• Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I have a recurring fantasy of visiting my favorite physics professor in the 1970s and showing him a modern smartphone. He showed me how to use integrated circuits, when microprocessors were a very new thing and we were mostly just making LEDs blink.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Came to say cell phone. Even as recently as the early 90s, no one on Earth had tech that was close. It would be plenty understandable by extrapolating current tech, but no one would believe it was a contemporary device.

      • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Yep exactly. Many people in 1975 might have thought a smartphone was some kind of trick, but the professor I’m thinking of was very familiar with digital electronics and would know it was absolutely impossible to build such a thing at that time. I would really love to tell him all about the Internet etc. And of course when to sell his house and buy Microsoft stock lol.

  • kelpie_is_trying@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Generator. Television. PS2. Cowboy Bebop on DVD.

    Idk if it would work at all, but TANK is such a good fucking song, and I hope they enjoy at least that much before burning me for witchcraft.

  • whotookkarl@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I’d want something that can help people and can be tested and has an immediate, dramatic effect to make it undeniable

    Maybe insulin? You could literally bring comatose people back from the brink of death in minutes

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Wouldn’t anyone needing insulin already be dead? Or is there a middle ground where a diabetic can go in and out of shock, yet survive without?

      • whotookkarl@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        They would survive for awhile after diagnosis on a starvation diet, maybe weeks, and slipping in and out of a coma but it was a death sentence. There’s stories from the 1920’s when whole wards of kids were hit with a first dose that removed the symptoms in minutes. I can’t imagine being in that room when all that despair and anguish turned into hope and relief.