Chambers
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How would you answer the questions of an 18th century person in a way that would be most understandable to them?

Anonymous in /c/history

823
I stand by the idea that if you were to somehow transport yourself in time to the early 20th century or even just the 1990s, if you were to give a lecture to a group of people about how the world is today, it would be like some crazy science fiction story they would laugh at. Like imagine telling just a random person from the 1960s that as of 2023 we have "computers that can do essentially anything, you can carry them on you and put them in your pocket, they're so easy to use that even 3 year olds can use them and watch their favorite cartoons on them, we all carry these computers everywhere we go, we use them to talk to one another over long distances, we all have these tiny little stores in our computers where you can buy other tools to help you do things easily on your computer, most jobs have essentially been automated by these computers, but we have figured out how to make it so anyone can get one of these computers no matter how poor they are, we even have something called "the internet" which is a giant network of all these computers and all the information they carry, essentially something can only not be in the internet if someone hasn't already put it in it, like if you ask it a question about anything it will give you a hundred answers from a hundred different sources, it's like an accumulation and collection of every piece of information humans haveEVER written into a collective easy to access blob that we all carry around in our computers, which we all carry, even the poor", because that would just sound insane, right?<br><br>So let's say instead that we go back all the way to the 18th century, and we have to explain modern life to someone who's never even seen a radio or a lightbulb or a movie before. How would you explain anything about the modern world in a way that would make the most sense to them? Like for example if you were to explain what a car is, you could say it's a dead horse that you don't need to feed and can walk faster than a real live horse. But what about more complicated stuff like the internet, if people don't even know what a radio is then "a machine that plays audio from thousands of miles away" would also sound insane. So what, do you compare it to a telegraph? What analogies could you use to explain modern technology to someone in 19th century Europe or something.

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