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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"

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T

titiklabingapat

Member
Computers, processors and associated technologies. It blows my mind how such tiny things even work, and get this, process and interpret data culminating in them actually able to affect physical objects.

Writing that even blows my mind right now.
 
A

Aaron Strife

Banned
nixau.jpg
 
C

Coriolanus

Banned
ThoseDeafMutes said:
Related pet peeve: the phrase "anything is possible!" If you are writing SF and a character has uttered the phrase "anything is possible", you have failed this city.
Click to expand...

Hey, the character could get trounced right after saying that as a way of conveying that, in that universe, anything most certainly wasn't possible. Could be played in a good way. Anything's possible.
 
M

Macheezmo

Member
Being able to download things on my phone from the opposite side of the planet while riding in a car just boggles my mind.
 
J

jerry1594

Member
Tupac hologram for sure. Just needed a poof of smoke.
HUELEN10 said:
i know for a fact that I feel my Mini is a magic device every time I use it, as Steve dreamed with the line with the first one.

Even a first-gen mini absolutely shits on your mid 90s PC.
Click to expand...
Muggle Bestbuy employees don't revere such power
 
E

Edward

Banned
"iPhones" (or smartphones) always come up, but it's mostly the internet that makes the iPhone amazing and magical.

Twitter. Facebook. FaceTime. Messaging. All apps that require the internet.
Google is terribly underrated. It's basically an engine that gives you the answer to any question you might have. Sure, you might need a bit of work to parse the answers that it gives you, but there's power in that too.
 
Z

ZackieChan

Member
SpoonyBard said:
I think Clarke meant technology that's several hundred years ahead of you. If a touch screen seems magical to you, that might just be an indication of your lack of education and imagination.
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Yeah, I think people are missing the "sufficiently advanced" part. I don't think Clarke was talking about shit that is commonplace (but then again, I have no idea).

Sakura said:
If you don't believe in magic you aren't going to assume something is magical over technological.
People a long time ago did believe in magic, which is why they would be easy to fool with modern tech.
Click to expand...

I think you're missing the whole point here.
 
B

boclfon479

Member
HUELEN10 said:
Even a first-gen mini absolutely shits on your mid 90s PC.
Click to expand...

Did anyone see Iron Sky? This reminds me of the scene where the ckmputer on the giant spaceship couldn't lift the ship, but they plug in the captives smartphone and it has enough processing power to run the entire ship. They had all '40s tech and it was our rivaled by a single iphone.

I know for a fact that if when I was in 5th grade in 1999, of someone told me that in 10 years we would have a portable phone that has a built in camera, touch screen, video calls, and internet capabilities I would NEVER believe it...

video calls with no latency stills impresses me to this day
 
SiteSeer

SiteSeer

Member
advanced technology is impressive, but the natural world & biological systems are most impressive. just take one slice of it, the infinity of space trumps 14nm transistor gates by a country mile in awe-inspiration.
 
G

gundalf

Member
Drazgul said:
Only for the ignorant. For the absolutely ignorant, everything is magic.
Click to expand...

This statement is IMO kinda harsh, at least for me, when I do code my own Apps, seeing them running still fells like magic, even though I know every single line of code behind it.
 
Z

Zeyphersan

Banned
I wonder if you were to take modern technology back far enough in time, it wouldn't even register as "magic." Like the thing existing would just not be fathomable to the people at all

Advent1s said:
Maybe if people weren't generally stupid with no ambition to not be stupid, this line would not need to exist.
Click to expand...

Wait, what? In the context of the movie Thor, it was to further hammer home that the Asgardians aren't really gods, just aliens who visited Earth and were worshipped as gods.

Even outside of the context of the movie... what?
 
Z

ZackieChan

Member
Advent1s said:
Maybe if people weren't generally stupid with no ambition to not be stupid, this line would not need to exist.
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dat sentence. It's like a roller coaster of structure and double negatives.
the ironing

But if you're trying to say that if people weren't so stupid, this saying wouldn't have to exist, you're missing the point of the saying. Note the "sufficiently" qualifier.
 
T

Timedog

good credit (by proxy)
Go back in time 200 or more years.

Make cgi proclaiming that you are god, showing "miracles", the "end times", etc.

Broadcast it on a giant screen on a bulletproof vehicle.

Your lineage now rules over the entire planet earth for hundreds to thousands of years.
 
M

Meia

Member
More_Badass said:
Was re-watching Thor on FX earlier and that line came up. Arthur C Clarke's Third Law

Would you agree? Have we reached a point where there are examples of modern-day technology/science that could be considered magicial to the uninformed?
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Almost anywhere you can go right now, you can magically pull things from the air and put it into a form you can read, or on a screen you can watch, right in the palm of your hand. This was in the realm of science fiction, what, like a decade ago?
 
S

Sesuadra

Unconfirmed Member
I showed my grandfather Paper by FiftyThree on my iPad mini. The different pencils you can use, the colours one can mix.
suddenly he said "where does to colour come from" I thought he made a joke, but he was serious. I now that they have no idea about the internet, that their senior mobile phone they use is incredible to them..but that they lack that kind of understanding really struck me.
showed me again just how amazing smartphones and tablets are.
 
H

hobblygobbly

Member
That there are flying machines that weigh 500-600 ton (it varies from take-off to landing because of fuel etc) in the air flying across the planet at a cruising speed of about 900-1000 km/h
 
Theonik

Theonik

Member
Reached the point? Show a lighter to someone in the stone age. You would be hailed as god.
There is no 'line' per se or rather it is not static. It simply needs to be reasonably advanced to be able to hide how it works to the person you are presenting it to.
 
moojito

moojito

Member
See how you have to add "to the uninformed" for that statement to hold up these days. So now we apply it only to secluded tribes lost in the jungle and not people living in normal society, which in itself should answer the question.
 
E

Exploding8

Member
Yeah we're getting to that point imo. Computers are all about abstraction, and every new invention pushes the details further and further away, so it's harder and harder to understand all the tech that goes on in computers these days. I'm not sure there's any one person alive that knows every detail of how a computer works anymore, from the intricate details of the CPU design to the high level software programming and network design being utilized.

My professor pretty much summed it up, he said as he was getting his PHd that the more he learned the less he believed computers could actually work. And it's because there's so much tech there.

Hell, look at kids these days. They can literally talk to their phone, ask a question, and it will answer using the internet, a repository of most of our knowledge as a species. And all they have to do is press a button or say "OK Google!" If that's not magic... Idk man.
 
A

Air

Banned
Yes, I would agree. I think the commonality with most magic is the speed and manipulation of the environment. Technology will easily do all of that.

Edit: Magic is also the omission of how the laws of the universe work in favor of it 'just happening'. Technology will give us both.
 
F

Futureman

Member
moojito said:
See how you have to add "to the uninformed" for that statement to hold up these days. So now we apply it only to secluded tribes lost in the jungle and not people living in normal society, which in itself should answer the question.
Click to expand...

Wherever I read the quote in the topic I think of aliens.

Everyone on earth could be the "secluded tribe."
 
openrob

openrob

Member
Mobile phones = telepathy


'One minute, let me just see what Dave in Newcastle thinks"

Man from few hundred years ago: "WHAATTTTTT?!!!"
 
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