The Clarke Axiom — named after the guy who coined it, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke — is well-known to geeks:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
You may remember seeing the Clarke Axiom mentioned on this blog before. I quoted Maciej Ceglowski, who remixed it to become:
Any sufficiently advanced society is indistinguishable from Canada.
(I can already hear the whining coming from the bloggers at the Western Standard. All I can say to those folks is: if you take your meds, the voices will stop.)
I don’t know how I ended up looking at a page in Everything2 (imagine a less academic Wikipedia written by LiveJournalers), but someone has come up with a geek lament treatment of the Clarke Axiom:
Any sufficiently nice person is indistinguishable from someone who likes you.
Bonus bragging point: This blog is currently the number one Google result for the phrase “Clarke Axiom”.
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I've always enjoyed some of the variations on the phrase (no sources, sorry, but they're not mine):
"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
and one for the archaeology geeks:
"Any sufficiently ancient technology is indistinguishable from magic."
The newbie Montrealer is eating too much poutine, I think. In a couple years he'll be off to his next country and bashing Canada, I'm sure, leaving behind another ex.
As for any sufficiently advanced society being indistiguishable from Canada, we have been in Helsinki for 3 days and we already call it Europe's Canada.
Which may not be very exact, but makes us laugh.
J.-
If we ask nice will the Canadians come fix the USA?
This is from a Charles Sheffield book "Transcendence" - should get some credit, methinks.
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