Idea for a short story in which everyone has to take such a literacy test and is restricted to a lifestyle of only having the luxuries they understand.
It’s about degrees of understanding, of course, but it should be mentioned that our lives will always be greatly enriched by the bizarre fact that we can use technologies we have no understanding of, and there is no such test. No one knows how a pencil is made. We float every day over an inscrutable river of magic maintained by a people we’ve never met.
I sometimes wonder if this is the reason advanced ancient technology is such a popular theme in contemporary fantasy media. All of the technology we interact with might as well be a product of some lost civilization, because we know that we will never meet most of the people who know how to make it all, if it breaks we can’t fix it, and we know that their tradition is separate from ours and traced back centuries into the history of science and technology that we might never learn. If we did meet them, we know that we wouldn’t have time to learn the whole craft from them. They are, in a sense, necessarily absent from our lives. We only see their artifacts.
Somehow, their artifacts keep working and abounding without them and that miracle is hard to get used to, so maybe we write stories about it, frame it in the most basally digestible anthropic terms, to help us to process it.
There’s a whole popular genre of stories about someone from our world being transported to another (isekai), and a subset of those stories involves kickstarting (parts of) an industrial civilization via mostly just your own knowledge. Examples include the manga Dr. Stone and the Chinese webnovel Release That Witch. Throne of Magical Arcana does the same with scientific knowledge, in a world where the power to cast magic spells derives from understanding the world. And more broadly, there are tons of stories with the same theme that focus on one smaller body of knowledge, like agriculture or medicine.
There’s no obligation to give up gifts we don’t understand—otherwise we’d have to give up sleep, and people before the discovery of oxygen would have to give up breathing. But we do have an obligation to be grateful for such gifts, which may have been the point of the post.
Idea for a short story in which everyone has to take such a literacy test and is restricted to a lifestyle of only having the luxuries they understand.
It’s about degrees of understanding, of course, but it should be mentioned that our lives will always be greatly enriched by the bizarre fact that we can use technologies we have no understanding of, and there is no such test. No one knows how a pencil is made. We float every day over an inscrutable river of magic maintained by a people we’ve never met.
I sometimes wonder if this is the reason advanced ancient technology is such a popular theme in contemporary fantasy media. All of the technology we interact with might as well be a product of some lost civilization, because we know that we will never meet most of the people who know how to make it all, if it breaks we can’t fix it, and we know that their tradition is separate from ours and traced back centuries into the history of science and technology that we might never learn. If we did meet them, we know that we wouldn’t have time to learn the whole craft from them. They are, in a sense, necessarily absent from our lives. We only see their artifacts.
Somehow, their artifacts keep working and abounding without them and that miracle is hard to get used to, so maybe we write stories about it, frame it in the most basally digestible anthropic terms, to help us to process it.
There’s a whole popular genre of stories about someone from our world being transported to another (isekai), and a subset of those stories involves kickstarting (parts of) an industrial civilization via mostly just your own knowledge. Examples include the manga Dr. Stone and the Chinese webnovel Release That Witch. Throne of Magical Arcana does the same with scientific knowledge, in a world where the power to cast magic spells derives from understanding the world. And more broadly, there are tons of stories with the same theme that focus on one smaller body of knowledge, like agriculture or medicine.
There’s no obligation to give up gifts we don’t understand—otherwise we’d have to give up sleep, and people before the discovery of oxygen would have to give up breathing. But we do have an obligation to be grateful for such gifts, which may have been the point of the post.
Obligation feels like a weird word here.
admin note: romeostevensit has passed the Internet test, hence why you can read zir comment (just kidding XD)