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.
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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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.
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.
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.
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 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.