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Russians Invade with Flying Saucer
Ridgelift writes "Wired is covering a project revived from Russia by the US Naval Air Systems Command: The Ekip, a pita-bread-shaped, stubby-winged, wheel-less, unmanned ship that weighs in at 500 pounds. 'For more than two decades, engineers at a former Soviet aerospace plant have been toiling on a drone aircraft that looks a whole lot like a prop from Plan 9 From Outer Space.'"
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I have been thinking about those rumors of a crashed UFO being studied at the Groom Lake facility, and it got me thinking about the possibilities. If the stories were true, I doubt they would gain much useful knowledge from it. Technology far in advance of your own, (or even moderately in advance of your own) would be unfathomable. Consider the following:
A modern F-16 enters a temporal vortex, and crashes on the White House lawn, back in 1862 or so. The pilot is dead, and the plane will never fly again, but President Lincoln realizes the by studying the wreakage of this futuristic machine, they might be able to develop a flying war machine that would bring a speedy victory against the south. He summons the top scientists and engineers of the day to study the wreak and learn what they may.
They would discover that the machine is made of wonderous materials - Aluminum was newly discovered and more expensive than Silver in that day. Titanium was unknown, as would be carbon fibre and other composites. They could discover some of its physical properties, but would have no idea how to manufacture it.
The principle of the turbine was known, but they would likely assume the aircraft was steam driven. The electronic fly by wire controls and on board computer systems would of course be completely unfathomable. It would be doubtful they could even determine the function of the countless electronic black boxes on board, let alone try and reproduce them. Even if the plane and landed intact, and the pilot was co-operative, he could not help them design and build another F16 with the technology of the day. It is doubtful they could even refine the fuel that would enable the one aircraft they had to fly a single mission!
An examination of the overall aircraft would not give them any advantage in learning how to build a flying machine either - aircraft of the early 20th century bear no respemblence to a modern jet fighter. If the Wright brothers were given the opportunity to carefully examine one before they started building their flyer, it would have set them back many years. They might have been wasting time trying to build gas turbines, instead of using internal combustion engines with propellors. Also, modern fighters are not aerodynamically stable, a sacrifice made to improve maneuverability. They require active computer control systems - if the onboard computer goes down, so does the plane. And 1900's era flying machine design attempting to emulate the construction of a modern fighter would be doomed to failure.
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...the mig, the sikorsky helicopters, you name it, they built it well. Cars, well, cars are so pedestrian that under a strict military regime the best scientists and engineers build weaponry. Few can argue with the machines the Soviets built during the Cold War. All of their aircraft are works of art and many times more durable and simple than comparable US or other international warplanes.
Um, I don't know which article you were reading, but this plane does not use any kind of ion engine, nor are ion engines even mentioned in the article! While your post was factually correct, it has nothing to do with the article in question and is in fact completely offtopic. Hrm, maybe you've stumbled on a new formula for cheap karma:
1) Claim that something you know is relevant to the story (even if it's not)
2) Talk about what you know
3) Karma!!!
Technology far in advance of your own, (or even moderately in advance of your own) would be unfathomable.
You bring up some very good points (and I really enjoyed the post), but I think that if genuine alien technology ended up in our laps, we would be able to learn at least something from it.
History isn't my forte, but I would think that an F-16 crashing in America of 1862 would give the US a head-start on technologies like radio and television, lasers, and jet engines.
You are right that they wouldn't be able to build a plane using those technologies, but having jet engines might be useful for something else, like watercraft.
I very much doubt that the modern US has gotten its hands on alien technology. There are some interesting theories that use it to explain how we got our hands on transistors, for example, but I think they are best used as an inspiration for historical fiction, not an understanding of how the technology was invented.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
"would give the US a head-start on technologies like radio and television, lasers, and jet engines."
I think you missed his point. The wouldn't recognize a laser if it bite them in the ass because it is so "far" advanced that they don't even know what it is or works..
The 2003->1862 example might be a bit week, but just think of crashing that plane in 1262 in central europe...
Tels
Would we indeed?
Let's suppose a friendly alien landed his intact FTL craft at a military airport and hands the "keys" to the officer in charge. He then says "It's all yours bud - you just need to fill her up with 20 kilos of anti-hydrogen to reach the next star." What do you mean you can only refine a few atoms of it at astronomical cost? I thought you were a technologically advanced, well equipped society?
Consider even a small difference in timeframe. Some of Intel's top engineers in 1970 are handed a modern laptop PC to analyze. They would of course be familiar with integrated circuit technology and have relatively advanced scientific equipment such as electron microscopes to do the analysis. They would certainly be awed by its complexity and would likely glean more than a few patentable ideas from it. But they would not be cranking out 2 GHz Pentium 4's the following year, or likely even by the 1980s. The fabs of the day would be utterly incapable of producing them for many years, even when the CPU was fully analyzed and understood.
I believe it was Asimov who once said that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. We like to think of ourselves as advanced, but I think that this view is pretentious. There is still much to learn about the universe.
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