Magic VS Modern Technology

In My Humble Opinion
1

Inspired by post 34 in this thread and something I’ve been mulling about for some time (long commute to work!).

For the purposes of plot some-time in the near future Bob the minorly godlike posthuman entity has been messing around again and has merged two different versions of Earth, the one we all know and love with high-tech, computers, nuclear weapons and furbies and a different version of Earth where magic is real and so are various fantasy creatures, technology has stagnated at a fairly low-level as magic is generally more useful for getting things done.

Basically science and technology still works but so does what is thought of as classic magical abilities (something like that in Harry Potter but everyone can learn it, at least to an extent, but its like becoming an engineer for example, takes years of study and some people are better at it than others), there are a lot of weird new creatures running around, some sentient and semi-humanoid (werewolves, vampires, ogres, kitsunes, mermaids, centaurs etc) which are humans who have been transformed into these new species and those which are sentient and non-humanoid and were never human (dragons, griffens, kraken etc) and non-sentient non-human creatures which are basically new animal species.

How would the world adapt? I imagine magic would be studied as a new branch of scientific enquiry (ie it has its own rules and regulations, something can’t happen just because you want it to), there would be a lot of questions re the legal, religious and social status of new sentient species (lots of exciting and fun new prejudices and what about inter-species dating) and the more dangerous non-sentient species would quickly be hunted down and kept to more manageable levels. It would be interesting to talk to a non-human sentient, I imagine they’d have a quite different way of looking at the world.

The clothing industry would have a boom fitting out peoples new bodies and transportation and other items would need to be remodeled, how would you design a car that could be used by a centaur for example?

Magic users wouldn’t be held quite in the awe as they were before:

“AVADA KED-”

BANG

“Glock 17…”

Dragons would be no match for an AH-64 Apache gunship and werewolves would think twice before attacking someone knowing they’ll be hunted down by angry night-vision goggle wearing villagers wielding AK-47’s with silver-tipped bullets and not merely pitchforks.

2

Sounds a little like a story I read long ago, like in my junior high library. A couple of centuries into the future, metallic iron actually becomes pretty rare because materials technology has cheaper better substitutes for almost any purpose you could use iron or steel for. And once the world isn’t flooded with iron (a powerful anti-magic), things that were presumed to be imaginary for over a thousand years start returning.

3

This totally depends on the capacities of the magic involved. For instance, if we take D&D magic, even a wizard with PHB-only spells is pretty much untouchable by anything modern technology can throw at it, because there’s a lot of things that are flat out immune to harm from nonmagical sources. A low-level wizard would easily fall to things like guns and bombs, but by mid-levels they start to get all sorts of ‘I win’ buttons, and a high-level wizard can’t possibly be taken down by modern technology at all. So, in order for this question to be answered, you’d have to define the full capacities of the magic in question and exactly how it works, because ‘magic’ is vague enough that there’s no way to be certain. There’s a lot of other sources with magic like that too - beings that are flat out immune to harm except by specific means and/or other magic. You need a specific sword to kill the evil wizard, or he can only be defeated by the prophesied hero, etc.

Similarly, it depends on the rules of magic as to whether it would be able to be widely used to help the average person. If magic is something that can be learned purely through study, then a lot of people would likely take it up. Eventually school would probably include a number of simple convenient spells to make life easier for everyone. If, on the other hand, it can only be used by people with an innate talent, those people would have a significant advantage, and depending on how magic works and how good it is against technology, we’d wind up either with wizard overlords or somehow hunting down and either killing or restricting those capable of using magic. Some scenarios out of the X-Men would probably be a pretty realistic response, except I find it unlikely that a Charles Xavier analogue would appear. It seems more likely to me that all the magic-users would eventually band together under a Magneto analogue, especially if they came from a parallel world in the first place and thus have no emotional, societal, and familial ties to normal humans from our world.

4

Ever read Robert Heinlein’s Magic, Inc.?

5

This is the basic premise of Shadowrun, though it using the “Awakening” rather than an alternate reality merge to bring magic and magical creatures into the ‘real’ world.

6

One huge factor is whether magic includes a “jinx” spell that works like an accelerated Murphy’s Law on technology. If all your high-tech electronics glitch and all your precision machinery jams at critical times magic is going to have the upperhand.

7

That’s actually a fairly interesting premise and explanation for why there’s no magic in the modern world.

Note, I don’t believe in magic for a moment, just in case someone gets the wrong idea.

I imagine it would be something of a ‘paper, scissors, stone’ scenario, magic could affect science but the fruits of science could affect magic…as in the iron scenario above. Whole new fields of research would probably open up.

Nah, I gave up on Heinlein after starting to read ‘The Number of the Beast’ and not finishing it. I realise its a rather poor example of his work to be fair, ‘Starship Troopers’ was interesting. Thanks though. :slight_smile:

Ah, good point, I’m vaguely aware of Shadowrun but its more of a cyberpunk future setting isn’t it?

Thanks for the well thought out reply. Personally I think that in any story people (or miscelleanous ‘others’) who have godlike power and abilities make things rather uninteresting (the ‘something can’t happen just because you want it to’ clause above).

I pictured the scenario as something like Harry Potter world levels of magical ability (though a little less outright breaking of the established laws of physics) where even top magic users are vulnerable to ordinary mundane technology but still capable of some very cool tricks and where there is no special bloodline necessary to use it, though just as most people are capable of learning to drive not many are good enough at it to be professional racing drivers, there’s a certain amount of innate talent necessary as well as dedication.