for most of history magic was accepted as reality by most people. So any aspect of the elevator that didn’t make sense to them, like the buttons and power, could be attributed to magic without much consternation.
Nowadays most (non-religious) people think “well there must be an explanation, I wonder how they achieved that, I’ll get to the bottom of this.” But before public schools, the scientific method, and an understanding of the natural laws, regular folk would just accept the unexplainable as magic, ghosts, demons, etc. People accepted that Hermes’ shoes just worked, or that Jesus could turn water into wine.
Humans are inquisitive creatures sure, but we’re also superstitious creatures who would often rather invent an explanation than admit we can’t explain it. And when you live in a world where even a rainbow or the stars are unexplainable, you get used to mythical explanations. You grow up with the people you love and trust giving you these explanations.
It’s the outliers who had the time and disposition — Aristotle, Newton, etc — that we celebrate today for bucking that trend. But they were the exception, not the rule. Archimedes may have spent the rest of his days studying that elevator, but 99% of his contemporaries would have said “By Zeus what a marvelous gift from the gods”, stared at it for a while, and then returned to toiling in the fields and quarries.
Yep. The internet is definitely magic.
A lift and cars are pretty easy actually. People have messed around with mechanical tools since before the pyramids. They'd be amazed by a car for sure, but they'd understand it's a complicated machine.
I would take a pic of a middle-ages person with my phone, show it to them and tell them I stole their soul. Then I'd be beaten, hanged, burned, and drowned for witchcraft. Still, it'd be hilarious.
You'd be screaming (with laughter, and pain) all the way to the pire!
We have sigils carved into refined rocks that can simulate the universe
The more time I've spent studying and researching new tech, the more I feel like, even to people today, our technology is magical.
I'm a medical diagnostic technologist. I understand how a CT and MRI machine work. They're still the stuff of magic imo. A lot of people take these technologies for granted because they're fairly prominent, but do you have any idea how a spinning magnet produces high quality, 3d images of the inside of your body? Very few people do. It's still freaking amazing and ingenious when you do understand it. Remodeling a CT scan into a 3d render is similarly impressive. The amount of calculations that take place within the space of seconds would take years for someone to do on paper, and we do 25-30 patients a day in our one machine at my location.
AI is making a big wave in my field too. Pretty soon we may only need radiologists to oversee AI rather than having to diagnose every exam themselves. AI on our consoles will be able to diagnose before we even send our images to a rad since they're so good at pattern recognition. Their readings have shown to be more accurate than a radiologist in some studies.
50 years ago we didn't even have consumer computers. Now our computers can diagnose and type a pneumothorax more accurately and faster than a doctor who has spent his whole life diagnosing xrays.
Well we'd all be burned as witches, so hopefully you are bringing people forward in time, not tossing them backwards. I'd expect my time traveler to be stunned by nearly everything:
Flush toilet
Electrical anything
Telephone, speakers, TV
I took a networking course in college and loved it but you still can't convince me that radio isn't magic. Even knowing the mechanics of it doesn't help - it's so freaking crazy. Fiber optic data transmission is such an awesome technology but even that doesn't confuse me like radio, or broadcast tv.
I'm srill convinced Electrons are just a massive conspiracy...
It's all just magnetism! Wake up sheeple!
How Can Magnets Be Real If Our Eyes Aren't Real?
Because birds, man.
l can think of one magic-technology that appeared during my lifetime:
E-Ink-Readers.
I mean, script suddenly appearing out of thin air on flat, solid surfaces? WTF?
I even studied enginering in the early 90's and would not have been able to come up with a technological explaination if I had encountered one of those back then...
I mean sure, but…from an uninformed perspective an LCD or even a CRT monitor are going to appear just as magical, if not more so.
But that's exactly the point.
E-Ink Displays would have been unable to explain for me from my thoroughly * informed * perspective as an HF and digital communications student.
Active displays in one form or another had been around for 50 years or so at that time. So have been practially all base technology concepts of the much mentioned smartphones. Nothing magical about an optimized version, just extrapolation.
But E-Ink? A * brand new * technology * without prior art * rapidly emerging from obscure theoretical concept to widespread use within just 15 years or so...
I am actually still a little bit awed each time I switch on one of those...
Try explaining titanium bone implants or the process of getting metallic aluminum to a Sumerian coppersmith
Especially if he's just been sold the wrong grade of copper.
Brb leaving a 1 star yelp review for Ea Nasir
Ea: Ruin everything.
Try explaining heroin addicts stripping copper wire from houses to Ea Nasir.
I like that reference
Even something as simple as arc welding or an EAF would seem pretty magical. Harnessing lightning to melt metal.
Try explaining to a bronze age healer that we can fix people's medical problems with surgery while they're unconscious and deal with their pain afterwards with medication.
For the latter one that wouldn’t be shocking. Opium poppies because widespread crops in the Bronze Age. I’ve even heard a classicist say that it’s theoretically possible that some Bronze Age healer in Egypt could’ve developed a secret formula for painkillers that was just morphine as the non poppy ingredients were able to be harvested using the trade routes and technology of the era.
I think what might be more surprising is that we can consistently knock patients out for surgery without much risk of death and that we can stop people from dying after they’ve overdosed on opiates (though idk how hard it is to od on smoked opium).
And in the medical field try explaining to a plague doctor that the bubonic plague is a mild inconvenience to all but the poorest people today and can be cured with inexpensive pills.
Ok, fair enough. But I thought of another one- even into the 20th century, a huge number of battlefield injuries were automatic amputations. We don't necessarily have to do that now in a lot of the same injuries.
This sphere has an evil magical aura that really wants to tear your body apart. Now watch what happens when I remove the screwdriver!
That does indeed sound demonic.
Just the thought of it chills me to my Core.
High speed rail, they would probably not believe their eyes if they saw a train going by with 300 kmh.
They thought trains would make women's uterus' fly out of their bodies so this tracks.
"Oh bother, my uterus flew out again!"
LOL, can you imagine the pantaloons after an F-22 Raptor does a low altitude flyby?
Mag trains and the level of magnetism utilized today would likely be considered black magic to pre-industrial people.
or even 500kmh
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I read somewhere that we are going to set up solar panels in space convert the electcity to radio radios, beam it to earth, then convert it back to electricty.
To anyone that wasn't Nikola tesla, that just sounds insane.
Nah, that's not an actual plan that's being implemented. It's basically a thought experiment at this point. The problem with wireless energy transfer at that scale is that it takes a fuck ton of output power to generate a little bit of input power at a distance (inverse square law)
Yeah, a proof of concept is one thing, but scaling it up to deliver mega or gigawatts is a whole different beast. I'd be concerned about environmental impact with radio waves that strong.
I've already done that in Dyson Sphere Program though
I mean, any lcd screen. It's a magical flat surface that can display any image. Add a battery and now it's completely untethered and silent.
Yeah, so by extension a mobile phone.
Capture people inside your device and conjure them at any time.
If you'd never seen technology this would absolutely seem magical.
Wireless telephone and internet would baffle even someone from the sixties.
Wireless phones were around in the 60s. Probably not many people would see them, but may have heard of them at least. They were usually only installed in cars.
I mean we gather these black rocks called silicone and refine them, then we cut them to plates and inscribe them with microscopic runes using light and very secret mixtures. Next we use lighting on it to make it think for us.
Look at what you did. You took perfectly good sand and gave it anxiety
Even more simplistic: we take rocks and etch runes onto them, shoot them with electricity to make them think.
Also, I think you meant silicon. Silicone is what flashlights are made of... Which would also blow the minds of less advanced cultures: "You craft soft holes from rocks mixed with glues and you fuck it?"
I read some other word instead of flashlight and I almost threw up in laughter.
That other word IS what they meant!
No you read that right. My autocorrect is thinking like a Puritan sometimes.
An LED flashlight.
You have a device you can fit in your pocket that can shine a light so bright that it looks like day.
The entire advanced mathematics. Go sufficiently far and mundane matrix multiplication will look like daemonic sigils. Write out a moderately complex math proof and you're essentially commanding inhuman tongue. Then when you convince them that it's really not devil summon spell you can tell the old era folks, that all these symbols is why the sun rises as fast as it does and moon has phases.
I’m 46 years old. In my lifetime, we’ve gone from being able to put half an hour on one side of an LP or cassette to being able to put a full album on a CD to being able to put a few hundred songs on an early MP3 player to being able to stream unlimited music almost anywhere in the world. That feels like magic to me.
Smart phones. The caveat being you couldn't take one back in time and impress them because the internet and cellular network wouldn't be there.
I remember a great answer to this somewhere and they said a solar powered 4 function calculator is the simplest thing we have today that would blow people's minds. You really don't even need a scientific one to achieve the effect. Apart from the obvious (quick math, LCD display, and solar power) it also uses plastic.
You don't need a network to make a smartphone black magic. Just taking pictures is enough, but also single player games, calculators, word processors, image editors, music players, really any non-networked application is still magic to pre-computer people.
Well, for like a day or two then the battery dies! But yeah, it would still be impressive, I'm not saying it wouldn't. A time traveler must always ask themselves how long they intend on visiting!
You can bring a solar panel with you to keep it charged if you have a long visit of convincing people you're magic planned.
I can't believe 3D Printing hasn't been mentioned. Summoning figures from the ether would almost certainly get you tried as a witch.
I think 3D printers will really become mainstream when they're a bit more capable.
Hmm I am not sure specifically the printing part would be that magical. After all you are just squeezing a material through a nozzle and moving the nozzle to make a shape which is conceptually easy to understand. However translating words into the 3D printer head moving to creat that shape would be the magical part
ChatGPT is magic to me now. It's great living in the future.
It is pretty cool. Until our AI overlords decide we are too wasteful. ;)
People in the past had a lot of weird technologies, trickery and magician stage plays. I don't think a laser pointer would be out of the ordinary, unless you'd try to explain what it actually is. I can imagine people would just assume it's a trick.
Now, a cutting laser... That could be interesting.
But I wonder how people in the past would react to stuff like audio and video recording and immediate playback. I always thought that is something that screams "impossible" unless you're already familiar with it.
Audio/video technology came to mind for me too. There's so many layers of technological development to get to even the most basic A/V displays. And even more to have something to play on it. It's sure to amaze or terrify some people from ages past. Similarly, navigation. Through something like a smart phone, it would probably be baffling to the brightest minds of the early 20th century, let alone centuries ago
Ooh, that's a good one (recording).
Remote controlled garage doors.
Just about anything to do with a smart home. I can control lights and appliances in my home from anywhere in the world using my phone (magical) or just my voice.
Also appliances of most any type. A refrigerator magically contains winter all year 'round, a heater, oven and electric cooktop provide heat without the fire, and a microwave heats things without heat.
A similar series written by an engineer whose character goes back about 10 years before the Mongol invasion of Poland. He uses his skills to fast-forward society into the age of steam while simultaneously avoiding being burned as a witch: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Stargard
Unfortunately, the author has had some JK Rowling moments, but I really enjoyed the books.
Photography. Simple as that, would blow people's minds.
The internet. Near instantaneous communication with anyone on earth who has access to it.
The Saturn V Rocket, The reusable Falcon rockets spacex uses(my jaw still drops watching those things land), The US NAVY's Rail Gun(until they canceled the project in 2021), That new globe screen doohicky in Vegas.
A remote control or any bluetooth-enabled devices. It's like spooky action at a distance. Just press a button on a little thing and it can make something else across the room do something on its own.
Magnets
I'd really love to sit a middle aged peasant down and watch them play GTA V
Most of our weaponry.
Communications is huge.
Depending on how far back you go, almost anything. Tech has come a long way and it still seems to have endless possibilities. We just might be in a golden era. We once deemed things impossible and brushed them aside, now we are more accepting of them only being impossible for current tech. Interstellar travel for example is tech that's still far beyond us but we know we can get there.
Quikclot. "Wait it's just clay powder?"
It doesn't need to be super advanced to be incredible.
I usually have a live cam playing on my 2nd screen. Right now I'm watching a bird feeder in Panama, full of tropical birds. Or I can watch another stream that's in NY State where there are Bluejays and Woodpeckers. Sometimes I have a tropical beach, or look at the jellyfishes in the Monterrey Bay Aquarium. I think that's magic.
What site do you use for that?
https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/animals/live-cams
^^This one works for multiple live cams at the Monterey Bay Aquarium
Thank you for sharing the best live cam on the Internet (gotta check out the otters, y’all)
That's a site that really serves a porpoise
All the sufficiently advanced ones, really.
Speakers still blow my mind. The concept of sound and hearing in general, really. It's incredible how much information, and the variety of information, you can cram into pressure waves. The fact that we have organs and neural pathways that are not only able to, but are solely devoted to the interpretation and transmission of pressure waves built into us is mind boggling. These weird wobbly bones in our head allow us to experience the world and each other. Mind boggling.
I think it would be vaguely adorable if after I used the external water dispenser on my fridge a medieval age person hesitantly asked me if I descended from Moses.
Depends how far back you go.
People from centuries ago would be astonished by cellophane and tinfoil!
I mean.. basically all of them?