High Magic - High technology, historical question

[Dreaddisease]

Can you have Advanced Technology or even simple technology advance from a high magic world?

I ask this simple question because I try to think of the inventions of the past that slowly worked towards the technologies of today. Example: In a magical society how could you imagine a printing press existing when one wizard could make a book copier magic item. Or a cotton gin or a mill or anything.

So what do you think?

 

[Sir Whiskers]

The short answer is of course both can exist. The long answer depends on various factors:

1) Is magic innate or learned? Can only a fraction of the population learn to use magic spells, or create magic items? If so, no matter how advanced the magic, there will be an upper limit on the amount of magic used in everyday life. The wealthiest will have it, the rest will use "normal" technology. In effect, technology is universal - anyone with the knowledge and resources can produce mundane items. If magic is the opposite, it will be rare no matter how useful or superior.

2) What are the relative costs of magic vs technology? Where magic is cheaper, faster, better, easier, it will be the preferred choice. Where it isn't, technology will be the preferred choice. I can easily visualize a world where long distance travel is via teleportation (instead of airplanes), but short distances are traveled via mundane means. A related example is Star Trek: transporters are used quite often, but crewmen still walk to the bridge or wherever when their shift starts. They still take shuttles.

 

[Umbran]

Example: In a magical society how could you imagine a printing press existing when one wizard could make a book copier magic item.

Yes, a wizard could make such a thing, but that doesn't guarantee that one will. There aren't that many wizards about, and only some of them have Craft Wonderous Item. And wizards frequently don't have time for idle inventive pursuits.

Invention, in large part, is not about the method, but about inspiration. The printing press looks obvious to us, in retrospect. But remember that it was pretty much a concept unheard of at the time. Coming up with things that nobody else has thought of isn't common, or easy, or guaranteed to happen.

If the idea happens to strike the guy who's really good with wood and metal, then you'll get a printing press. If it first strikes the guy who has the item creation feat, you'll get a magic item. You can have both things happening at once.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

One of my favorite relevant quotes (I think it is Carl Sagan...):

Any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic.

One of the guiding principles of the Technology stuff I am working on right now, actually...


Wulf

 

[BiggusGeekus@Work]

I think a high-magic game wouldn't have the same "feel" as technology. The gizmos would be more effective and more localized. So you wouldn't have several machines dredging a river, you'd have one flying guy with a wand. You wouldn't have a magical machine to reprint books, you'd have a bookcase that turned blank books into exact copies.

I think the progress of science would be slowed down dramatically in the presence of magic.

* Sages attempting to determine how electricity is conducted would have to take steps to rule out magic as an option. There would be a lot of bad science performed as people accepted the "easy" explanation of magic for how things work.

* Diviners would only confuse things. A spell that returned the answer "a star is a large sphere of flaming gas far away", might lead the wizard to think that a star was a mile in diameter and up to 3 thousand miles away, when the truth is much more vast.

* low technology would seem to be a dead end. Why use a cannon, when a wand of fireballs would be more accurate, more devestating, easier to transport, not prone to explosions, and you don't even have to worry about the gunpowder getting too wet or too unstable.

* mythic beats would detract from the study of natural law. It took us millenia to understand that a bird's low weight was a very important part in how they fly. How would a griffon, unicorn, or dragon throw off those studies?

Of course, progress would march on. But -- in my opinion -- it would march slower.

 

[netnomad]

One of my favorite relevant quotes (I think it is Carl Sagan...):

Any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic.

Wulf

It was Arthur C. Clark not Sagan.

-Netnomad

 

[Umbran]

One of my favorite relevant quotes (I think it is Carl Sagan...):

Any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic.

I believe the original is from science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke's book, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible .

Clarke's 1st Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

Clarke's 2nd Law: "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."

Clarke's 3rd Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

It was Arthur C. Clark not Sagan.

Thanks!

Actually that seems to make more sense...


Wulf

 

[Bendris Noulg]

Can you have Advanced Technology or even simple technology advance from a high magic world?

Sure! Just ask He-Man and She-Ra.

 

[shadow]

In the campaign setting that I'm working on high magic and technology used to exist side by side. Thousands of years ago a "techno-magic" empire existed. They created really high tech machines that ran on magic. Airships, ornithopters, and other techno-magic devices were common. However, the empire was destroyed in a cataclysmic civil war, and now the techno-magic devices are rare artifacts for the PCs to discover.