Aug 8 09 Paracast Newsletter

[Bixyboo]

A Trip Through the Crazy World of Reverse Engineering

Just imagine, if you will, living in the 15th century, and having Apple’s iPhone handed to you. Your assignment, should you decide to accept it, is to figure out not only how to use this curious gadget, but to dissect the technology and build something that offers the same functionality.
Of course the prospects of such success can best be described as little to none, and that’s the most optimistic slant I can offer. Indeed, the very idea should strike you as absurd.

Now imagine it’s 1947, and a craft from another star system lands in the New Mexico desert. Why its highly advanced technology failed is anyone’s guess. Maybe the aliens, perhaps as we do on Earth, contract spaceship construction to the lowest bidder – or the one that contributes the largest amount of credits to the appropriate election campaigns.

In any case, the craft is loaded onto a truck and taken to a top secret military installation, where the best scientists in the nation work day and night to unearth the secrets it contains.

Just how much technology would you expect them to retrieve?
Well, if you can believe the late Army Colonel Philip Corso, co-author, along with Bill Birnes, of “The Day After Roswell,” such inventions as integrated circuits were actually reverse engineered from parcels of wreckage retrieved from the Roswell crash.

Now I realize the whole Corso affair is extremely controversial, but at the core of this argument is the life experience of a highly decorated military figure. While some of the confusing and perhaps misleading passages in the book are likely the result of sloppy editing, we are left with an intriguing scenario that isn’t so easily dismissed.

However, I have to wonder just how well our scientists and engineers would fare attempting to interpret evidence of a technology that may be hundreds or thousands of years advanced beyond what we have achieved. Would it truly be possible for them to be able to really understand even a small part of what they recovered?
Can you actually believe that?

Then again, if the UFOs were, in actuality, craft from our own future, maybe we’d just be reverse engineering our own inventions. Talk about an odd development, where we, in effect, change the past to create our future.

But the potential paradox of time travel is surely beyond the scope of this commentary.

Peace,
Gene Steinberg
Co-Host, "The Paracast"
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Very good Newsletter this week, Gene and David! I bet that if something like were taking place..that our scientists and engineers probably wouldn't be able to figure it out....that the technology would be just too advanced...the concept that it could be human technology from our own future is an interesting theory......

 

[Kandinsky]

I was gonna post a smart-ass spin on the anti-reverse engineering arguments. Thing is, the more I think about it the less likely it seems.

Maybe a modern car could be reverse-engineered by a 1920s mechanic, I was going to suggest. Then damn! The whole engine is micro-managed by microchips. The interior has so many dials, buttons and levers the old mechanics might not know where the hell to begin. The immobilizer would utterly baffle them. It takes a bit of experience and knowledge to disable immobilizers. Then again, maybe they could break down the engine and get some good ideas to improve their existing technology? New alloys, silicone, design improvements etc.

The reverse-engineering thing has bugged me since Lazar first hit the UFO mags. Now I'm even more doubtful. Transistors and fiber-optics are supposed to be from Roswell, but they each have a history of decades before Roswell. As ever there's a lot of BS.

So, a car engine could be reverse-engineered to a degree. If the car engine was found by someone in the 18th Century, they'd have no idea. I guess my tortured point is unless the 'UFO-tech' is comparable to ours in at least one aspect, I doubt we could reverse-engineer a damn thing. Based on reports of structured craft, slow/fast speed, acceleration, hovering, silent, no combustion engines, gravity defying, appear/ disappear, enormous dimensions etc...we just don't compare to 'em!

 

[Schuyler]

Here's the thing about encountering advanced technology. You may not know how to do it, but you know it can be done. That is a powerful incentive. We are encountering it now with the proliferation of nuclear weapons. When the US built the first bomb, it was a theory. They did not know if it could be done; they just thought it could. Everyone else building a bomb knows it can be done.

The same issue surfaced in the fictional Eifelheim book I reviewed here a few days ago. One of the protaganists found a diagram of an integrated circuit in an illuminated capital from the 14th century. The circuit depicted a generator used in the propulsion system of an alien ship that used advanced concepts in physics to 'bend space.' The physicist who looked at the diagram said she did not yet know how it worked, but she now knew it could be done. Thus the aliens in the story gave us the stars 700 years after the fact.

 

[dyingsun]

Schuyler, completely of topic(edit: I am), but thanks for the review of the book 'Eifelheim', I'm for one extremely interested in early germanic history and the 'paranormal' in general.Hope it arrives within a week here.Thanks for the suggestion.