These people built the first cities, they developed agriculture, they developed arithmetic, they did things that to this day we don't fully understand how they did it--building triremes, building Stonehenge. The most astonishing of all is that they didn't do it with flying saucers or nonsense like that.

They just were fuckin' clever and very determined.

But what I am saying is that beyond general concepts or just showing or teaching them how it works, a daydreaming tribal person 10,000 years ago, who had never seen the modern world, couldn't dream up a detailed description of our world, especially as something as unexpected as e-mail spam. There are just too many details and conceptual hurdles to cross for imagination alone. Magic can be dreamed up easily. It's the details that are the sticking point.

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