Homo Habilis

[poliphilo]

I press a button. Morgan Freeman appears in front of me and says, "Shit". It's raining where he is. I press another button. He disappears.

I take this power for granted, but I don't have a clue how it works.

If our technology were to disappear tomorrow I wouldn't be able to do a thing to get it back. I don't even know how to smelt metal.

Maybe I'd have the wherewithal to go make myself a hand-axe, though I understand there's quite an art to knapping flint.

Left to my own devices I belong in the stone age- if that.

I have about as much aptitude for tool-making as a chimpanzee.

Comments

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

There's a quirky movie called Happy Accidents - it starts out as a typical wacky guy meets girl-who's-been-hurt-too-much romantic dramedy, but then the guy starts claiming he's from the future (and it's relatively well done so you're not sure until the end).

Anyway, okay movie, but it has one scene which I thought was absolutely great. The guy starts talking about time travel and one of the girl's friends, understandably skeptic but also drunk and obnoxious, says something like, "Oh yeah, well how does your time machine work?" The future guy says he doesn't know. "Well, how are we supposed to believe you if you can't even tell us how it works?" And then the future guy gets really angry and starts asking her friends to explain how cars work, and none of them can.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's nice.

I look round the room and it's full of stuff I don't understand. There's the computer, a quartz watch, a digital camera...

But it's not just the relatively sophisticated objects. Here's a plastic waste bin. Do I know how plastics are made? Of course not!