Elsewhere on reddit, I saw someone debunking a theory that much of our post-WWII technological progress came from examining a crashed alien spaceship. Essentially, all the mooted technology could be traced to pre-WWII precursors. This sparked an interesting thought experiment.

What could the ancient Romans learn from a piece of modern technology? Let's say the USS Gerald R Ford, the latest aircraft carrier, falls into a time vortex and appears intact and unmanned in the middle of Ostia's harbour. (Ostia is the port of Rome). The year is 50BC.

This is Rome at one of her peaks, the heart of the classical period. They do not have our scientific understanding or frameworks, but they have great minds and some of history's greatest engineers. No one could figure out the principles of electricity from staring at a circuit board, but they could definitely figure out S bend plumbing (which wasn't invented until 1775) and vastly improve their internal plumbing systems.

On the other hand, Julius Caesar is dictator. Would he simply declare the ship is a sign of his divine providence and refuse to let any philosophers near it? Would the Roman populace see it as a sign that gods exist and shift their culture away from logic and towards a more devout religion?

What do you think they could learn from this crashed seaship? I think this would be interesting to analyse from two perspectives - if you ignore political/social considerations like Caesar and religion and just looked at what a smart team of Roman engineers/philosophers might have discovered or if you let the political/social factors play out.