In terms of internal combustion I think we are nowhere near the end of development. Homogeneous charge, variable compression, etc is still on the drawing board (that is... not in production). Soon we will also see new valve technologies (BMW has had an electromagnetically actuated valve system in the works for years now).

Plus diesels just keep getting better and better and with the introduction of EGR systems and piezo injectors we are seeing a new era of quite, clean diesels. Unheard of 20 years ago, even.

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---"Why do things have to suck so bad?" a friend once asked me.
"Because space is a vacuum and that's a lot of suck." I replied.
(Actual quote)---

Well, this may be true, but if we are now extracting 25% of the chemical energy of the fuel, we only have a factor of four to go before we are getting it all, then that's that in terms of reducing waste.

And that's just looking at the energy efficiency. Also consider size and weight for a given power output, cost, ease of operation, reliability and maintenance requirements...

There have certainly been and continue to be new developments and refinements, but the really major advancements in piston engine technology (even specifically internal combustion engines) predated the automobile. The Model T engine was a fairly modern design, and was kept in production until 1941 with only minor refinements and adjustments. The field was already quite mature when mass produced automobiles arrived on the scene, while complex electronics didn't really even begin until vacuum tubes were developed in the early 1900s.

Comparing the development of electronics or even just integrated circuits or computers with the development of the automobile is absurd. A more realistic comparison would be electronics against the entire industrial revolution, which had similar positive feedback effects spurring its growth...production of engines and tools allowed production of more advanced engines and tools, similar to how electronic controls and computer aided design allow further advances in electronics.

Moore's law may hit a wall based on the manufacturing process required to lay down the traces to allow elelctron flow, and transistor size as well -- we were supposed to hit that wall in the early 90's but developed a new process that allowed the newer pentium processors. I forget exactly which, but it was a big breakthrough. Prior to that, it was considered impossible to go further, a lot like 28.8 kb modems represented the maximum amount of badwidth possible over a POTS line. then we got 33.6k, then 56.6k through compression and other algorithms. By then, we had availability of higher bandwidth that POTS, so we set aside further modem development and concentrated on these conduits. We had enough throughput now so we could develop the internet applications and data transfers we wanted, so we could focus on those.

In new PCs we can have 2 or more real or virtual processors coupled with a bus with sufficient bandwidth to allow memory operations that arent a bottleneck -- but I wonder if we are truly at a wall.

In a way, I hope we are. I think quantum computing is a real possibility soon, and it seemingly opens the door to the kind of breakthroughs we look for in AI, etc. Kind of like using a T1 line or bable in place of a modem; much higher throughput using atomic states over NP juntions to perform logic operations. I think the possibilities will truly seem endless for a while.


And we truly owe this to Babbage, The Transistor, and the Integrated Circuits. No Aliens needed.

Point I am trying to make is that our current transistor-based technology for computers is not good enough for the type of technology the alleged aliens use to get here...

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“He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever”
Chinese proverb
"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence - and then success is sure." - Mark Twain.

Very true. If it was we'd be going there.

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Friendly Rabid Atheists (mostly)

I get that, and totally agree. I was just pointing out that although our PC technology may seem to have grown suddenly, it has a well established and documented history that doesn't need to include alien technology to explain.


However, to play devil's Advocate .... Why do we have to assume Aliens would give us their current level of technology?? Why not give us the concept of a PN juction as a switch to use and evolve on our own? A PN juction switch is something we might not have had, but we certainly could understand it. We were already using VTs to perform the switching necessary to store and use binary states; I doubt we could have evolved a more advanced method on our own, of say Quantum Computing, because we didnt have the technology to exploit it at the time. We would have had to have a lot more sophisticated technology in may areas to use it at all, which means they would have had to given us a LOT of technology.

If we found a race of intelligent monkeys and wanted to help them, would we give them a fully fledged car, or start them out with the Wheel instead?

To be clear, I dont think we got any of our tech, or anything else from aliens. Just playing devil's advocate.

But it is not a matter of the aliens "giving" us the technology. The claim is that we stole it from the alien's spacecraft. It is similar to this intelligent race of monkeys have a jet fighter crash in their midst. They might figure out the wheel thing but they aren't going to figure out the avionics for some time.

Ah, yes. you are correct. I forgot the assumption here was that we had found the technology at Roswell. thanks.

While reading this thread I am reminded of the short story by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic, which posits the notion that we would have about as much of an understanding about the significance of stuff left behind by visiting aliens, as animals would understand what was going on with the junk left behind by people who stop by the side of the road, in a wood, for a picnic.

The odds of us being able to reverse engineer it into something even vaguely useful seems slim at best.

Take someone from 1809 and show them your house. How many "gadgets" could they reproduce? The plastic shelves? The teflon pans? The LED tv? The electric coffee pot? The poor guy would freeze to death because he would be able to find a fireplace! I suspect that any aliens that do make here will be a bit beyond that 200 year gap.

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Friendly Rabid Atheists (mostly)

I presume you mean unable, and he'd be able to find fireplaces and pellet stoves in a lot of places around here, including my own apartment.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

A pertinent post indeed.

This isn't really a quibble, but... some years ago, a Russian colleague of mine who was a friend of the Strugatsky brothers pointed out that the translation of the title lost a significant point. The "roadside" was not supposed to be the sort of wood where you'd have a picnic; rather, it was a layby in a built-up run-down area next to a busy but poorly maintained road - that is, the last place you'd want to stop to eat, but for some reason you did anyway.

A great little story - not fully captured in Tarkovsky's film Stalker.

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Cricket is boring. IMHO, of course.

Do you really have to go back that far? Take someone from 1959 and empty your pockets and attache case: a cell phone would be hard enough for them to grasp; a Blackberry would blow them away; your laptop would seem like something out of 2001; and, your GPS would look like voodoo.

I don't think reverse engineering would be the problem -- it'd be an incredible leap for them to believe you weren't trying to deceive them.

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I can't WAIT for January 1, 2013 to arrive! Then again, I'm still waiting for October 1, 1993 ...

You'd better BET there's a spoon, Neo! THWACK!!!!

Of course, a counter-argument is, "Why would the aliens give us an outrageously outmoded technology if we were capable of assimilating a more advanced one?"

Von Daniken comes to my mind. Props to the aliens for helping us build the pyramids, but wouldn't it have made more sense to teach the Egyptians about arches, concrete, and rebar?

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I can't WAIT for January 1, 2013 to arrive! Then again, I'm still waiting for October 1, 1993 ...

You'd better BET there's a spoon, Neo! THWACK!!!!

Grammar fail.

Yeah, but I live in an all electric home, and the thermostat is not at all obvious as a source of heat. Cryptically marked and out of the way.

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Friendly Rabid Atheists (mostly)

I work on the Antebellum USN. (URL on request.) The differences in technology are interesting. I've seen long documents on the way copper protects ships from damage, and most of it is wrong, wrong, wrong. But they're trying to figure it out. No idea of a sacrificial anode at that time, IIRC.

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Friendly Rabid Atheists (mostly)

You know, the funny thing is that I was just commenting the other day about how familiar Sir Isaac Newton would be with a lot of the contents of my house. Yes, the plastic and various other technological advances would throw him, but I do still have that fireplace, and while my windows are beyond anything he could have had, they're still windows. My books are brighter and more varied, but they're still books. He wouldn't be able to work out my oven without help, I suspect, and my refrigerator would completely floor him, but aside from our dependence on electricity, not as much has changed as we may imagine. (And emptying my bag would produce no electronics whatsoever, and only my collection of credit cards/store discount cards/library cards would produce any suprises.) The basics don't really change.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Another example that might provide an insight into the difficulty of reverse engineering any truly advanced technology.

A few years ago a couple of radio-thermal generators were recovered from Georgia. These were designed to provided electrical power in remote areas. The lumberjacks that originally came across them were using them as heaters...

A concept used hilariously in the TV-show Catweazle.

Elec-trickery!

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Join the Illuminati

As technology develops and progresses, it tends to leave behind many predecessors. A short look at history will show this. I'm afraid I'm not as knowledgeable about this as some here, so forgive any mistakes I might make in the following example: One might look at early mechanical computing devices, later followed by electromechanical devices such as those used to break the Enigma code, followed by vacuum tubes, followed by the transistor, followed by the integrated circuit, etc.

Each one of those steps had a predecessor, much as living creatures have fossil ancestors. Each step is accompanied by huge amounts of documentation, research, theory, budgets and spin-off technology.

Can anyone show us one example of technology, whether we take it for granted or not, that just suddenly sprung into being without such backing? If so I'd really be interested in hearing about it.

As for our ability or inability to backwards engineer alien technology... I think we can take it as a given that any civilization advanced enough to traverse interstellar distances would have to be far more advanced than us. Let's say by 500 years at least. Go back 500 years into our past and give Galileo a nuclear powered aircraft carrier and ask him to reproduce it. How do you think that would work out?

Very bad for Galileo.

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Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true. -- Niels Bohr --

Ipsa scientia potestas est. ~ Knowledge itself is power.---- Bacon
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Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit.


Hint: this is at heart a scientific forum, and underneath the fooling around there are some diamond-hard minds hanging about, ready to tear you to shreads. -- mike alexander --

It can be hard with current technology. In WW2 the Germans never suspected that the british had developed microwave Radar. They even had a Cavity Magnetron tube from a crashed H2S set on a Lancaster Bomber.
Conclusion they thought it was a hoax as they had no idea of the theory behind it and didn't even consider microwaves as a possibility.

Just before the war the Germans sent an Airship on a series of flights up and down the North Sea packed wit hdsetectors for Radio and Radar transmission. Germany was using rotating antenna with a wavelength of between 1 and 5 meters for it's Radar experiments. In the UK a complete system was already operational using 11m wavelength (this was chosen as half the wingspan of a Heinkel 11 bomber) Instead of using a rotating antenna CHL used phase shift between 4 transmisson and 4 reciever towers to give direction. It operated on a pulse rate of 25 per second, this was a sub multiple of the mains power frequency and was chosen to stop interferance.
When the Germans detected these signals they were so different to their experimental Radar sets they assumed they were just getting interference from the National Grid.
Conclusion the UK didn't have Radar.

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That flight was, as far as I can tell, the last flight of the Graf Zeppelin, the last of the great airships. The British were tracking the flight on radar and monitoring the communications the whole time. According to one story I read, at one point the airship gave an incorrect position report. The British had to bite their tongues to keep from correcting the Germans. IIRC, I read this story in a book I bought in England titled "Most Secret War" by Dr. R. V. Jones (considered by many as the father of electronic countermeasures), a great read.

check out http://www.radarpages.co.uk/ all you ever wanted to know (and more) about British Air Defence Radar.

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My understanding is that this was Graph Zeppelin II a sister to the Hindenberg, not the slightly smaller but more famous craft that circumnavigated the world and provided scheduled services to South America

I can just picture it...

Zeppelin radio operator: "Ja, mein Herr . Wir sind (reads co-ordinates)"

(Crackling radio in clipped tones): "Actually, old boy, I think you'll find that you're rather north of that location, what what?"

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"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

"Certainly, in the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is often useful." - Ian Faith

The funniest part is that after traveling many light years to get here it all went pants on them in the last couple hundred miles.

The claims are that either lightning hit the Roswell saucer or two of them collided. The first is based on the storm that night, indicating that UFO are not capable of handling weather even if they can cross interstellar space. The second is needed to explain why there is more than one crash site charging admission.

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Friendly Rabid Atheists (mostly)

Maybe they just forgot how to fly the thing in the atmosphere. A few years ago, I had the joy of observing the emergece of "Brood X", a brood of 17 year periodic cicadas (immortalised by Bob Dylan in "The day of the locusts".) These things spend roughly 17 years of their life living in tunnels underground, and then finally emerge into the light where they have a couple of weeks of trying to fly (and mate.) Trust me, they are not very good at the flying thing (the other bit I didn't observe.) Maybe a similar thing happened to the "aliens".