Turned on the tube for some background noise only to find some UFO show. They were cranking out the same nonsense about how the United States was able to advance technology thanks to reverse engineering the flying saucer that crashed in Roswell in 1947. Their leadoff claim was that stealth technology came out of nowhere in the 1980’s. Of course, in the real world stealth technology was developed over decades; even as classified as it is, the evolution of the designs and technologies can be seen (for example the 1961 Boeing “Quiet Bird” stealth concept).
But there’s one thing that seems like it should be obvious, but apparently isn’t. OK, so let’s say an alien spacecraft crashed in 1947. Right now as I write this in the early 21st century, we have *nothing* like the technology needed to build and operate FTL scout ships of our own. Such a device would be far in advance of what we have in 2019, never mind 1947. Still, the technology we *do* have in 2019 would seem fantastically advanced in 1947. Tech such as a smart phone – the microchips within it would be astonishingly advanced in 1947. So… let’s say you dropped a supply of 2019 advanced tech in 1947 and told the boys at Wright-Pat “have at it.” Would they have the first clue *how* to reverse engineer a smart phone? Is there anything in one of those things that they would have the ability to understand in order to use them to invent transisters or lasers or whatever the frak these UFO nuts think we reverse engineered?
I doubt it. The technology did not exist in 1947 to allow the best minds on the planet to even analyze modern technology, never mind reverse engineer it. And we’re supposed to believe that these same mooks somehow figured out how to analyze a computer that would have been at home onboard the Starship Enterprise?
We will soon see commercial devices that use graphene sheets in their construction… batteries, capacitors, display screens using single-molecule-thick sheets of this special form of carbon. 1947 would have been damned lucky to even *detect* the microscopically thin layer of carbon, and even if they did, they would not understand what form it took, and would certainly be unable to duplicate it.
A lot of modern technology is so fabulouly microscopic that the simple act of trying to measure it will destroy it. Why should alien technology centuries in advance of *now* be any different? Hell, for all I know the 2060 equivalent of the smart phone – assuming there’s still a handheld variant, and they’re not all just nanowires that are grown directly into your cerebral cortex – will be a rectangular slab of quartz 1 centimeter by 4 by 9. It will appear to be a simple perfect rectangular solid. Every form of analysis we have today will show that it it composed of nothing but pure SiO4, and yet it can do amazing things and seems to have an inexhaustible power supply. We in 2019 simply would not have the technology to understand that what makes it work is the differential gravity wave displacement process that uses slightly greasy solar atoms guided by a detrion-based dark matter tachyon beam to preferentially quoodwrangle the individual silicon atoms into specific spacetime sub-domains while simultaneous quantum entangling all of the oxygen atoms to a single synthetic offsite master atom. How would we expect people who think that mechanical watches are the bees knees to figure that crap out? How the frak would they take that sort of technology and derive *transistors* from it?
Gah.