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Posted: |
Mar 3, 2017 - 11:03 AM
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By: |
Metryq
(Member)
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Warlok wrote: Synonym Phrase: Could we possibly acquire technology advanced beyond our own, study it, and eventually understand it?
That would depend on how far beyond our own technology the new tech is. In James P. Hogan's excellent novel The Proteus Operation scientists from an alternate 1975 travel back to 1939 in an effort to change the results of World War II. (In their world, the Allied nations fell.) One of the future scientists is explaining macroscopic displacement into a new universe as similar to coherency in masers and lasers. The 1939 scientists do not understand the analogy, as the maser and laser have not been developed, yet the mechanism had long since been proposed by Einstein (in either universe). And in Robert Heinlein's The Door Into Summer it is suggested that Da Vinci was a 21st century engineering professor displaced 500 years into the past. He knew about a world of automation, computers, power, flight, etc. but could not bring them about because the required "former art" did not exist.
Bell Labs produced the first solid state transistor in 1947, but solid state physics began much earlier. It turned out to be easier to produce vacuum tubes, so semi-conductors had to wait. Someone ignorant of the history of this type of technology might be inclined to suggest that it was all reverse engineered from a crashed alien starship. "The tech suddenly appeared from nowhere!"
Now suppose a simple example of such tech was dropped on scientists even a decade before solid state physics was hypothesized. Would they be able to puzzle out what was going on? The manufacturing techniques to reproduce it would certainly be lacking.
Whenever the reverse engineering of alien technology is brought up, there is also the suggestion that humans are just too stupid to work out such advances on their own. "UFOs must have helped build the ancient Egyptian pyramids because those people had no powered machinery." If you've never read any books about ancient technology, you might be surprised. Our ancestors were not dummies.
Sometimes humans manage to figure out something revolutionary without even a natural example to guide them. Studying birds was no help in developing manned flight. And the first man-made fission reactor was built decades before a naturally occurring one was discovered.
Conspiracy theories about reverse engineered alien tech are easiest to believe when one knows nothing about the history of new technologies.
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Posted: |
Mar 9, 2017 - 9:00 PM
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By: |
Solium
(Member)
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E.T. is on his way!
Bizarre flashes of cosmic light may actually be generated by advanced alien civilizations, as a way to accelerate interstellar spacecraft to tremendous speeds, a new study suggests.
Astronomers have catalogued just 20 or so of these brief, superbright flashes, which are known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), since the first one was detected in 2007. FRBs seem to be coming from galaxies billions of light-years away, but what's causing them remains a mystery.
"Fast radio bursts are exceedingly bright given their short duration and origin at great distances, and we haven't identified a possible natural source with any confidence," study co-author Avi Loeb, a theorist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement Thursday (March 9). "An artificial origin is worth contemplating and checking."
http://www.space.com/35996-fast-radio-bursts-powering-alien-spacecraft.html
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