Distinguishable From Magic
In 1973, the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke wrote what would become perhaps the most quoted observation in the history of technology: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I have always liked this quote, because he was right. Do you know how a quartz clock works? I’ll give you a hint: it’s vibrating crystals. Turns out the holistic hippies were right, crystals are magic. Right now in my pocket I have at my fingertips essentially all human knowledge and information. Somewhere in a server farm in Virginia, a computer the size of a wardrobe decides that I need to be enraged at a video of a monkey being bullied. This thinking silicon (a rock) converts this information into pulses of light, fires them down a glass wire thinner than a human hair, sends them under the Atlantic Ocean at roughly the speed of light, up through a cable landing station on a beach in Portugal that looks completely unremarkable from the outside, across Europe, under more oceans, up through the seafloor off the coast of Queensland, through a series of increasingly unimpressive concrete buildings, through the air invisibly as radio waves, through my wall, and into a small rectangle of glass and metal in my hand. The monkey has no idea any of this happened. ...