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Comment by rudolfwinestock | Hacker News Reader

That reminds me of a story which I read in Ray Bradbury's collection, _The Illustrated Man_.

The captain of a rocketship (that's the word used) is obsessed with finding a supposed miracle-worker. They land on a planet where the locals tell them of a man who healed a child's broken arm with just a touch. The captain demands evidence and is presented with a painting of the child with a cast around his arm. The captain derides the painting, saying that it could be fake, whereupon his next-in-command points out "Photography is an unknown art on this world."

That's right. They have faster-than-light space travel, but image manipulation is unthinkable.

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>They have faster-than-light space travel, but image manipulation is unthinkable.

See "The Road Not Taken" by Harry Turtledove, where the idea is that humans developed advanced technology only because they failed to figure out the trick for easy FTL travel.

That story's a bit "ehh" for me, not least of which in the way that it posits war of any sort without corresponding technological improvement. The opportunity to shoot new and exotic people has never stopped people from inventing new and exotic ways to shoot those new and exotic people.

It actually has, it’s often cited how long the Chinese had gun powder, but the Europeans perfected its use in war (so the analysis purports).

Wait, who said the locals have "faster-than-light space travel"?

We only know that the visitors on the rocket-ship have it.

It could very well be that the visitors have a rocketship (ie. faster-than-light space travel) and "Photography" (since the next-in-command mentioned it), but the locals don't have either.

I think the parent meant that the visitors think that a photograph can't be manipulated and is thus a perfect record. Today of course editing photos is commonplace.

But they are shown a painting which is pretty obviously just whatever the person creating it wanted it to be, nobody would ever accept it as a perfect record of reality. I don't understand how photography comes into things?

I'm not familiar with the story, but this is what I take from the comment above:

* captain arrives in FTL ship looking for evidence of a thing

* captain isn't satisfied with a painting offered as evidence, because it could be fake

* aide says that photography is unknown to the natives, implying that the production of a photograph would be taken by the captain as having more evidentiary value

=> captain knows about FTL but is unfamiliar with the technology required to produce false but convincing photographic images

Ah, makes more sense. Of course, 'captain knows about FTL' is not necessarily a given, much like 'driver knows about internal combustion engine' for cars - he may just be pressing buttons randomly (cf. the Heechee series by Frederick Pohl[0]) for instance.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heechee

Well, even today that we know Photoshop, a photograph still has more evidentiary value than a painting (which has absolutely none), so there's that...

Of course if it's a FTL ship photographs themselves can't really have any evidentiary value...

Can you travel faster than a photon without knowing how to capture a photon? I love the idea. Maybe CCDs just have a different cultural significance for them.

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