Returning to the theme of what might be dubbed “UFO Realism” I would like to address a topic that exercises the minds of a lot of UFO conspiracy theorists, namely, reverse engineered alien technologies.

First, is there any evidence at all that any technology we currently have has any extraterrestrial element? For example, one famous claim by Colonel Corso is that much modern technology was derived from the Roswell Incident. To quote the Wikipedia entry the list includes “…particle beam devices, fiber optics, lasers, integrated circuit chips and Kevlar material”, not to mention the transistor itself.

The initial problem with these claims is twofold.

First, there is no technology that does not have a very long “pedigree” of previous research backing it, often extending for decades before the public is aware of it. For example the transistor invented by Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley in 1947 (the year of the Roswell UFO crash) was preceded by a number of patents in the 1920s and 30s for just such devices. The problem was not having the idea, the problem was actually making sufficiently pure materials to construct a working device. As an interesting aside, the earlier patents describe a far more advanced transistor (a Field Effect Transistor or FET) than the one the trio constructed (a Bipolar Junction Transistor of BJT). In fact, if ET is using transistors they would be FETs!

Second, as mentioned, is the problem of actually copying an advanced technology. Which brings us to the Apple iPhone in the picture.

Let’s suppose we were the “aliens” with our circa 2019CE advanced Apple pocket supercomputer and dropped it off a mere 50 years in the past, to the Apollo Era when we were just about to go to the moon. Imagine what a major boost to technological development that would have been! Or not, for reasons that will become obvious.

So, what can we say about computers of 1969CE? For a start, the iPhone will have more processing power than all the computers on Earth combined, and more memory than existed at that time. So even if they could unload the data in it, they could not store it or run it. That is assuming they could work out how to access it via WiFi or USB which given the data rates and complexity of the protocols would be very unlikely. Even then, they could not access the operating system. The photos would also be fairly useless because they are compressed using complex protocols and still each would occupy more memory than the average supercomputer had in that era. But at least they could power it up and display movies, photos, music… Well, maybe. If they could get around the security, which even our police cannot do without a great deal of contemporary hitech hacking. Then they would discover what, exactly? My emails, chats, phone logs? Maybe a movie or two could show them the world of the future, but while it might have a major impact on music, fashion and the car styles it will not yield much technical insight. It’s not as if I keep a copy of Wikipedia on board!

If they decide to probe deeper, it will destroy the functionality immediately. Then they only get to analyze the gross features. They will discover the battery contains Lithium and Cobalt fabricated on the nanoscale. That it has a radio that operates in the microwave region switching faster than any instrument they possess. Then, after carefully abrading the packaging of the chips and looking at them under an electron microscope they will discover features down to about 7nm and can probably guess that the billions of structure are transistors. They probably will not be able to work out what the flash memory does, because just looking at it will destroy its contents. They might even guess that the screen is made up of millions of organic light emitters, again fabricated on a scale far below the resolution of optical microscopes.

And that’s it. I can even imagine President Nixon asking his science adviser Edward E David how long it would take to duplicate the circuits, and getting the answer that if they put their best people on it and spent billions per year in materials science, chemistry, electronics and optics they might do it in 50 years! Because that is what it took.

This is not to say that knowing something can be done is not immensely useful, and they could not pick up a few clues and perhaps the odd shortcut. But overall that iPhone in 1969 would not cause a revolution in scitech beyond that which we got in this timeline.

But surely not all alien tech would be like that if we discovered some? Well, probably not. One possible example of something we might well be able to reverse engineer is a room temperature superconductor. I imagine ET probably uses a lot of that (except possibly at Roswell). The fact that we do not possess such a material is another blow against the Alien UFO tech theory. Also bear in mind that their putative scitech will be thousand or millions of years ahead of ours — not a pathetic 50 years.

So what about really advanced ET tech — like self replicating intelligent nano-systems? Well, we have been surrounded by similar for all of our existence and have been studying them scientifically for several hundred years. Animals and plants. So far for the most part we have only been able to eat them or ride them. And if there is such tech lying around and it’s not in a crashed spacecraft or conveniently labeled, would we even recognize it? I suspect not.

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For more speculations on UFO/Alien technology I have written here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_J._Corso

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor#History