Imagine, if you will, an alien arrives on Earth, and their level of technology is equivalent to what ours will be 200 years from now. In other words, they are to us as we are to the scientists of 1809 - the year of Charles Darwin's birth. 1809 was an era of sailing ships and horse-drawn carriages. The first railroad wouldn't be built for another 16 years. Got the picture?
Now, hand the greatest scientists of that age this Timex watch, and tell them to make an exact copy. Well, first, the face piece is plastic, something they can't make, and in that era the aluminum of the case and bands is more significantly more expensive per pound than gold. This assumes that they can machine the aluminum and springs of the band.
It gets even worse once they crack the case open. Instead of the gears that they expect, the inside consists of a series of black boxes, including an electric motor, a battery, and a quartz timing device. As far as making it illuminate, forget about it. Edison's dad isn't even a gleam in his grandfather's eyes yet!
So, they would be very hard-pressed indeed to make a simple watch - something that many people simply throw away when the good-for-ten-year battery quits. What's even worse is that the scientists know what this device does.
Now hand them an F-16. If you think that they could build a flying replica of one, I've got a bridge for sale in Brooklyn.
Of course, if you're looking at something built for an alien physiology, using an alien language and measurement system, with unclear purposes, how much more difficult could it get?
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chris_gerrib- chris_gerrib
- Private Mars Rocket - Science Fiction
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profit by pursuing means of converting electromagnetism to gravity. Assuming we could figure out what those funny-looking black boxes did...
Andre Norton agreed with![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
jordan179: In her novel The Time Traders, one of the characters asks what difference it would make to hand a Bronze-Age Celt a pistol. Even if you taught him how to use it, he couldn't reproduce it or its ammo. The response was, True, but it might give him ideas he wouldn't otherwise have.
Just so, if that F-16 did nothing whatever beyond demonstrating how alternating current works rather than direct, that alone would have monumental effect on the resulting technology - as, indeed, it did.
I understood how my Commodore 64 worked. I could program it. No one understands these gigabyte PCs, nor is their development in this time scale plausible. In my more dyspeptic moments I could easily be persuaded that they weren't developed here.
You remind me of the movie Philadelphia Experiment II, where handwavium “stealth technology experiments” send a F-117 with nuclear payload back to 1943, where it lands in the middle of Nazi Germany. Next thing you know, Washington is atomized by das Phoenix, the amazing Wunderbomber which is itself destroyed in the blast. The Germans didn't figure out how to make what they had, but they learned more or less how to use it (and we won't worry about the need for inflight refuelling, shh-hh...).