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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 7056385" data-attributes="member: 6683613">That is my basic thesis here, and if I'm not mistaken, it seems to be  [MENTION=6799753]lowkey13[/MENTION]'s as well.In this case, the interpretation is actually a direct contradiction of the law.Are you just objecting to the prevalence of the trope that psi is a real and scientifically masterable phenomenon? I mean, yes, I agree with you, that's factually incorrect, and it can sometimes be annoying when it's taken for granted in hard SF. And yes, there is a functioning ouija board in Childhood's End. But I really don't think that the Third Law is referring to psi at all. Psi is seldom described as a "technology", just for starters. Insofar as psi appears too much in SF, that's not an application or even a misapplication of the Third Law -- it's something else entirely. Now, if we were talking about stuff like brain-implanted telephones imitating telepathy and voice-activated computers imitating invocations, that would be the Third Law in action. But seeing as how we can say "Siri, what's the weather forecast?" right now, I can't agree that these possibilities are so implausible as to make the Law objectionable.I'm getting a "no true Scotsman" vibe off of your approach to magic. Which is strange, since we both agree that there is no such thing as "true magic" at all. I fundamentally disagree with you: magic is anything you don't understand. As I said, we can easily imagine that my smart phone is the product of sorcery if we don't have the scientific context to know how it works, even though it doesn't behave particularly sympathetically.You will note that I compared 1917 to 2017 to 2117. If you actually bother to graph the line, it is linear.Yes, we're about to hit a ceiling on the power of integrated circuits due to physical limitations -- if they get much smaller, they're going to draw too much power per square millimeter and start melting themselves. However, we also know that the human brain can do its thing on just 20ish watts of power. This is one area where we know that the current physical limitation on our technology is not a hard ceiling on what is possible.Again, you're giving off the impression that you're really just complaining about psi, and again, I don't think Clarke's Third Law is about psi at all.</blockquote>

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