How feasable would it be to create the effects of magic using today’s technology? Any sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic. Do we have sufficient tech?
I am thinking about stuff like using a Roman candle- type thing to shoot fireballs and that kind of thing. Electronics isn’t my cup of tea, but any insight will do.
I found a website that dealt with this called Ars Technomagica. However, I was found with more questions after checking it out. Thanks!
What about a magic mirror? Travel to distant lands! See events unfolding as they take place! Watch historical re-enactments! All from the comfort of your own living room! Almost everyone has one nowadays.
Looks at Terminus Est with disbelief
Looks at magic mirror in living room
runs away screaming, “IT BE THE DEVIL’S WORK! THE DEVIL’S WORK!”
Oh! Oh! Your powers of deduction are amazing! Why are you wasting your time on a atupid internet message board when there are so many unsolved crimes! For the good of the country, go, GO!
Well…some of your fantasies can come to life, anyway. I, personally, can call flashes of fire from my fingertips and fling small fireballs. In the right setting, I can also draw glowing symbols that hang in space. I’m currently working on a wand that will supply several light effects, and I’m watching speech recognition avidly so that I can start using incantations to do things. I built a Tesla glove once that provided some neat (if risky) lightning effects, and my gaussglove left some lovely handprints in a few monitors.
You can get your very own wand of (diminutive) fireballs from Theatre Effects if you want–they’re near the bottom of the handheld pyrotechnics section.
I still want the tricks the technomages could do in Babylon 5, though. The state of the art isn’t there yet, though.
It depends on what effects you’re looking for, and whom you’re trying to impress. The key to Clark’s observation is that the technology is sufficiently advanced compared to the person using it. We’re all used to television, and are familiar with the technology, so it’s not magic, to us. Show the same thing to a medieval peasant, though, and he’d be convinced that it was the work of the Devil (OK, so maybe it’s the work of the Devil, anyway. You know what I mean). Put that way, your question sort of becomes “Do we currently have any technology that’s well ahead of what we currently have?”
I’m just going to throw a distinction between technology and magic an author-whose-name-I-don’t-remember decided to make. Technology attempts to work with natural laws to do something desired, while magic attempts to reverse the laws of nature to do something desired.
I quote: Michael Deering, a researcher in virtual reality as Sun Microsystems in California, has pioneered a system by which computer chips are grafted on to human neurons. Ultimately this will enable thought to be transmitted as microwave signals, as in a mobile phone; another suitably “hot-wired” human could pick up these signals up, possibly thousands of miles away. Would this not, in effect be a form of telepathy?
That’s from an old New Statesman magazine article called There’s Method in the Magic. I used it for speed typing practise once.
Those tesla gloves would most definitely rock. Please email me plans or post them. Thanks!
Chronos, I think you are on the right track to what I am getting at. I want something that will appear confusing and inexplainable to someone not knowing what it was. Kind of like making the coin disappear or fitting all those clowns into a car. We are the singers, the shapers, the dreamers, the makers…
Well, not exactly what you mean, but have you ever considered a gun? If you’re ever in Washington, DC, go to the National Air and Space Museum. There’s a permanent exhibit there called “Where next, Columbus”, which is a look at the history and future of exploration, especially in space. Near the beginning of the exhibit, there’s a video that deals with a recent first contact…this one in the '60s, between a group of Australian miners and this tribe in New Guinea. The tribe was extremely impressed by the gun. The general response when somebody who lives in a culture that never invented guns first sees a gun is. “It’s magic. That person pointed a stick at something. The stick then made a noise, and the thing died.”
The question is meaningless until you specify what magic you would like to replicate using technology. As has been pointed out, most of modern tech would be considered magic to a middle ages peasant. What are you looking for? Summoning creatures (ultransonic dog whistles), flying (jet packs), mind control (some hypnotism), ruling the undead, aphrodisiacs (the “date rape” drug), polymorhpism, lyncathropy – some can be done, some can’t.
That’s easy, just get someone stupid enough and almost anythng would qualify.
“…and we may never see their like again.”
Sorry, red–I’d have to redesign the gloves from scratch at this point, and now that I’m no longer 20, drunk, and convinced of my own invincibility, I’m don’t think that I’d wear them if I did. Even at the low currents involved, a short across your chest could potentially send your heart into fibrillation and kill you.
Stick with the gaussgloves–thin neodymium magnets sewn into the gloves can scramble disks (sometimes), make small metal objects jump around impressively, and leave nice psychedelic handprints in monitor and TV screens. You can freak someone out by “mind-melding” with their computer (via the monitor) and leaving visible effects. They’re not as impressive, but they’re safe.
Hmmm…maybe if I redid the Tesla gloves with a stun gun, it would be OK. Lemme think about it. Meanwhile, come up with a few examples of things you want to be able to do.
Someone’s been watching “Crusade”.
The thought about New Guniea (Papua) is interesting. Whatever “magic” you did, it’d be in the audience’s perception of it as truly magical as opposed to some kind of technology. The Papuans viewed a gun as magic because the concept of guns was beyond them and their culture. But the idea that nearly anything is possible with the right technology underlies our current culture (and the OP). So you’d have to come up with something that is totally astonishing and doesn’t look as if it were done with some kind of trick device. Throwing fireballs and Dr. Doom zapping finger-rays look like there is technology underlying them, and so aren’t particularly magical. But perhaps something like “Jedi mind games” or Galen the Techno-Mage’s “16 words” would be more impressive.
Crusade it is!
Balance, how were the gloves powered? I was thinking of making a power sword, with a katana and cabling. There would be a backpack full o’ car batts which would run a hot wire to the blade. Is there any way to make this work?
I am talking about stunning the general population. Not hilljacks in Kentucky who have never seen someone shoot fire from their hands.
I have made guncotton before. Taking an ordinary-looking cotton ball and setting it up with fire in an impressive flare is pretty cool. NI3 is also nice in the chem dept.
The 14 words would be most excellent, but it would be kinda hard to see it as tech unless you counted the impressive wiring in our brains. Still, they would be nice to know. Anyone got any ideas on what they would be like? I’ll try and come up with a list of stuff I am thinking aobut later. I am kinda sapped right now.
If you can marvel in the glory of a mountain, why not pay homage to the light play of a laser?
My gloves were driven by a Tesla coil powered by gel cells and an inverter circuit in a weird harness affair–kind of like a bandolier in reverse. The whole mess was hidden under a loose, billowy black shirt (yes, I’m big enough to conceal that on my person). The wires ran down my sleeves, between the rubber and leather layers of the gloves, to flat copper studs on the knuckles and fingertips. Right hand was hot, left hand was system ground. Grabbing someone with both hands is unpleasant for them, to say the least. You could make a smaller, safer version with the guts of a stun gun, but it wouldn’t provide continuous arcs.
If you load up a sword the way you describe, you’re just asking to get burned, and you would likely ruin the edge or point of the blade when you pulled an arc from it. A pack of car batteries will juice it enough to weld it to things. Very dangerous, my draconic friend.
It may be that fuel cells will soon provide a way of making the power supply smaller.
See, with this sword, I am worried that the arc will just jump from the hot to ground following the path of least resistance. Would a spark actually thravel ino he blade part, or would the grounding wire need to be near the tip?
I would probably step down the juice a lot. However, welding a sword to something would be kinda cool… Would the edge get too hot and melt? Would I have to switch on the juice befre the strike?
“…but I can only do it once!”
If you just hook the circuit up through the sword, you won’t get anything but a warm (maybe very warm) sword and a dead battery. To show any visible effects, the sword would have to be hooked up to the hot side of the circuit and ground out through the target. To do that with any reliability, I think you’ll need an earth ground for your supply–maybe a wire down to some metal cleats would work. Even then, no juice will pass through your target if it’s insulated from the ground. You could, for example, bang on a car all day with the sword without drawing an arc–the tires break the ground path. If the car were grounded, then you would melt nicks into the blade and the car whenever you hit metal; you might even spot-weld them together if you didn’t hit too hard.
The nasty, violent part of me envisions a pair of knives (I prefer knives to swords) hooked up to the positive and negative sides of such a circuit. Has anyone here ever hooked up a pair of those little corn-cob holder spikes to AC?
You are one sick bastard. I like that 