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If an alien space probe failed to aerobrake around Earth and ended up crashing in the US in 1947, what could we have actually gotten out of that?
The obvious would be technology, there'd no doubt be examples of functional integrated circuits, data processing, photosenors, and maybe some materials that we would've have invented yet, like Graphene or Aerogel.
But what I'm wondering is if we'd actually have been able to reverse engineer the tech in less time that it'd have taken us to invent it. Alien tech designed for alien by alien engineers probably isn't easy to decipher, just look at how human centric our tech is, and the outdated legacy standards it's built on top of.
What do you think? The logistics of reverse engineering hypothetical alien tech doesn't seem out-of-bounds for SFIA.
I genuinely don't think so. Reverse engineering is a dirty art on a good day.
Just look at how much NASA and SpaceX have been having to reinvent because it wasn't written down (people always complain when I don't mention the writing part) and that's just a few decades in between.
Take fog bank. Etc.
Mind you.
Macro scale design is hardly a dead art. Things as trivial as cable management, UX, nozzle placement etc are still slowly getting better.
Cutlery shapes haven't had to account for a change in tasks whatsoever for example and yet they've gradually evolved to be incrementally better through both different applications of existing materials as well as the creation of new ones.
A modern fork is vastly better at a wide range of foods than one from 350 years ago and it would just take an evening to get a person from back then to get it.
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