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 live in the here and now, and I’m still baffled by wireless internet. It’s modern sorcery
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
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
We have sigils carved into refined rocks that can simulate the universe
Well we’d all be burned as witches, so hopefully you are bringing people forward in time, not tossing them backwards. I’d expect my time traveler to be stunned by nearly everything:
Flush toilet
Electrical anything
Telephone, speakers, TV
I took a networking course in college and loved it but you still can’t convince me that radio isn’t magic. Even knowing the mechanics of it doesn’t help - it’s so freaking crazy. Fiber optic data transmission is such an awesome technology but even that doesn’t confuse me like radio, or broadcast tv.
I’m srill convinced Electrons are just a massive conspiracy…
It’s all just magnetism! Wake up sheeple!
How Can Magnets Be Real If Our Eyes Aren’t Real?
Because birds, man.
The more time I’ve spent studying and researching new tech, the more I feel like, even to people today, our technology is magical.
I’m a medical diagnostic technologist. I understand how a CT and MRI machine work. They’re still the stuff of magic imo. A lot of people take these technologies for granted because they’re fairly prominent, but do you have any idea how a spinning magnet produces high quality, 3d images of the inside of your body? Very few people do. It’s still freaking amazing and ingenious when you do understand it. Remodeling a CT scan into a 3d render is similarly impressive. The amount of calculations that take place within the space of seconds would take years for someone to do on paper, and we do 25-30 patients a day in our one machine at my location.
AI is making a big wave in my field too. Pretty soon we may only need radiologists to oversee AI rather than having to diagnose every exam themselves. AI on our consoles will be able to diagnose before we even send our images to a rad since they’re so good at pattern recognition. Their readings have shown to be more accurate than a radiologist in some studies.
50 years ago we didn’t even have consumer computers. Now our computers can diagnose and type a pneumothorax more accurately and faster than a doctor who has spent his whole life diagnosing xrays.
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.
Try explaining titanium bone implants or the process of getting metallic aluminum to a Sumerian coppersmith
Especially if he’s just been sold the wrong grade of copper.
Brb leaving a 1 star yelp review for Ea Nasir
Ea: Ruin everything.
Try explaining heroin addicts stripping copper wire from houses to Ea Nasir.
Even something as simple as arc welding or an EAF would seem pretty magical. Harnessing lightning to melt metal.
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.
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.
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.
Smart phones. The caveat being you couldn’t take one back in time and impress them because the internet and cellular network wouldn’t be there.
I remember a great answer to this somewhere and they said a solar powered 4 function calculator is the simplest thing we have today that would blow people’s minds. You really don’t even need a scientific one to achieve the effect. Apart from the obvious (quick math, LCD display, and solar power) it also uses plastic.
You don’t need a network to make a smartphone black magic. Just taking pictures is enough, but also single player games, calculators, word processors, image editors, music players, really any non-networked application is still magic to pre-computer people.
Well, for like a day or two then the battery dies! But yeah, it would still be impressive, I’m not saying it wouldn’t. A time traveler must always ask themselves how long they intend on visiting!
You can bring a solar panel with you to keep it charged if you have a long visit of convincing people you’re magic planned.
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.
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
I can’t believe 3D Printing hasn’t been mentioned. Summoning figures from the ether would almost certainly get you tried as a witch.
I can create anything your heart desires, as long as your heart desires simple plastic objects and it’s prepared to wait five hours.
I think 3D printers will really become mainstream when they’re a bit more capable.
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. ;)
Photography. Simple as that, would blow people’s minds.
I’d really love to sit a middle aged peasant down and watch them play GTA V
