If we had alien technology....

[ydoaPs]

If an alien ship crashed in the 1940s and the military recovered it, why is the military technology so far behind(all you have to do to see how ancient military tech is is look at the computers on the latest and greatest aircraft carrier)? Surely in the past 70+ years we'd have been able to reverse-engineer something.

[Moontanman]

Some say a lot of what we have now come from reverse engineered alien technology and or that much of it was and still is beyond our keen. It's a very frustrating thing to discuss since by definition there is little or no real evidence to look at.

[AngryTurtle]

hard to reverse engineer things made out of self healing super metal

[ajb]

What about the The Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit, Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk and the Lockheed Martin/Boeing F-22 Raptor? All built from alien technology.

 

[Phi for All]

There's only so much you can do tactically with Velcro.

[insane_alien]

There's only so much you can do tactically with Velcro.

 

for everything else there's duct tape.

[Phi for All]

for everything else there's duct tape.

Which came originally from Atlantis, not offworld. It was only when the Atlantians discovered Super Glue that their continent sunk.

[vordhosbn]

At least in the field of computers, latest tech is not always best tech. Military grade software must be most importantly reliable, GUI and excess computational power are not needed.

[mooeypoo]

At least in the field of computers, latest tech is not always best tech. Military grade software must be most importantly reliable, GUI and excess computational power are not needed.

Also, armies - as well as governments - are beaurocratical machines. It takes forever to change equipment, let alone switch software and train the technicians and workforce, sort out the money to pay for new software, etc.

[ydoaPs]

What about the The Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit?

 

You're right. Northrop Grumman isn't capable of that kind of technology TODAY, let alone when teh B-2 was designed/built. Oh, how I hate them.

Military grade software must be most importantly reliable

Tell that to the military who is currently on XP

[Phi for All]

Tell that to the military who is currently on XP

Isn't the Pentagon using WTF?

[Sisyphus]

Please, the U.S. military's IT department is totally awesome.

[Phi for All]

Please, the U.S. military's IT department is totally awesome.

Oh, that's right, they're only using WTF? for accounting.

[greenprogrammin]

If an alien ship crashed in the 1940s and the military recovered it, why is the military technology so far behind(all you have to do to see how ancient military tech is is look at the computers on the latest and greatest aircraft carrier)? Surely in the past 70+ years we'd have been able to reverse-engineer something.

 

Sorry no alien ships or organisms to reverse engineer except our own.

 

We have developed communities that adapt and evolve in cyber space. I believe this to be alien to the physical world. hehe

Edited January 8, 2010 by greenprogrammin

[tomgwyther]

I personally worked on the alien ship that crashed. all the technology was rubbish, except for a computerised version of table tennis, which I sold to Atari a few years later. Nothing else worth salvaging unfortunately.

The military wouldn't have known what to do with any of it anyway, they're not that intelligent; this is an organisation which took over 600 years to invent camouflage for goodness sake!

[Tau Meson]

I don't think we would be able to do anything with it if we did recover any alien technology, other than to guess at where it came from and how old it is. To reverse engineer alien technology would be quite like the Romans trying to reverse engineer a computer; it is only possible if you already have the theory and materials to do so.

 

So, even if there really was an alien landing at Roswell, I don't think there is much we can do with the ship itself. It could take centuries minimum to do anything with it.

[insane_alien]

i seriously doubt that ALL the technology onboard a spacecraft is going to be so far in advance of our own.

 

sure, there will be a bunch of stuff that is just beyond our understanding for the moment but it would surprise me if there wasn't some stuff that was only a short leap in understanding probably even some stuff that is only in the theoretical stages just now but hasn't been realised technologically.

 

while some stuff will be like romans trying to reverse engineed a computer, other stuff will be like romans trying to reverse engineer a zip.

 

while they wouldn't manage the former, the latter would be relatively easy, they have metal working skills even at the fineness necessary for a zipper but they never mused them. certainly not to the extent we do.

[Tau Meson]

Yes, that is true, and a good point. I just got the impression from the OP that if an alien spaceship did crash and was studied by the military, that he was expecting that we should have, say, photon torpedoes or giant laser cannons by now. It is already hard enough for us to reverse engineer technology built by other human beings, never mind advanced alien tech.

[insane_alien]

well we, would be able to get to the advanced technology quicker than otherwise. and a LOT of resources would be spent in accomplishing the reverse engineering as well.

 

all we'd have to do is learn lessons from the less advanced technology to understand how the more advanced stuff works. this is infact how reverse engineering works just now when the device being reverse engineered has more than one innovation. start with the easy bit then move on to the hard bit.

[Moontanman]

I think it's safe to say that any interstellar space craft that crashed on the Earth would have very little technology we could reverse engineer and come up with some wild break through that everyone would look at and say "WOW! THAT MUST BE ALIEN TECHNOLOGY"

 

Any thing really different or advanced would be almost impossible for us. Even if you took a laptop back just 100 years how much of it could be reverse engineered? Just figuring out how to charge the thing would be a huge challenge.

 

Alien technology, short of new fangled zippers (whoa! Velcro?) 100's or 1,000's of years ahead of us would be as opaque to our technology as a laptop in 1492.

[insane_alien]

yes, but the technology is not all going to be so far ahead of us that we have no hope.

 

we still use old technology as well as new technologies. this is what i was trying to get across with the zips and the romans.

 

a roman will never have seen a zip before, the precursor didn't arrive until 1851, the zip as we know it was around 1914. but, romans had the technologies to recreate a zip.

 

this is just one example, there are many more. flat pack furniture could be an other.

 

electronics do have a leap in understanding required, but not every technology we use is electronic. not all technology on the alien spacecraft will be whatever advanced shit they have. i'm pretty sure there will be a huge number of technologies that they take for granted since they've been around so long that we'd find interesting and be capable of reverse engineering.

 

assuming that there is enough variety in the technology around it would be possible to work our way up the chain of complexity. sure, it may take a century or two of work but we could do it.

[Moontanman]

A zipper and fold flat furniture is more of case of using current technology in different ways than advanced technology. I don't think an advanced zipper is going to allow up to reverse engineer something we cannot comprehend any more than it could have helped the romans build a integrated circuit.

 

But I do agree that after a couple hundred years we might get some things as we recognized our new technologies as the beginnings of some of theirs. So I think it's reasonable to say that a space craft that crashed 50 or 60 years ago would not have allowed us to develop very much from it's technology.

[lucky45]

I think the latest alien tecknowledgy lies with the Great Pyrimids. Something must have inspired them to build them in a manner that certain points in the pyramids point to the north star as we know. I also think this,(which will turn alot of heads in the Chritian communitY), Just about everyone in the christian community Believe That God is the creater of all things.I my self believe so,but What if God was an alein with supernatural powers, from some other world or whatever, And planted his seed of humanity here on earth. and is sitting back watching us (as we all know as UFO's)

[insane_alien]

A zipper and fold flat furniture is more of case of using current technology in different ways than advanced technology. I don't think an advanced zipper is going to allow up to reverse engineer something we cannot comprehend any more than it could have helped the romans build a integrated circuit.

 

again you missed the point, i do realise there would be a lot, heck, a majority of stuf completely out of our reach. BUT there would also be lots of little things that we COULD reverse engineer.

 

for instance, alloys and materials. we likely have the technology to replicate those once we analyse the structure and composition. we could probably make advances in antenna and sensor technology as well.

 

all i'm saying is that we would not be completely stumpd by every example of technology outside our own.

 

I think the latest alien tecknowledgy lies with the Great Pyrimids.

 

pyramids are all human.

 

Something must have inspired them to build them in a manner that certain points in the pyramids point to the north star as we know. I also think this,(which will turn alot of heads in the Chritian communitY), Just about everyone in the christian community Believe That God is the creater of all things.I my self believe so,but What if God was an alein with supernatural powers, from some other world or whatever, And planted his seed of humanity here on earth. and is sitting back watching us (as we all know as UFO's)

 

 

oh ffs try to keep on topic and within the bounds of realism.

[Tau Meson]

yes, but the technology is not all going to be so far ahead of us that we have no hope.

 

we still use old technology as well as new technologies. this is what i was trying to get across with the zips and the romans.

 

a roman will never have seen a zip before, the precursor didn't arrive until 1851, the zip as we know it was around 1914. but, romans had the technologies to recreate a zip.

 

this is just one example, there are many more. flat pack furniture could be an other.

 

electronics do have a leap in understanding required, but not every technology we use is electronic. not all technology on the alien spacecraft will be whatever advanced shit they have. i'm pretty sure there will be a huge number of technologies that they take for granted since they've been around so long that we'd find interesting and be capable of reverse engineering.

 

assuming that there is enough variety in the technology around it would be possible to work our way up the chain of complexity. sure, it may take a century or two of work but we could do it.

 

 

 

I understand, but there is also lot more to it than just being comprehensible. Again, lets go back to that Romans with a computer example. Lets assume that they do understand the principles. So, where are they going to get the materials from? Where are they going to get the infrastructure to even support their use? Just think about what had to come in place before we can have computers; we need not only the materials, but the industrial processes, the economic motivation, a system of distribution, and electricity to power them all. It's easy to come up with the economic motivation, but where would they get everything else?

 

Lets move on to a more contemporary example, could the Aztecs reverse engineer muskets from the Spaniards? They had no metal or gun powder, and thus they had no blacksmiths to actually make the things.

 

Now lets go back to the task of reverse engineering the alien space ship and say, for example, that we do understand how its engines work. So, where are we going to get the materials, industry, technology, the fuel and the infrastructure necessary to reverse engineer the thing from?

 

So sure, there is some technology that we use that date back to Roman times. The Romans might be able to reverse engineer the zipper. But I think that misses the point; they wouldn't be able to reverse engineer a computer, and we probably would not be able to do a whole lot with an alien spaceship other than study it's origin and composition. I believe, in my honest opinion, that it could take centuries, if not millenia, before we can actually reverse engineer their tech. A crashed alien spaceship would tell us just as much about advanced technology as an airplane teaches the cargo cults about advanced technology.

Edited January 9, 2010 by Tau Meson
Consecutive posts merged.