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
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 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!
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.
We have sigils carved into refined rocks that can simulate the universe
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)
Correction. It actually has been done.. A prototype has successfully demonstrated proof of concept.
A space solar power prototype that was launched into orbit in January is operational and has demonstrated its ability to wirelessly transmit power in space and to beam detectable power to Earth for the first time.
You are right about the efficiency, but since the amount of energy that can be gathered in orbit is so large, the small fraction that can be received on Earth could still be significant.
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 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.
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
Photography. Simple as that, would blow people’s minds.
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.
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…
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.
Sir I have finished my report, here, have my entire table computer, I’ll go get another. I can see you already have six others, but this one has my word document on it.
Although there are people where I work that actually think that’s how computers work.
I assume they mean TOS Star Trek
TOS had them too. Also, 2001 A Space Odyssey also had something even more like a modern tablet. .
Quikclot. “Wait it’s just clay powder?”
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.
Honestly, I feel most things would depending on how far back you go:
If you’ve only known stairs your whole life, a lift would seem like a teleportation device.
If you’ve never even seen a wheel, a car would look like a loud metal monster.
If your whole world has been the one village you grew up in, the Internet is just plain incomprehensible.
If you’re used to making fire with a flint, a simple lighter (especially one without a flint in it) would seem like a magical device already.
Now, I’m not saying you couldn’t explain these concepts to them. People in the past where far less stupid than we often think, they just didn’t have the vast knowledge we currently rely on. But if you where to show these things to them without any context, they’d probably think you’re a witch or something
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.
If you’ve only known stairs your whole life, a lift would seem like a teleportation device.
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.
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 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.
