Arthur C. Clarke once said that any advanced technology could be confused with magic. Of course, the point of this article is to prove him wrong. Sometimes, it’s actually within anyone’s lifetime in the last 60 years to show how far we’ve move into a Science Fiction reality. Equally, we’ve also shown how quickly we’ve adapted, off by necessity and usually by herd instinct. Stage magic is more distraction and deception. I think Clarke was meaning the more arcane magic. Not necessarily raising demons but more akin to not understanding what we’re seeing or what is actually happening.
I do think things have changed a lot in the 26 years since Clarke died. We’ve always know what a computer was since being told what it was. The disbelief with current computers would be how they could be compacted so small that they could pack many of its capacities into a mobile phone. Where were the flashing lights to show it was doing something as in the early SF and TV shows and not a keyboard in sight? But we were so used to that idea that the manufacturers based their designs off of the original ‘Star Trek’ communicator.
The film and TV representations of computers needed to have something there to show something was going on, not really understanding that many of the viewers did but accepted this was fiction.
None of which was helped that scientists said a computer could never be smaller than a large building. All that changed with the miniaturised central processing unit (CPU) which compacted transistors. A box on the table with a screen and keyboard hardly looked dramatic. Even the least computer knowledgeable person today knows that computers have to be programmed to work and that takes time. Its hardware developers brought in different facets from different technologies and, in term, moved computer tech into mundane household items. In less than thirty years, we’ve taken computers for granted today to the point many have them in the form of a mobile phone small enough to fit in a pocket. Probably the only limitation is the size of the screen and data input and audio isn’t totally perfect yet. Even if a holographic screen was possible, I expect it won’t catch on because it sort of defeats privacy. Mind you, if you wore glasses that enabled only you to see it, there is an immediate solution and hope another pedestrian or a car doesn’t knock you over. Oddly, for a genre such as Science Fiction, it hasn’t really kept up with the current models let alone how they would look in the future (sic). Even if it’s not necessarily the point of the story, its rarely an incidental background feature.
A thing to note here is when the principles are explained and what it can do, computers are fairly easy to recognise. You might not see the mechanism working or even the computer programming language used, but you know if a particular problem is put in, the right software will give the right answer. Well, unless it’s the current versions of AI which gives multiple answers and isn’t able to tell the difference from any of them…yet. Feels a bit of a regression really. Show to someone the turn of the last century and they might think of it as magic.
Anyway, we do have examples in our own lifetimes to say that although some things have changed drastically, we can recognise their function as we adapt to them. Ergo, we don’t confuse them with magic. Even the likes of the Hadron Collider is easy to figure out even if the molecules and atoms it throws around are too small to see.
That doesn’t mean we can’t be confused if a particular item has multi-functions but observation can soon turn that over. We can establish what a weapon is simply because it can stun, maim or kill something or someone. It’s the end result that counts. I can have a firm grasp of something from a scan of its manual, mostly looking for things that are different or new from similar equipment than read in depth.
A lot of it is incorporating new elements into the design to refine it. A taser has the potential to kill but, at lower voltages, can only stun and then only at a reasonable distance. We might have reduced the killing capacity but it would still be defined as a weapon.
Notice, the principle uses of technology is transport, communication, weaponry, agriculture, medical, education, information storage/calculation and even housing when you include power, plumbing and insulation. It would have to be something pretty extraordinary to think what would we have done without it when we saw it? A common thing in development is to go faster or make it smaller or more efficient or, as in the case of cleaning implements, not even need a human to do anything but operate it. All of these are reflections of how we have developed over the years.
Probably the biggest change that no one spotted is how computer-tech has entered into every aspect of our lives and no one anticipated that decades ago because computers were never seen as being smaller than a large room. Steampunk might have explored using primitive computers but I doubt if it would have allowed flexible programming. The significant change was a need for smaller calculators capable of flexible programming than hardwired programming and the evolution of the silicon chip. Our knowing our own development can see where we’ve come from but little about where we are going. By growing with developments, we’ve adapted easier to changes. Of course, that’s a generalisation. There will always be a percentage of the population who aren’t likely to adapt or even use the tech but that’s a pure Gaussian curve statistic.
I had to spend some time thinking about anything exotic that we haven’t got but wouldn’t recognise. If we were that clever to know that we would be clever. So, I took a different tact. Something we would recognise but not have then teleportation would surely qualify even if we recognised the function. Science Fiction got there first. Although would we confuse it would faster-than-light where something just pops off into the distance faster than we could see? Of course, anything going that fast must have some sort of energy output and if done from inside an atmosphere could likely rupture it. Not good for breathing. You would not want to do it too close to the Earth, assuming the initial burn was fuel-based. The same would also apply with invisibility. Without visible retinas, its unlikely you would be able to see and not really that practical. Turning something invisible wouldn’t mean its not there.
If there is a bigger problem, then it’s the film representation of current technology showing things that it shouldn’t be possible in real life. There is no door in lift/elevators ceilings to climb onto its roof. Skyscrapers have reenforced windows that can even hold a mini-car without shattering so how can some normal person chuck someone else through it? One cannot write a complicated computer program in a matte of minutes, let alone have no flaws or errors. Films cheat a lot but for Science Fiction, there is a need to check what is possible before working out how to get around it and establish in fiction that it was normalised.
Of course, there are some areas where nature steps in with limits. The speed of light is the most common example. A photon, which is essentially a no-mass particle can only go at 186,282 miles/second (299,792,458 metres/second), the speed of light. It’s unlikely that we could ever achieve that speed with a starship with a determinate mass.
All our scientific laws are based on observations of nature and how varying some of their facets can calculate the result. This is more of an understanding of how they connect and using it. You can see it in liquid volume.
Time is more a man-made invention, made from determination of the near spherical shape of our planet and the Babylonians base-60 system which stuck for most people for being practical in divisions without fractions despite the decimal systems we use for everything else. If we meet an alien species, they are bound to have a different numbering system and so we would probably have to use the likes of the speed of light to work out a conversion system. I suspect the same would all be used from the 26 constants that we know to exist. We would hope they use base 10 but if what they have for hands has a different number of digits, then expect a different base. If they differ, like we do with time, there we’ll be constantly doing conversions. We can only hope there are comparisons in mathematics and similar inventions or communication and misunderstanding will be rampant. We’ve proven it ourselves with one of the flights to Mars using the wrong size scales.
One thing another alien species is likely to agree with is nature does not match all our inventions. There are no wheeled animals. No radiowave using animals. No exploding live animals. I’m specifying ‘live’ because in death, gases in the body do get released but not necessarily explosively. We might employ our knowledge of the sciences differently but still get a similar result. If we have to do a comparison to a sentient species, we would be looking for what we know would be the same as well as what isn’t. How sophisticated it is might show learning from experience. If we all have to live with the same limitations, then why should there be any differences?
Then we see UAPs fly at Mach speeds that leave our own aircraft standing. We suspect that they are employing the Earth’s magnetic fields differently, something we haven’t mastered yet. That would definitely fall under advance technology but not something we couldn’t one day do once we grasp the principles. Of course, they could reduce inertia and as the Earth rotates at around 1000 mph (6378.1km), a UAP would be quickly out of sight. We don’t see it as magic. The same applies to nuclear fusion. We just haven’t been very practical yet to use widescale.
Was Clarke right? That’s become more debatable. I seem to be showing a case for not necessarily so. Certainly, our knowledge of science has grown in the past couple decades and scientists will explore anything that is a given and test it more than the old days where the teachers were more prone not to want anything changed. Whether this additional knowledge will refine inventions is more a grey area. The practicabilities of a flying car is less so simply because we don’t want traffic jams or, worse, crashes that would affect people on the ground. That’s just being sensible. Of course, someone is going to think an automated flying car might get around this but those problems won’t go away. Everything has a breakdown factor to consider.
Interestingly, Science Fiction, in all its formats, has gotten us used to futuristic technology and even some of the possibilities of alien tech. That doesn’t mean we’re going to get that right but we’re less likely to be primitives fooled by magic tricks and snake oil but more likely to question, ‘What did they do to learn to do that?’
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