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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 7055602" data-attributes="member: 6683613">I think you may be overinterpreting Clarke's aphorism. There's no guarantee in there that I can see, no promise that anything is possible. The functions of my smartphone would seem "magical" to an observer from 1917. He can probably guess with confidence that it's a product of human technology rather than sorcery -- heck, we can say he's H. G. Wells himself, has a utopian outlook that makes Clarke look like Harlan Ellison, and is ecstatic to see this evidence of the triumphal march of science into the future. But he'd have no idea how any of it worked. If in fact it were the product of sorcery and his optimism about science were misplaced, he would be none the wiser. It would thus be "indistinguishable from magic".And I think it's reasonable to believe that there will be some technologies from 2117 that would have this same effect on us. Not everything will be possible, of course, but there will probably be some possibilities that we can't imagine. Let's say we encounter a teleporter. We'd have no clue how they did it. It could be magic, and we wouldn't be able to tell. But it's probably a safe bet that's a product of science, because science has a pretty good track record for blowing our minds and expanding our possibilities, and magic as far as we know doesn't even exist. Or maybe there are no teleporters in 2117. Maybe teleporters are truly impossible. But if not a teleporter, there's probably still going to be something that amazes us. You raise the possibility of hitting a scientific ceiling, and to be sure, we can never know if we will someday, but it's probably not a mere century away.</blockquote>

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