The price of a satellite phone in 1650 was greater than all the money in the world combined, so that has to be considered expensive in absolute terms, right?
A satellite phone in the 1600s would useless other than the novelty of owning one to just look at it and play with it. The battery is dead shortly after it arrives, there's no one else to talk to, and there's no infrastructure to do anything with it. The level of technology is beyond what any 1600s scientists have even dreamed about. Maybe there are a few things inside that could improve science. A lithium battery is not that complex so perhaps scientists of the time would have been able to see it for what it is and move up the invention of batteries by about 200 years. Plastics in the phone would be interesting but without petrochemical developments, it would have been totally unknown. Overall, the phone would have a fascinating collection of rare and unknown materials.
It would be like if I gave you a car and told you to build another from scratch with a gift of unlimited money to make it happen. You could use existing knowledge resources to build crude tools to build more sophisticated tools that would eventually produce the parts for a car. But without that existing supply of knowledge, how would you do it? You would need to invent all the tools yourself to produce something as simple as an engine block. You'd be looking at the end result of 200 years of the industrial revolution without any idea of what happened in between.
Not like much would change, but this would be funny: Let's "up" the ante and make it two phones, using point-to-point ad-hoc voice connection to each other, with a battery life of a week.-
That would be quite the "footnote" somewhere ...
PS. I hate to "underestimate" our forebears, but ... at what point would they just throw their hands up in the air and start screaming "witchcraft!" burning the lot, phone samples and all, at the stake?
> Let's "up" the ante and make it two phones, using point-to-point ad-hoc voice connection to each other, with a battery life of a week
To make it truly interesting you'd have to add a geostationary relay satellite and e.g. solar recharging, to make the device useful for up to a lifetime. At this point, we have a military communications device of obvious value. (Presuming you get to a non-idiot.)
British GDP (the highest in the world under a single state) was about $10.7bn in 1700 in 1960 dollars PPP [1] or about $113bn today [2]. At its height, in the 16th century, Britain spent about 10% of its GDP on its military [2]. So the price for a working pair of satellite phones is reasonably capped around $11bn in today's money. Of course, having a pair of satellite phones and no military isn't helpful, so in practice we'd likely see a top price equal to no more than $1 to 2bn today.
At which point one asks what size army one could raise to steal your satellite phones with a fraction of that money.
> add a geostationary relay satellite and e.g. solar recharging
That would indeed be something.-
Had originally limited battery to a week in the thought experiment as I was curious about what would happen after they became mere "inert" objects.-
(Image the Pope being summoned - and a church Council being called for and the device suddenly ceasing to work - with hundreds claiming it once did ...)
The price is undefined because there is no conception of the object and therefore no market.
If the idea of a phone - a computing/telecommunication device that use natural philosophy and not magic - were presented then an initial price can begin to be formed, defined as the amount of money they are willing to spend to develop it.
> Is the price of an impossible (or, period-impossible) object a knowable quantity, economically speaking?
Yes. We estimate what someone in that world would pay for it. A satellite phone in a world without satellites, electricity or other satellite phones is at best a novelty. So we'd look to rates paid by kings and collectors for similar antiquities.
The prices of many of the "parts" were already known on that day. Perhaps most notably wireless service. This would have allowed at least a ballpark estimate for what people would be willing to pay.
The iPhone wasn't the first cell phone and wasn't the first smartphone either. One could assume that it would cost at least as much as a brand new Blackberry or Windows Mobile phone since not only was it Apple but it has features that no one else had at the time. Of course it still had to be affordable if Apple wanted it to sell well so people had some idea of what wouldn't be reasonable for what a smartphone should cost.
PS. In a bit, like the weather? The further from the present you go, the "harder" it gets to solve for that?
That said, when approaching (or, surpassing) some "imposibility boundary" - for more an more parts to actually exist, ultimately leading to the whole being impossible ...
I think that's true. If you described an early personal computer and its capabilities (including software) in 1970, sure, a lot of people would be "Why would I want that?" But both business people and individuals could probably give some reasonable approximation of what they'd be willing to pay.
The thing with something like a phone is that it's so dependent on several different network effects that it's hard to put a real value on it in isolation. Of course, for an individual device, there's very much an upper limit. I suspect that a lot of people in 1970 would balk at the price of an iPhone but then they had other telecoms charges that would seem extortionate today.
I have a copy of an old humorous computer article in a book to the effect of things that people thought they'd want computers for and how they didn't really play out (given the tech at the time).
Yeah, agreed, an iPhone or really most computers is a difficult comparison to make for this sort of thing. I mean, what is an iPhone anyway? It relies on a lot of infrastructure that wouldn’t be available in the 70’s: the modern internet, the apple App Store, usb chargers, a way to write and compile iOS programs and get it to run them, the first and third party programming ecosystem.
It seems like a nitpick but the value proposition of the thing is very dependent on the ability of all those, I’m sure we all have some intuition of which ought to be included, but it might not match.
An iPhone with all those things would probably be extremely valuable I guess. Thousands of times faster than the fastest supercomputer and a bit easier to carry.
The Blackberry was initially mostly of interest to "important people" whose organizations were paying for easier texting and email on the go. I did eventually get a Treo in 2006 on my own mostly because I was doing some travel on crutches and didn't want to carry a laptop. But the iPhone--especially by a few years post-2007 introduction--was really transformational for a lot of people in the mainstream. But, as you say, that was dependent on a lot of things that weren't inherent in the phone hardware.
Mobile communications for the most part was very much a premium early adopter phenomenon for people who really needed it in some form and/or didn't much care about the cost. Satellite was like that and is only now slowly changing.
It would actually be extremely cheap, since it would last only 1 charge (if it came pre-charged), no connectivity, no way to export anything it does (not even print a photo).
After 24h literally more useless than a rock as a phone wouldn't even work as a thing to bang other things on.
If it did happen to have a solar charger, still pretty useless, except for the camera (if available).
