Beautifully written. Someone should submit this to Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, etc.
I think that the human desire for magic is closely tied to the desire for something new. The things that we do with science would be just as impressive to medieval-tech magicians as their magic would be to us. But we already understand most of our technology- we know what it’s used for, what it can do and what it can’t, how much it costs on eBay, and so on. To steal a metaphor, human excitement is like a gas that expands to fill the available space. If you dumped a medieval knight into 21st-century America, they’d be in awe of our amazing ‘powers’. They’d want to explore the world, study our technology, understand the marvelous secrets behind modern civilization (at least if they’re anything like OB readers). But soon enough, they’d bump up against the limits of what we can already do with aluminium and silicon. And beyond that, you can only make further progress through tremendous effort, tremendous intelligence or tremendous luck. So magic, no matter how trivial, would be of tremendous interest to the world because it hasn’t been done before. It lies outside of the predefined boundaries most people live their lives in.
Beautifully written. Someone should submit this to Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, etc.
I think that the human desire for magic is closely tied to the desire for something new. The things that we do with science would be just as impressive to medieval-tech magicians as their magic would be to us. But we already understand most of our technology- we know what it’s used for, what it can do and what it can’t, how much it costs on eBay, and so on. To steal a metaphor, human excitement is like a gas that expands to fill the available space. If you dumped a medieval knight into 21st-century America, they’d be in awe of our amazing ‘powers’. They’d want to explore the world, study our technology, understand the marvelous secrets behind modern civilization (at least if they’re anything like OB readers). But soon enough, they’d bump up against the limits of what we can already do with aluminium and silicon. And beyond that, you can only make further progress through tremendous effort, tremendous intelligence or tremendous luck. So magic, no matter how trivial, would be of tremendous interest to the world because it hasn’t been done before. It lies outside of the predefined boundaries most people live their lives in.