We all know the effects Ahkmenrah's tablet has on exhibits: it brings them to life every night, and the exhibits turn to dust if they wander outside the temple/museum and don't get back inside in time. We know the effects the tablet has on human beings: it gives them renewed energy and, for want of a better word, "superpowers". It makes old guys who should have retired feel like they're twenty again, and they don't feel all the pains of their age.
But what would knowledge of the tablet's effects have on greater American or even global society?
This question will be answered by categories: governmental response, public response, scientific response, and conspiracy theory response. None of the categories are mutually exclusive, and each affects all of the others in varying capacities. For example, governmental response affects public, scientific, and conspiracy theory response just as scientific response affects governmental response which then affects public and conspiracy theory response. However, the effects are not quite easy to predict. Governmental response may be to repress knowledge, which will enrage the public rather than keeping them quiet as the government intends. Conspiracy theorists will, as a result, be on fire, and the scientific community will at the very least get curious. So you see, each piece is interrelated, though distinct and wildly variable as each reacts to others.
Having said all that, let's begin.
Governmental Response
When it comes to a magical object which can change the course of human life anywhere on the planet at any given time, or even globally all at once just because knowledge of its existence has gotten out, the government (US, because this is where the tablet "lives" now, whatever Egyptian government happens to exist at the moment, because that's where the tablet "lived", or anywhere else) or a collection of governments, may respond in a variety of ways and will likely come into conflict with each other over this. To prevent the public from rioting or crime from going up as people try ever more creative means to steal the tablet, the US government may try to keep it a secret, which will only have the opposite effect in certain spheres. The general public will want to know why it's so special that the government has to have SWAT teams posted around the Museum of Natural History in New York 24-7, McPhee and other museum employees will especially be royally pissed off because its their jobs being interfered with, and conspiracy theorists will go nuts speculationg on why the tablet needs to be so highly protected in the first place.
Or, the US may decide its main concern is not protecting the tablet from its own people, but making sure it doesn't get into the hands of hostile powers. In the age of global information via the Internet, this could be any other nation at any given time, anywhere in the world. Or it could be a group of people organized around the sole goal of getting their hands on the tablet to use to their own ends. Or it could be a combination of those two. This ups US surveillance of, well, everyone, which will also get the public riled up, but in this scenario, it's considerably more likely that they will eventually know why the tablet needs such protection.
Or there could be a global response to the tablet's existence, resulting in summits where every world leader in life tries to sort out some sort of arrangement where the tablet can exist in relative safety where it belongs (hopefully they decide this is with its owner, Ahkmenrah) and the people know about its powers and limitations, and people are allowed to study it and write research papers on it and do presentations on it for their dissertation defenses and school projects. This is a very idealistic scenario but it could very well happen, depending on which people are in power where in the world.
Perhaps the most realistic way for world governments to respond to knowledge of the tablet's existence is all three of these. At first they decide it's dangerous for the public to know about the tablet's power, even though chances are they will already, but after their scientists have done work on it, they decide to let everyone know about it but to protect it from other world powers while ambassadors and other diplomats work to arrange a series of meetings to get to the idealist scenario where the tablet is still safe but people are allowed to know about it and examine it and tweet about it to all their buddies. Projected timeline: several years to a decade.
Public Response
Society at large, once word of the tablet's magical abilities gets out, will be thrown into chaos. First there is the general idea that magic is real. Second, what does its existence say about world religions and the people who adhere to them? What conflict, moral or otherwise, will that place everyone in? Third, if magic is real and God or gods exist, what does that do to the educational system, especially in the US with the heavy focus on evolution over creationism? What will this do to the way students learn world history, especially ancient world history? There are thousands of other ways society will be deeply shocked to its core by the existence of the tablet and its powers, but those are the biggest three.
Real Magic
The knowledge that magic is real and can be seen and experienced affects everyone, from scientists to clergy to laypeople to pretty much everyone involved in insert Pagan faith here. At least in the US we aren't trained to believe that magic is real. It's something we associate with childhood imagination, that we will eventually grow out of in favor of college, jobs, careers, getting married, and having kids of our own. Or partying, girls, etc. The deep, profound shock of actual magic, in an actual place, which operates on specific and well-defined rules, would be the first and basest thing to tear our society asunder, and it leads into the two other big fracturing points.
Religion
So far as I understand (so please correct me in the comments if I'm wrong), western monotheistic religion stresses magic as evil and something belonging to the realm of the devil. People who adhere to western monotheistic religions may decide never to patronize the Museum of Natural History again, or any other museum, for that matter, fearing that every museum around the world has a magical artifact that does something cool. People may also end up going on long soul searching missions trying to find themselves as the world falls apart around them. And the world will fall apart around them. Chances are good that the Catholic Church won't take too kindly to some random magic thing being allowed to exist within its realm while its people are carrying out the work of saving souls from eternal damnation, and that's to say nothing of Fundamentalist Christians, radical Islamists, or Fundamentalist/Radical anything, for that matter.
But the basis of these religions will be rocked to their cores. What are they supposed to do in a world where it's essentially been clearly proven that the Egyptian gods are real forces to be reckoned with, and the Egyptian underworld exists? There is no similar evidence for God, Heaven, Hell, Allah, etc. in this universe, which begs the question, are these entities and places not real? What this sort of pondering will essentially trigger a large-scale dark night of the soul. While millions of people are trying to find their own paths in a world where Egyptian magic is real, church structure is struggling to deal with how that reality and their teachings can or should coexist in such a world, whether everything they know and do is wrong in some way, and what it means to have an afterlife realm which people can freely traverse back and forth from and into which people can be tossed to unknown fates, a realm of unknown geography and populated by unimaginable creatures.
Religious centers are among the great forces behind a sense of community, and the collapse of like religiousness means the collapse, or partial collapse, of any sense of community, a contributing factor in the potential societal collapse caused by knowledge of the tablet and its magical powers.
Education
Children are generally taught two basic concepts in school (besides sharing, letters, numbers, and all that): the first is that the earth is billions of years old and life evolved, and the second (this especially comes in through historical and scientific education) is that magic doesn't really exist. It's all in their heads when they play princesses and dragons. The tablet's abilities have no direct effect on living things springing out of nowhere (so far as we know), but they do allow for extinct organisms to be resurrected, which will add to the learning experience of the child who reads about wholly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers in books but knows (sadly or otherwise) that he can't actually have physical contact with one. Except when he goes to the Museum of Natural History at night, he can.
The process of children learning that magic doesn't really exist is a long one which begins when our parents joke about how great our imaginations are to all their grown-up friends while we talk to pirates and rattlesnakes and real life princesses who only we can see. Then we go to school and we meet real people, and we learn how to be around real people. Or we've had siblings and we may never have imaginary friends in our lives. As we go through school, however, we become trained in the scientific way of thinking, which is in essence, "If I can't see it, touch it, smell it, taste it, or hear it, or if I can't measure it in any way, then I have to question whether or not this exists". Then we get to college, and according to some studies by this point all the creativity has been leeched out of us by the system.
But what we also learn, rather specifically, is that the ancient Egyptians did not curse anyone, or their curses didn't work, and whatever happened with the people who dug up King Tut is really just a gruesome series of coincidences. As soon as it gets out that ancient Egyptian magic specifically is very, very real, then this throws several questions into the face of the modern educational system: What does this make science? Was it really a curse which leveled the excavation team of Tutankhamun's tomb? More generally, do curses really work? And there is a question for the entire academic community out there, as well: What do the tablet and the gate tell us about ancient Egyptian history, myth, and religion? The very idea that the Egyptians may have been on to something is a guaranteed learning experience for everyone with even a milligram of interest in the matter.
Scientific Response
A more specific subset of general public response to the revelation of the tablet's magical powers is the response of the scientific community. Speaking as a science major and someone who wants to be a researcher for the rest of my life, I can say that if a comparable event happened in real life, I'd want to know about it. I'd want to know details, facts, ins and outs, rules, I'd want to see it in action. In short, I'd want to study the dang thing. What does it do? What is it infused with that gives it magical powers? How does the magic work? What makes it work? These are all questions a scientific mind would have ready to ask and desperate to answer.
There are about as many types of scientists as there are types of things to study, so there will be just as many approaches to the tablet. Some will want to study molecular forces and "God particles" (so to speak), while others would think more big picture, observing the cycles the tablet goes through and taking notes when someone breaks its rules (which will require the museum to put up a sacrifice, or some anecdotal evidence from Larry or one of the exhibits), and yet others will study the way the tablet affects society at large. There will be physicians who'll want to study Larry and the three old night guards who interact(ed) with it on a nightly basis. There will be archaeologists, paleontologists, geologists, all swarming the museum just trying to get answers: to Ahkmenrah, to Rexy and the mammoths, to the whales and tree life and African mammals, everything. Every science imaginable, there will be people crowding the museum wanting to study what the hell is going on.
But that creates a problem: who studies what, when, and where? If scientists from the government are involved, then they've got the guys with the guns to back them up when they call first dibs and try to discern whether the thing is safe to allow around the general public or not. That is, of course, their main goal, or it should be. The government's job is to protect its people, after all. But after the government scientists clear out, there will probably be a lot of debate within the scientific community about the actual logistics of studying the tablet. Again, there is an idealistic response: the community at large forms interdisciplinary teams small enough to manage yet large enough to get done everything that needs to get done, which go in in cycles studying the tablet in its various aspects, and at the end of it, they compile their reports within their disciplines and present all their findings to the rest of the community, ready to engage in discussion.
That is idealistic, but it still seems more likely (at least to me) than the idealistic governmental response.
Conspiracy Theory Response
Here's where things get interesting. Conspiracy theorists come up with crazy explanations for everything under the sun; in their world, everything is a result of Free Masons, aliens, insert other secret society here, or any combination thereof, and it's all for some sort of grand plan to take over the world. And for every conspiracy theorist, there are five theories for everything. So there are nearly infinite possibilities for conspiracy theory response to the revelation that the tablet actually has powers. You'll have people claiming that it's really, really advanced technology passing as magic which aliens are using to take over the world, you'll have people claiming the same thing except the aliens want to help humanity. You'll have people claiming a secret sect descending from ancient Egyptian times knew the whole time about the tablet and are really supposed to be the guards of the thing (and a subset of these, you'll have people claiming to be members of this sect trying to apply for jobs at the Museum of Natural History). You'll have people claiming there is a society opposing the first sect, also descended from ancient Egyptian times, trying to obtain the tablet for themselves and use its power to take over the world, placing the night guards and even Larry and McPhee under suspicion by some of these people.
And I haven't even touched the tip of the ice burg when it comes to conspiracy theories that could start swirling around the tablet should its secret ever get out and seep into society. And in the initial reaction period, these theories will swirl around like mad and be at their most varied and insane-sounding. Only after time goes on and more information about the tablet gets out will the theories calm down and be discredited in relative peace. They're like Twilight vampires that way, ferocious newborns who eventually grow into tame(r) older vampires.
This is the subset of general public response, though, which will enlighten sociologists and others in the humanities the most about what people truly are willing to come up with and buy into in times of extreme social crisis.
There are certain subsets of response which don't quite fall into the above categories, which are as follows: many Pagans may or may not feel smug pride that goes along with "I told you so" when the world at large is faced with the reality of magic. Some overly religious people may march on the museum demanding the release of the tablet into their possession to be properly destroyed so the devil can stop doing his work and they can get back to saving souls (or they'll destroy everything even remotely connected to the tablet for that same goal). We may have people fleeing the country in terror of some form of coming apocalypse. We may have people coming to the museum like it's a religious pilgrimage in search of personal truth/healing/whathaveyou. We may have the Ancient Aliens guys trying to prove that the tablet is aliens (though I use the term "prove" loosely anymore in relation to Ancient Aliens). Egyptologists especially will go nuts. As I said, the most likely response for society to take in response to the reality of the tablet's existence and power is near complete breakdown. And then the real question is, how will we put ourselves back together again?
Next on "For the Love of Night at the Museum": A specific subset concerning the upcoming NATM 3: the two new Egyptian characters on deck and their relation to Ahkmenrah (who is in NATM 3, if you haven't been following my fanspazzing over the pics coming out) and by association to Kahmunrah, as well.
Countdown: 320 Days to NATM 3
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