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
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.
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.
High speed rail, they would probably not believe their eyes if they saw a train going by with 300 kmh.
“Oh bother, my uterus flew out again!”
LOL, can you imagine the pantaloons after an F-22 Raptor does a low altitude flyby?
or even 500kmh
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Mag trains and the level of magnetism utilized today would likely be considered black magic to pre-industrial people.
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.
Ooh, that’s a good one (recording).
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
Depends how far back you go.
People from centuries ago would be astonished by cellophane and tinfoil!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 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.
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
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. ;)
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.
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.
The internet. Near instantaneous communication with anyone on earth who has access to it.
- microwave ovens
- speakers (especially battery-powered Bluetooth, since they aren’t connected to anything)
- LEDs (light without noticeable heat)
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.
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.