• Dharma Curious (he/him)@slrpnk.net
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    16 days ago

    Said it before and I’ll say it again: just because you understand the magic doesn’t make it any less magical. A wizard may know the ins and outs of their spells, but they’re still spells. Our entire universal is fucking magical, we just happen to have a decent understanding of why (some) of it functions the way it does. Jiggle a quark here and another may jiggle the same way somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, that’s fucking wild and magical and incredible, and just because we have some level of understanding behind the mechanics doesn’t make it not magic. It just makes it a hard magic system.

  • marcos@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    It’s chemicals that make signals jump between neurons in your head. Electricity acts entirely withing single neurons.

    Also, that’s a control spell, not a summoning one.

    • TheBeege@lemmy.world
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      15 days ago

      I was really hoping someone would catch this. I’m glad someone else was also paying attention in biology

    • TimewornTraveler@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      15 days ago

      that’s crazy to think about. which NT is responsible for sending a signal along my vagus nerve to my brain? what NTs regulate the functions of the sympathetic nervous system? how can transport as quickly as my body reacts? I need to know more!

      how quickly do NTs even travel? it feels like electricity because it’s nearly instantaneous! how do they do that so fast???

      • marcos@lemmy.world
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        15 days ago

        it feels like electricity because it’s nearly instantaneous!

        It takes hundreds of ms for a signal to go from your brain to your foot. Electricity on wires travels several times around the world in that time.

        But for most of the distance the signals do travel as electricity. (At least the ones that get to be electricity, our brain has several kinds of signals.) It’s just a particularly slow form of electricity.

    • bss03@infosec.pub
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      15 days ago

      Clarke’s Maxim: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

      Corollary / Contrapositive: Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.

    • piranhaconda@mander.xyz
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      15 days ago

      I mean, yea. The people designing the AC to DC power supplies often don’t care what you use them for, why would they bother putting schematics for a real load on their diagram?

    • socsa@piefed.social
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      15 days ago

      That’s not a resistor it’s actually a BIG LOAD. The diagram would better show it as a reactive load (usually just a rectangle) since most real loads are reactive. Get it?

      • vithigar@lemmy.ca
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        15 days ago

        It’s a basic AC rectifier, the resistor represents an arbitrary DC load. You use similar circuits all the time, though generally with additional failsafes and some mechanism of smoothing out the rectified current.

    • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz
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      15 days ago

      While it helps the ritual it isn’t strictly required, so it can be easier for an apprentice to achieve.

  • BlueKey@fedia.io
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    16 days ago

    The mages of Electrical Engineering reseach the tools and formulars to control the magic. The mages of Hardware Engineering develop under great effort the sigils and rituals of how the rocks must be processed. The Warlocks of the CPU use the near infinit possibilities of algorithms and the power of the evolved rocks to create worlds nobody could ever have imagined (in exchange for the ability to go outside).

  • bss03@infosec.pub
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    16 days ago

    When we figure out how to manipulate elctro-weak at scale, it will be magic.

    Electro-mag is pretty crazy already, I agree. The ICP can’t even figure out how they work.

      • bss03@infosec.pub
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        16 days ago

        When the environment is energetic enough, the electromagnetic force and the weak force unify into the electroweak force. The weak interaction controls radioactive decay.

        We can control electromagnetic force “at scale”, IMO. It’s not freely, but we have networks of electromagnetic systems that span continents.

        If we could control the weak force at the same scale… I’m not sure what wonders we might unlock. At the very least, I imagine we could “clean” instead of just “contain” radioactive waste, at least low-level stuff.

        • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
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          15 days ago

          If we had control over the weak force:

          • We can likely turn elements into other elements at will
          • We can manufacture safe decay sources for a new class of nuclear energy
          • We can probably create safe “decay batteries” tuned to their specific use cases. Batteries that last for tens of thousands the lifespan of current chemical ones.
          • Potentially engineer with neutrinos. Imagine communication via neutrinos, you could transmit straight through the earth.

          I mean, with control over matter like that, at the scale of electricity, Star Trek matter replicators would be a thing.