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 ...)
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.