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Comment by haswell | Hacker News Reader

I’m not saying that I buy into these narratives, but in the interest of curiosity and for sake of argument…

Let’s say that there are real ET craft, and let’s say that the US government has indeed been retrieving and studying them for decades.

If such analysis unlocks technology breakthroughs of the kind that would solve say, energy problems, the government now has the problem of sitting on secrets that it has no legal pathway to introduce to the public, and no way to explain without somehow coming clean.

If any of this is real, the kind of legislation described in the article seems like one of the few ways they can start to introduce this information to the public. This makes it sound like they know what this is and they need to establish the channels and narratives to discuss it publicly (even if “this” is all a cover for misuse of funds that has nothing to do with ET craft).

Everyone is focused on “what is this distracting us from?”, and maybe that’s all that this is, but even if this is misdirection, there’s something going on that’s making elected officials and reputable military types speak publicly about UAPs.

That by itself is a pretty interesting signal if nothing else.

It could also all be bullshit, and either way, I’m pretty curious to see where this goes.

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It's possible as well that the technology used in such a device would be entirely indecipherable to us due to not just being more advanced, but due to being on the other side of a technological 'leap' that we're nowhere near making ourselves. If you gave a broken iPad to the greatest minds of the mid-19th century and they expended all the resources at the world's disposal to study it, it's likely that they wouldn't learn anything about it at all, and it wouldn't advance technology a bit, at least not for a hundred years or so.

If there's anything to this (and I don't really think there is), it's entirely possible that if the government is forced to reveal it, they're going to say, "We've had this thing since 1946, we've spent billions of dollars researching it, and all we can figure out is it's made of some sort of titanium-osmium metal foam that appears to be completely undifferentiated with no structures or power sources at all, but we know it used to work because we shot it down after it vaporized a Jeep".

While people in the 1850s probably would not have been able to fix or turn the iPad on they would have been able to examine it. They could have taken it apart and looked at the various materials and perform physical and chemical tests on them. They could open up some of the electronics and look at them with a microscope. The understanding of electricity, circuits, and electrical devices in the 1850s was developed enough to learn something from an iPad. Perhaps they could examine the glass face and learn about that. Perhaps they could learn about new manufacturing techniques by examining the way the device was assembled and formed. I think humans would be able to glean similar types of information from alien technology even if we weren't able to actual use it in its intended way.

Quite generous of you to assume the aliens are only (the equivalent of) ~150 years ahead of us. Would the ancient Egyptians have had as much success reverse engineering an iPad as some Victorian-era scientists?

It seems the crucial element (pardon the pun) is that they wouldn't know what to look for. The Victorians knew enough about chemistry that they could figure out the material composition of various components. And we similarly know how to enumerate all sorts of chemical and physical properties of any exotic materials and objects we might come across. But it's all based on our own patchwork model of the physical universe, which has plenty of gaps we know about, nevermind those we can't even imagine. We don't know what we don't know.

If we assume aliens are visiting then it's almost certain that their technology is thousands, if not millions, of years ahead of ours. And if we assume that follows an exponential curve (which may not be a valid assumption - we really only have ~200 years of history upon which we could base such a supposition), then it follows that their technology would be indecipherably complex for us to understand.

No, that does not follow.

You're arguing for a sort of technology threshold beyond which we cannot see (presumably within a reasonable time frame). However, which side of said threshold we are on, even for technology from a civilization a million years older, isn't clear. I am not convinced it can be clear, since we'd be arguing about properties of a hypothetical craft.

A time-based argument is probably not useful. The difference between ourselves and ancient Egyptians is huge, but it isn't from exponential change in technology over time. That change in technology was driven by (and drives) both our different (from the Egyptians') model of the world, and our ability to sense the world.

Consider a recovered alien ship hull. If it crashed in ancient Egypt, they might make use of the metals and conclude the ship was a god or its vessel cast down from the heavens. If it crashed in the modern United States, we could figure out the chemical makeup of it, test its properties, hypothesize about how it works, and try to recreate it. All of that could wind up being incredibly valuable, even if we couldn't recreate the shell itself.

Any alien civilisation, unless it's within our very solar system and we've failed to detect it which seems thoroughly unlikely, has visited us from another star system. If not FTL, they have the means to travel across light years of distance and are capable of preserving themselves for the trip if it's a long one and folding space if it's a "short" trip. That kind of technology to do either is still beyond us despite all the advancements we've made in the last 100 years

I would posit it's not even Victorian era scientists looking at an iPad. It's like presenting an iPad to pre-agriculture humans. We might not even fathom how it works or what it's even supposed to do when our frame of reference is so far behind technologically

All of that is valid points. But if the USA has retrieved crashed spacecraft then what the hell are these guys doing crashing in the first place? Humans barely lose any important spacecraft to crashes and we've only been playing this game for about 50 years or so.

> if the government is forced to reveal it

The government isn't even revealing the existence of search-warrant-type documents. Who do you imagine would have the ability to compel the revelation of a secret of this magnitude?

Congress could pass a law requiring it to be revealed, the president could order it, leaking of additional information could cause public outcry leading to one of the above.

I'm using 'forced' in the sense of 'circumstances cause it to become necessary to do', not 'some more powerful entity will make them do it'.

I don't think the people allegedly involved in this alleged coverup have shown any respect for laws or norms. They can just keep lying and obfuscating. The only way they would ever disclose anything is if they wanted to.

We can't even hold some NIH administrators accountable for funding research that led to a pandemic. It's laughably naive to think that we could hold accountable, nevermind investigate, whatever faceless perpetrators are responsible for a government program cloaked in so much secrecy that not even presidents have been aware of it.

The craft might also have had a contained self-destruct mechanism.

The mid-19th century would make eventual headway with an iPad, but not much if all they were left with was the remnants of one that had been vaporized.

> no legal pathway to introduce to the public

So, DARPA doesn't exist, and it can't put out calls for things it'd like developed in certain areas? /s

I mean, it doesn't really take much thinking at all to figure out ways to introduce "future generation" technology that's not going to raise many eyebrows.

You're assuming they've been able to figure anything out and are just sitting on it. If tech from an interstellar craft is here on Earth it's so far beyond anything we can make that we probably don't have a chance of figuring it out. It'd be like the first Europeans to reach America giving the natives guns and asking them to duplicate them, they don't even have the ability to smelt iron so it's just not going to happen and just having a gun isn't going to advance any of their other tech in the least.

Whoa, that's far from true.

They would not be able to duplicate an AK-47 as-is, no. Their reverse-engineering efforts of its components would absolutely advance all of their other tech, even if none of it ever produced a working firearm.

The gun is inspiration-- an outcome to work towards. Producing gunpowder and trying to create a musket out of reeds may not work out, but would have led to their independent discovery of fireworks.

Without knowing what gunpowder is, can you discover how to make it just by looking at a sample if you are a stone age tribe? The only part of it you'll be able to identify is the charcoal. The other components are going to be unknown to you and besides that they are so finely milled into the powder that they are inseparable without techniques for decanting and knowing that you had to evaporate the water to get the salt out of it.

Same with the steel, they'd have to identify that it was a type of iron but before that they'd have to know what iron was. They had no metallurgy so the chances of that happening are extremely slim. Iron ore looks nothing like iron metal. They'd probably need to discover other metals like copper first to develop smelting techniques and nothing in the gun is going to teach them how to find, mine and smelt copper or iron.

I agree, but that's the point-- they're going to try a lot of things to achieve those ends. They may not create a single component of a functional firearm, but they're going to develop a lot of unrelated technology in trying. Even if we never made it to space, the attempt would still have given us Velcro.

I don't think that would be the case for being presented with such a big discontinuity. Comparing it to the space race isn't accurate because while we hadn't achieved spaceflight before we had pretty much mastered atmospheric flight and were using turbojet engines and rocket powered planes to reach the stratosphere and even the mesosphere before the first man reached orbit. We were steadily going higher and higher so reaching orbit was the next step in our progression. Even if you gave a modern rocket engine to someone in 1940 their society would understand almost all of what went into it. Go back further to 1840 and their engineers would be amazed at the strength of the materials but they would recognize a combustion chamber, valves, fuel tanks and even the wiring. In 1740 they would still probably have enough knowledge of fluid dynamics to deduce how it worked although the concept of combining oxidizers and fuel would be foreign to them, though only for another 30 years. Even as you push it back further and further people would still recognize that it was made of some type of metal and could understand that liquid or gas could flow through it and burn and they could probably build a very crude and simplified copy that used the basic principles. The point is that even bronze age civilization was far more advanced than people who had no metallurgy. There are incredibly difficult things you need to learn to go from zero to having any of the components that make up a gun and none of that knowledge is encoded in the gun itself. It's just not obvious to someone with no information about how gunpowder or iron are made how you would go about obtaining and processing the raw materials. It's probably even completely counter-intuitive that you would make something like iron from stone or that you have to burn the stone for a long time at a very high heat. Who would even think of that in a stone age society? The best guess as to how it was invented is by accident and observation. Having a chunk of metal won't give you that insight.

That being said and all, who knows what people could learn from say... the equivalent of the ashtrays, doorknobs, toilets (etc) in hypothetical alien vehicle(s).

Wouldn't have to be the biggest challenges getting solved right away. Alien "mundane, old crap" would probably turn out pretty useful too. :D

Sorry, I think I still just have to disagree. Look at what a car or modern ship is made of. Nothing in it could be reproduced by a stone age civilization. They could maybe make a wheel out of wood which would be a technology they didn't have but honestly I'm inclined to believe the reason why pre-animal-husbandry civilizations didn't use the wheel is because it's mostly useless with nothing to pull it. You really need the wheel plus draft animals plus roads to actually do anything otherwise the terrain is just too rough for a person to pull or push a small cart very far and it's easier to just use a frame pack or basket on your head or back.

I think that would all depend on how advanced this hypothetical tech is, and the timeframe in which someone wants it known to the public. DARPA may not provide enough cover for sufficiently advanced discoveries that cannot be explained without raising bigger questions.

It could also be a misinformation campaign meant for adversaries to make it appear that these hypothetical discoveries are backed by a source that may potentially yield more.

Beyond this, perhaps we now have evidence that adversaries reverse engineering the same tech are ahead of us, and enlisting the broader scientific community is now the primary goal.

And again, I’m not saying these are likely explanations. But in the unlikely event that we’re really talking about alien tech, they seem plausible.

There is also that fermi paradox resolution that basically says the same tech that unlocks infinite energy also unlocks the ability to destroy ourselves. So in theory there could be good reasons for avoiding commercialization of highly advanced technology, if it means that within a century some guy on the street could build an apparatus that destroys the planet in an industrial accident.

AI could unlock the ability to destroy ourselves and we've commercialized that highly advanced technology but it sure didn't stop the majority of people from wondering "should". :P

If they had this technology I'd assume there would be no point of revealing it, since you'd lose the advantage of secrecy over it for no good reason. The US military is capable enough against other nations with conventional technology. I'd expect if this tech were employed in war it would be in defense of the planet itself.

Why wouldn't the government just announce that the new tech was created in any of 1000 labs? I am sure there is a scientist somewhere willing to take credit can get a nobel prize. Or just say it was discovered by Darpa, don't ask questions but here is how it works?

This was my first thought as well, and I think there are a number of possible reasons:

- The tech is so far beyond our own that it would be unreasonable to claim it was developed in secret labs within plausible timeframes

- They know it exists, but don’t know how it works, and there are growing concerns about adversaries beating us to that understanding

- They believe adversaries have already figured things out or have surpassed our progress, and there is growing urgency to drum up public support for another space race type of research project

That's an interesting thought experiment.

Any technology that much more advanced than our own would require intermediary technologies before we could replicate it. If you took a car back to ancient Rome, they wouldn't be able to replicate it in one step even if they understood it, because you need sufficiently refined fuel, metallurgy, manufacturing precision, etc.

The technological baseline needed to rollout any wildly advanced technology would necessarily lead to an incremental advancement before we got to the end result, and each step would be a plausibly "natural" advancement on current technology.

There doesn't seem to be any particular place where a bunch of wild advancements are emerging from, which leads to a few likely possibilities: we haven't found alien technology; we have, but it's so advanced that we haven't cracked the surface yet; or we have, and have cracked the surface, and are replicating it, but they're doing a very good job keeping it secret. I don't think it's possible to keep the lid on something that big, and space is so big that I'm very inclined towards the first one.

> If you took a car back to ancient Rome, they wouldn't be able to replicate it in one step even if they understood it, because you need sufficiently refined fuel, metallurgy, manufacturing precision, etc.

A bicycle is an even better example. It is 100% understandable to a Roman just via looking and touching, but replicating a bicycle in Rome isn't as easy as it looks. The chain alone is a problem.

Why would the chain be a problem? The Romans could make metal rods, rivets, and some of their finer metalwork is crafted with more precision than any bicycle chain.

The real difference is that it would take an army of ancient craftsmen to make one bike.

The real distinguishing factor with modernity is mass manufacturing and precision at scale.

Even moreso income inequality and competition with slavery.

Any roman who could afford a bicycle would rightly think it was rubbish compared to a horse. All this expense just to propel myself around?!

The same goes for most modern conveniences. Even the best modern dishwasher is less efficient than a human slave doing the same task, if you're indifferent to the suffering of the slave, as the Romans were.

> "They believe adversaries have already figured things out or have surpassed our progress, and there is growing urgency to drum up public support for another space race type of research project"

I would vote for this one, but this hypothesis doesn't need the ET part.

Supposedly a few pieces of technology that we use in military and everyday use were created using alien technology. Stealth fighters and holograms. But I have read the book about the engineering/creation of the f-117 stealth fighter at skunkworks and nothing in that airplane doesn't seem like it could be created using currently understood scientific principles. One thing that did stand out was the timeline from creation to delivery was very short, also the plane cannot fly using just human piloting, a advanced computer must make micro adjustments to the crafts trajectory every second or the plane crashes. This was done in the late 70s so that seems extremely advanced for back then so who knows.

There is not a single invention out in the world today that came from alien technology, that came out of left field, or has no paper trail of terrestrial origin. Holography for example has been a hot topic since the 1600s, combine holography with the invention of photography and you get holograms.

> Holography for example has been a hot topic since the 1600s

I can't figure out what you mean by this, unless you're referring to Pepper's ghost which is not a hologram at all. If you photograph a Pepper's ghost illusion you get a regular photograph, not a hologram.

>Why wouldn't the government just announce that the new tech was created in any of 1000 labs?

Because the type of exotic field propulsion these things are using is so far beyond the current state of the art it wouldn't be remotely plausible.

It would be like going from vacuum tubes to 3nm EUV in a single step, no one would believe you.

> If such analysis unlocks technology breakthroughs of the kind that would solve say, energy problems, the government now has the problem of sitting on secrets that it has no legal pathway to introduce to the public, and no way to explain without somehow coming clean.

They would just release it and come clean. No one would be mad that we suddenly have near-magical solutions to energy problems.

What you're describing is essentially what happened with the Manhattan Project, which was a tightly guarded military secret. But once it became clear there were civilian applications, they stood up the Atomic Energy Commission and helped the rest of the country get to work on nuclear energy.

If it is real, then there's probably a billion self-replicating alien robots in the oceans already converting the earth to paperclips without our realizing it. There will be a trillion before we notice, and then we'll just get wiped out. No actual aliens will ever visit earth, just autonomous drone swarms trying to keep us from becoming properly space faring. After all, if we ever get to be properly space faring, we might interfere with it's paperclip goal

I would think that knowledge of ETs would be very destabilizing for our society. Why go into work the next day if there are literal ETs visiting our planet? Why pay taxes? Why fight for generals who have lied to you? Why worship your god? Especially if its a truth that has been kept secret for so long, that would be particularly damning for the legitimacy of current governments of the world in the eyes of most people, I would assume.

On the other hand, if we have our hands on ET craft, you'd have to imagine there are some capitalists who would like to profit hand over fist over whatever this technology might offer, people who aren't well leveraged for this revolution be damned and left to fight amongst themselves while your cabal maintains the largest technological advantage relative to other groups in human history. We have plenty of examples of capitalists profiteering at the expense of humans and the earth today.

This is all speculation of course, who knows what is happening.

> I would think that knowledge of ETs would be very destabilizing for our society. Why go into work the next day if there are literal ETs visiting our planet? Why pay taxes? Why fight for generals who have lied to you? Why worship your god?

Maybe I'm being naive, but unless there was an imminent invasion, I don't think it would change most lives at all in any significant way.

You go to work because you need to eat and in order to eat you need money from working. You pay your taxes because there are penalties for not doing so. Generals and politicians already lie to everyone, so you keep fighting their wars regardless. None of these change for anyone unless there's some breakdown in society from some external cause, such as an invasion or war.

The only one of those that has any real merit in my mind is that it would probably cause some people to question religion. But the opposite could also be true and the religious types might herald it as evidence that there is a god because only a god could conceive of such technology.

I'm sorry, but this would be an entire paradigm shift of how we see ourselves as a species. To think people would show up to work on monday I think is uncertain. We would be going from a millenia of human primacy on this planet to having these unknown apex predators lurking with unknown intentions. It's so completely unprecedented that it would be hard to imagine there wouldn't be social unrest, and major dissatisfaction with governments that have chosen to lie to the people they allegedly serve and represent. You might start to question who really runs the world, if some secret cabal had been able to keep the greatest secret of all time a secret for decades, and make decisions for the entire planet independent of our supposed democratic process.

If any of that were true, this "secret cabal" that really runs the world wouldn't have allowed these things to be revealed in the first place. If they did, they're either inept because they couldn't see the scenario coming that you did or they don't actually control as much as you are suggesting they would (or don't exist at all).

This just comes across as conspiracy mongering. Yes, there will be people who think like that but those people already think like that. There wouldn't be some mass collapse in society or government. The most that would happen is people would be interested in the information released, acknowledge the government has secrets just like they did yesterday, and move on with life.

What are you smoking where there's a clear line from "this thing crashed in the desert 50 years ago, we still know basically nothing about it" to everyone becoming an atheist and tax evader?

Alien intelligence would be one of the most important discoveries of our species but you still have to wake up the next morning and go to work.

A real eye opener regarding this has been the ongoing war in Ukraine. For some reason I always had this picture of war being people constantly hiding in bunkers, looting and stealing in a sort of apocalyptic doomsday prepper way, whoever remains working in tank factories around the clock, that sort of thing.

But no, their entire country is being blown up on a daily basis, apartments being hit by cruise missiles, streets being shelled and people just go to work and school or whatever like it's business as usual. I guess in the end, what else can you really do? Life is banal.

Like if the imminent threat of grisly death doesn't get people to stop living in a society then literally nothing else will. Not aliens, not AGI, not the return of Jesus, not even everyone magically turning into frogs. Well ok that last one might do it.

Their entire country is being blown up on a daily basis,

That's the thing - except for places very close to the front lines, only very tiny portion of the country is getting hit.

So no, it's not "the entire country, on a daily basis".

You are correct though that the media loves to paint it as a 24x7 apocalyptic hellscape (mostly via selective imagery, independent of what is actually said in the articles). That's how they get your anxiety molecules jumping, and thus make their money, after all.

>For some reason I always had this picture of war being people constantly hiding in bunkers, looting and stealing in a sort of apocalyptic doomsday prepper way, whoever remains working in tank factories around the clock, that sort of thing.

For cities actively under siege, that's exactly how it is though. Read about St. Petersburg or the battle of Vukovar.

> Life is banal.

I wouldn't word it like that

Why not?

> banal: so lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring.

People going to work every day while there are bombs dropping, in the middle of a war, trying to keep the exchange of goods going so they can pay for the war and to survive, is not banal. It's not obvious that people would go to work in a war zone, and it's not boring, and in many times in history people did not go to work during a war (except for farmers, whose lives depended on it)

They didn't say war is banal, they said life is - which it is. Going to work every day, going to the gym, making dinner, doing laundry. Most of it's boring, and a lot of it you have to do whether or not something 100 miles away is getting bombed.

I'm not smoking anything. I'm merely speculating on what I think is a rather interesting hypothetical situation. It's generally interesting enough to sell millions of copies of books and thousands of movie tickets on similar subjects, after all. I just think being told that you've been lied to for decades, your elected leaders don't really call the shots but some classified group does unilaterally for the entire planet, there's some unknown creature potentially at the top of the food chain prowling the planet for the first time ever, and now you have to just suck it up and go back to flipping burgers to be rent burdened, is a really hard pill to swallow. For reference, we've gotten close to civil unrest in the past, when it became clear with the Pentagon Papers to the public that they were lied to about Vietnam being winnable and the scope of the conflict, and public opposition eventually forced the war to end. People were facing conscription and burning their draft cards. To think the working public today, as squeezed as they are by the elites, might face extraterrestrial threat and the greatest lie of all time and just clock in the next morning like nothing has changed, I think, is a bit of a gamble.

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