[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The quote is “Science is magic that works” – Kurt Vonnegut.
Rick Rosner: That reminds me of the Arthur C. Clark quote that the technology of a sufficiently advanced civilization will be indistinguishable from magic [“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”] that is, if aliens came to earth with super high tech, it would just look magical, it would be so far beyond us.
On the quote you said; early humans, pre-renaissance humans, or pre-scientific method humans developed their technologies more gradually than we’ve developed ours. So, they had less technology that worked and the technology they had like the technology of building a shoe, there was nothing about a 13th century shoe that would have appeared to be magic. You might have some shoes for the king that would appear to be super fancy but they all use the same technology and it wasn’t super amazing if you took shoes from now, like the best army boots from now and gave them to soldiers back then, I think they’d go crazy for them.
On the other hand, they wouldn’t protect you from having half your foot cut off with an axe, so maybe they wouldn’t be that crazy for them. When the scientific method and the renaissance came along, then the pace of technology just went nuts and has continued to accelerate. Compared to earlier humans, we have a lot of shit that is magical in its effectiveness though usually we take and treat it with contempt or take it for granted because we were soaking in it.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.rickrosner.org.
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Rick Rosner 