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
We have sigils carved into refined rocks that can simulate the universe
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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…
Wireless telephone and internet would baffle even someone from the sixties.
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)
I’ve already done that in Dyson Sphere Program though
High speed rail, they would probably not believe their eyes if they saw a train going by with 300 kmh.
or even 500kmh
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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.
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.
ChatGPT is magic to me now. It’s great living in the future.
