There's a bit of goalpost moving going on there. We started off talking about identifying the makeup of a piece of material, not fully understanding it as a piece of technology, and having an actual piece of such material would allow us to analyze it all the way down to the subatomic level. You just don't get any more basic than that. So while it's true we might not know what it's role is in the larger picture as a piece of foreign technology, that doesn't mean we wouldn't be able to identify what it is.
N-no – I’m not trying to move the goalposts here; I’m simply pointing out that identifying the chemical composition of a piece of matter doesn’t necessarily tell you anything meaningful about it. Many of the materials that we make nowadays are composed of commonplace atoms and molecules, and yet that alone tells us essentially nothing about it – a silicon processor is the example that I used earlier. Knowing that it’s comprised of silicon and copper and germanium or whatever, doesn’t shed any light upon its significance or its function. I’m sure we could find plenty of rocks made of the same elements – yet nobody would say that a silicon chip is the same as a rock. So clearly there’s often much more involved with identifying a material than simply determining what it’s made of; that’s all I’m saying.
That's fascinating to ponder, and if we can already imagine that, and it's possible, and we had a sample of such technology, I think that given our rate of technological advancement, that we'd be fools to think we wouldn't figure out a piece of technology a thousand years ahead of us far sooner than a whole millennium. We'd probably have it figured out before your grandkids are grown and the Chinese would be making knock-offs a year after that.
I’m not so sure about that. A functioning system would be one thing – that could accelerate our technological development dramatically. But some chunk of weird alloy or something? Hard to say what we might learn from it, if anything, until we reach the point in our own development where such a material makes sense.
Imagine if I left my shoe in feudal Europe. There’s a lot of advanced technology in that shoe, from a Dark Ages perspective: a range of complex polymers and strong synthetic fibers and precisely machined alloys. Would that have spurred us into the modern technological age any faster, if we could’ve been studying it all along? Maybe, maybe not: without the advanced microscopes of the modern era, and the development of chemical forensic analysis, and a sophisticated metallurgical and industrial knowledge base, we wouldn’t have been able to derive any useful technological knowledge about it for hundreds of years. In fact, by the time we
could unravel its mysteries, we’d already be the ballpark of the technology that created it in the first place. Now think about the dizzying variety of advanced scientific processes taking place all around the world that go into our most commonplace technologies today. Unless a piece of technology is fully functional so we could see what it does and how, it could be very difficult to learn anything useful from it. It’s just not a given that some random chunk of matter from a more advanced civilization is going to significantly accelerate the rate of global technological development.
Sometimes people on the show say that a smartphone would seem like magic to people in the past, and the assumption is that such a thing could’ve spurred the Age of Reason into existence far sooner. But not if the battery were dead. It would just be a weird piece of jewelry to people who hadn’t discovered electricity yet.
Here’s a more contemporary example – we’re just now learning about phonon materials. A few years ago, a material that exploits that technology wouldn’t have meant anything to us – we wouldn’t have been able to see anything useful about it at all, because we had no idea what the heck a phonon even was, and until we figured that out, we wouldn’t have had any way to detect its utility, or to understand why the atoms were arranged a certain way within it.
Agreed. At least in the context of us having direct access to it rather having it used on us in a way that is designed to fool us. For example if the aliens are using active camouflage to make their craft appear to be an airplane, we might not recognize that we're looking at an alien craft.
I couldn’t agree more, and I think it’s pretty clear that we’re already aware of stealth measures being taken by these devices – in this latest case, the objects foiled our primary radar systems, but were somewhat detectable by a presumably more sensitive type of radar system. Capabilities like advanced decoy camouflage wouldn’t surprise me at all.
But frankly, why even bother? These devices can outmaneuver our best aircraft and defensive weapons with no problem. I mean – good luck targeting and destroying an object that can perform instantaneous hairpin changes in trajectory at high speed and leap from a near-ground hover into the stratosphere in the blink of an eye. Masquerading as a helicopter or an airplane when you can just exit the atmosphere in a jiffy, seems pretty pointless and comparatively risky by comparison. If anything, these rascals seem to enjoy taunting our military with their superior capabilities – how many times have they been seen violating the airspace over our most sensitive military installations – thousands, maybe more?
And what Gene has been saying is different – he’s saying that something even weirder than an alien device is making us see alien devices, and that doesn’t make sense to me. Because we humans can’t make people see a ufo darting around a pair of combat jets, therefore whatever is making us see this stuff is alien, at least in the “I have no idea that is” sense. So why make it more complicated than it already is? Maybe it’s possible that some unthinkably advanced blob of extraterrestrial plasma technology could cloak its true appearance by projecting some kind of 3D hologram of a solid ufo, but I just don’t see any reason to think that. It’s a nifty idea, but that’s all.
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