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.
Wireless telephone and internet would baffle even someone from the sixties.
Photography. Simple as that, would blow people’s minds.
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.
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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.
We have sigils carved into refined rocks that can simulate the universe
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.
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?
