Cosmic Appalachia

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Occasionally I wish that just one truly magical thing were real: flying carpets or wishing rings or alchemy or fairy dust. But then I realize that if that were the case these things would also become ordinary, because that’s what humans do: we take extraordinary things and make them commonplace and boring. I mean, we have chemiluminescent plankton, wild horses running unaffected through Chernobyl, hunks of wood somehow fashioned into complicated stringed instruments, not to mention the complex sequence of biochemical and electrical processes that allow me to enjoy these things, express them in a language you can understand, and then type my thoughts onto a palm-sized tablet, which will then broadcast them through a wireless, invisible network of harnessed photons. All this in addition to auroras, motion pictures, water falling from the sky, the germ-killing mold that can make a sick person well again in a matter of days. These things are ordinary and unmagical because we’ve said that they are. But to quote the great Terry Pratchett, knowing how something is done doesn’t make it not magic. I mean, seriously people. I just waved a “Magic Wand” (it is called that) over a 70-year-old letter from Italy, and it created an image of that letter made up of 1s and 0s on a disc the size of my pinky nail, which I could then upload and share instantly via that stream of harnessed photons. How is that not magic? Also, consider the photo above: One of my friends couldn’t be at a party because she was literally 2,000 miles away.  She was still able to attend via a screen carrying her voice and image nearly instantly across that distance in a cloud of data that somehow didn’t get lost in the upper atmosphere.  How is that not a crystal ball, or a scrying pool? I don’t care what you say: that’s magic; that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Occasionally I wish that just one truly magical thing were real: flying carpets or wishing rings or alchemy or fairy dust. But then I realize that if that were the case these things would also become ordinary, because that’s what humans do: we take extraordinary things and make them commonplace and boring.


I mean, we have chemiluminescent plankton, wild horses running unaffected through Chernobyl, hunks of wood somehow fashioned into complicated stringed instruments, not to mention the complex sequence of biochemical and electrical processes that allow me to enjoy these things, express them in a language you can understand, and then type my thoughts onto a palm-sized tablet, which will then broadcast them through a wireless, invisible network of harnessed photons. All this in addition to auroras, motion pictures, water falling from the sky, the germ-killing mold that can make a sick person well again in a matter of days. These things are ordinary and unmagical because we’ve said that they are. But to quote the great Terry Pratchett, knowing how something is done doesn’t make it not magic.

I mean, seriously people. I just waved a “Magic Wand” (it is called that) over a 70-year-old letter from Italy, and it created an image of that letter made up of 1s and 0s on a disc the size of my pinky nail, which I could then upload and share instantly via that stream of harnessed photons. How is that not magic?


Also, consider the photo above: One of my friends couldn’t be at a party because she was literally 2,000 miles away.  She was still able to attend via a screen carrying her voice and image nearly instantly across that distance in a cloud of data that somehow didn’t get lost in the upper atmosphere.  How is that not a crystal ball, or a scrying pool? I don’t care what you say: that’s magic; that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Filed under personal magic actual science hand-wavy science nerdiness creative writing nonfiction

  1. blackchaps said: Very true. The other day, my 12 year old had to wait, like, three seconds for a page to load and started whining, and I said, “Give it a minute, it has to bounce off a satellite.” She just stared! lolz
  2. featherloom posted this