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
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.
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.
Photography. Simple as that, would blow people’s minds.
We have sigils carved into refined rocks that can simulate the universe
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.
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)
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.
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.
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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.
Try explaining titanium bone implants or the process of getting metallic aluminum to a Sumerian coppersmith
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.
I mean… basically all of them?
