Reverse-Engineering

[Thanas]

But sometimes inventions are just a matter of the right idea coming along. Imagine sending a Gutenberg printing press back to Ancient Rome in 1 A.D. Its value would be recognized immediately, and I'm guessing that it wouldn't be too complex for the Roman's ironworking capabilities to build a replica. They could probably do the same with Galileo's telescope or a medieval windmill.

Or stirrups. But that's only the case when the invention in question is exceedingly simple. It stands to reason that a very simple design would be relatively simple to reverse engineer.

This assumes of course that stirrups would be necessary - which is doubtful considering the saddle constructions of the romans which pretty much eliminate the need for stirrups. At least with regard to ancient warfare - it wasn't until the dark ages that European horse breeding and the event of large cavalry armies meant that one needed stirrups, and even then the roman heavy cavalry did pretty well.

That, and you will need ALLOT of paper available to make it useful. Did the Romans have that?

The Romans did in fact, have a great deal of paper available. Considering they were one of the most literate societies in the world at the time.

No roman ever did use paper. That technology was only available after the Battle of Talas in 751 AD.

The romans used papyrus, parchment or vellum.

[Zixinus]

The point I was thinking was whether they can make enough paper to make printing worth it? The point of printing is to make books or any written document cheaper, but that can't happen if the paper is very expensive.

Though, I'd like to know: could the same technology be used for something else, like clay tablets?

[Academia Nut]

Fascinating discussion, and it brings to mind the question of not just the science and capacity of would be reverse engineers, but also how they would go about looking at things. For example, if the HMS Victorious mysteriously appeared in Portsmouth in 1840, adrift and without crew, how would the British respond? Would they even be able to get the hatch open? Would they even be able to stop it from drifting? Assuming they do get in without causing critical damage, how would they go about searching the ship. What would their social response to this sort of thing be, which is probably just as important as their technological response. Shep suggested that they might start by figuring out all the documentation, organizing it by where they found it, but would they even think to do something like that?

Of course, just by going with aerius' example, a diagram like that might as well have been Egyptian hieroglyphs without the Rosetta stone to anyone before the 1940s-50s, and I'm fairly certain that's just the circuit diagram to a simple audio amplifier. It would be interesting to see which words they might be able to guess at (right or wrong) from how they were constructed, and which words have drifted or even inverted in meaning over the years. The aforementioned change in meaning for torpedoes would be one issue. But as another example, any mention of the word 'computer' would throw them off as a computer was a person, not a machine, so confusion as to what they are even looking at even if they had the manual would abound.

And that's with a shared language to look over the labels and manuals. I can only imagine the headaches if a Soviet Akula or worse a Chinese Type 094 (to pull random nuclear powered ballistic missile subs off Wiki) washed up in Portsmouth instead of a Vanguard. Technical manuals in modern Russian or Mandarin would be a nightmare for 19th century English speakers. Of course, that would also bring up all sorts of wide ranging political issues. How would the world respond to such a strange sort of ship showing up, especially if it was clearly made by a recognizable culture at the time? As Shep mentioned (if true) reverse engineering can have wide ranging affects if it damages local original engineering efforts. What would the politics of finding some sort of clearly super advanced technology from a future culture be? I can only faintly picture the political tangle if the British obtained a nuclear sub (especially a Russian one) during the Great Game.

Damn, now there's the urge to actually have a story written that would explore all the interesting little details of something like that happening, but I know far too little about nuclear submarines or 19th century British naval, engineering and related social practices to get it right. Perhaps I will pass the seed on to someone more knowledgeable.

[Samuel]

I believe the premise is similar to Mike's fan fiction when a ISD pops up in the Alpha Quadrent. Stuart has been making piecemeal attempts- you think we can get him to make a whole story out of it?

[Sky Captain]

I`m now thinking of how we at our present technological and scientific knowledge level would handle highly advanced alien spacecraft if one crashed on Earth and survived relatively intact, but crew died so there is no one who could potentially help to understand ship`s systems. One of the first things I think would occur to us given how energy intensive any kind of interstellar travel we could think of is, a question what if aboard that ship are few dozen tons of antimatter or something even more energetic would come up very quickly.

I can imagine in this situation a dilemma could form up because certainly our scientists would want to take that ship apart to at least try to understand how it works while they would know perfectly well that monkeying around with technology centuries or millenia ahead of our time designed to handle astronomical energy amounts could easily end up in a huge disaster.

[Samuel]

I`m now thinking of how we at our present technological and scientific knowledge level would handle highly advanced alien spacecraft if one crashed on Earth and survived relatively intact, but crew died so there is no one who could potentially help to understand ship`s systems. One of the first things I think would occur to us given how energy intensive any kind of interstellar travel we could think of is, a question what if aboard that ship are few dozen tons of antimatter or something even more energetic would come up very quickly.

I can imagine in this situation a dilemma could form up because certainly our scientists would want to take that ship apart to at least try to understand how it works while they would know perfectly well that monkeying around with technology centuries or millenia ahead of our time designed to handle astronomical energy amounts could easily end up in a huge disaster.

I'm thinking something that kills all the crew might breech any containment field for the reactor, making the issue of a UFO moot. Not to mention that I doubt a purpose spacecraft could survive re-entry. Still, if we get it intact, we should have an advantage- we know alot more about physics. We won't be able to reverse engineer alot of the stuff because we don't know how it was made- not having a common language makes things harder. Or common body plan.

[phongn]

Until the late 1960s the USSR had a thriving computer industry with innovative hardware designers, programmers, and users. Then the KGB stole essentially everything there was to know about the IBM 360 series of mainframes. The leadership assumed that IBM technology was necessarily superior to the homegrown kind and imposed it wholesale, killing off just about all indigenous innovation. This step more than any other assured the entire Communist bloc permanent cybernetic inferiority right through the Fall. They never really progressed beyond the IBM 360 and 370 series machines, and essentially missed the personal computer revolution until the West wisely began letting them import machines.

How much is that true?

The S/360 clone was called the ES EVM. The USSR also reverse-engineered Western minicomputers under the SM EVM project (including the PDP-11) - though they weren't pure copies. I think they seriously harmed their computer industry when they made the decision to reverse-engineer Western designs: they had some very sophisticated designs (e.g. the BESM-6).

However, I'm not sure if they would've been able to join the PC revolution, which ever since has been the primary driver for damn near the whole industry.

[Stuart]

Still, if we get it intact, we should have an advantage- we know alot more about physics.

Unfortunately, that, right there, is the deadly trap. We don't know a lot more about physics, we know a lot more about our physics. We know absolutely nothing about their physics and since it features a working interstellar drive, by definition their physics is totally different from our physics. We can take another example from the Victorian era; in the 1860s it was a quite common saying that physics was a dead field, everything that could be discovered had been and that all that was left was simply building things bigger and better. They knew their physics very well but they didn't know our physics at all. They didn't even suspect it existed.

We'll look at what arrives with our eyes and interpret it using our knowledge and understanding. That's what'll lead us to do the equivalent of taking the reactor fuel rods out and passing them around the audience for inspection.

[Bilbo]

Still, if we get it intact, we should have an advantage- we know alot more about physics.

Unfortunately, that, right there, is the deadly trap. We don't know a lot more about physics, we know a lot more about our physics. We know absolutely nothing about their physics and since it features a working interstellar drive, by definition their physics is totally different from our physics. We can take another example from the Victorian era; in the 1860s it was a quite common saying that physics was a dead field, everything that could be discovered had been and that all that was left was simply building things bigger and better. They knew their physics very well but they didn't know our physics at all. They didn't even suspect it existed.

We'll look at what arrives with our eyes and interpret it using our knowledge and understanding. That's what'll lead us to do the equivalent of taking the reactor fuel rods out and passing them around the audience for inspection.

So if an interstellar space ship crashed on Earth today (dont ask em how we knew it was interstellar capable) the biggest scientific gain for humanity might be the simple knowledge gained that some sort of FTL travel really is possible.

Kind of like the Dyson line in Terminator 2. He talks about the chip and arm they had. They were broken but what little they could study gave them hints to begin research in directions that no one had considered before then.

[Stuart]

So if an interstellar space ship crashed on Earth today (dont ask em how we knew it was interstellar capable) the biggest scientific gain for humanity might be the simple knowledge gained that some sort of FTL travel really is possible.

That's probably a very fair statement; it would tell us, very clearly, how little we knew. It might, if we are lucky, provide a few pointers on how to get there but we'd have to make the jump under our own steam.

[Xon]

Reverse engineering hardware is hard, software is harder because you need access to the equivelent hardware as well and a fair amount on the enviroment in which the software was developed. Software controll systems are critical to many things we take for granted today.

[Thanas]

The point I was thinking was whether they can make enough paper to make printing worth it? The point of printing is to make books or any written document cheaper, but that can't happen if the paper is very expensive.

I doubt it. Vellum is quite expensive, and Papyrus itself is quite uneven...not what you want in printing.

Though, I'd like to know: could the same technology be used for something else, like clay tablets?

No. Pressing clay tablets = bad idea.

[Sky Captain]

We'll look at what arrives with our eyes and interpret it using our knowledge and understanding. That's what'll lead us to do the equivalent of taking the reactor fuel rods out and passing them around the audience for inspection.

I`m thinking in such a situation we, given our knowledge that seemingly harmless things can be very deadly, would assume that ship contains technology that can be extremely dangerous if handled improperly. Of course there would be no way to know which items are harmless and which items can cause disaster if mishandled. Smart thing might be to move that ship (if it`s small and light enough to be transportable) to a location as far away from major population centers as possible perhaps some remote Pacific island and study it there.

[Wyrm]

I`m thinking in such a situation we, given our knowledge that seemingly harmless things can be very deadly, would assume that ship contains technology that can be extremely dangerous if handled improperly. Of course there would be no way to know which items are harmless and which items can cause disaster if mishandled. Smart thing might be to move that ship (if it`s small and light enough to be transportable) to a location as far away from major population centers as possible perhaps some remote Pacific island and study it there.

Well, that's the rub, isn't it: What is the proper way to handle the technology? Is the Pacific even far enough away to prevent serious consequences if it does go off under human meddling? Given the immense energies required for a decently fast Alcubierre drive would make the Galactic Empire green with envy, thinking that a Pacific island is far enough away in case of a disaster is hopelessly optimistic at the very least.

[Sky Captain]

I`m thinking in such a situation we, given our knowledge that seemingly harmless things can be very deadly, would assume that ship contains technology that can be extremely dangerous if handled improperly. Of course there would be no way to know which items are harmless and which items can cause disaster if mishandled. Smart thing might be to move that ship (if it`s small and light enough to be transportable) to a location as far away from major population centers as possible perhaps some remote Pacific island and study it there.

Well, that's the rub, isn't it: What is the proper way to handle the technology? Is the Pacific even far enough away to prevent serious consequences if it does go off under human meddling? Given the immense energies required for a decently fast Alcubierre drive would make the Galactic Empire green with envy, thinking that a Pacific island is far enough away in case of a disaster is hopelessly optimistic at the very least.

Yeah that`s right Pacific island won`t be far enough if worst thing happens and ship blows with billion teraton explosion. But what are our choices. We would have to deal with that ship one way or other. Leaving it where it crashed and doing nothing also has dangers that some sort of containment can fail on it`s own and cause big BOOM even without our intervention.

[Surlethe]

No. Pressing clay tablets = bad idea.

Why is that? It seems that impressing on clay makes sense, especially since cuneiform was originally impressed on clay. The only problem I see is that clay is not easily transportable.

[Thanas]

No. Pressing clay tablets = bad idea.

Why is that? It seems that impressing on clay makes sense, especially since cuneiform was originally impressed on clay. The only problem I see is that clay is not easily transportable.

That is the major problem of it. I am sorry, I should have elaborated a bit more. With a world as the romans, you need easily transportable materials. You cannot do this with clay. Furthermore, the romans used stone tablets for permanent recordkeeping.

Then of course there is the problem of the value of the clay tablets. In order to survive, clay will need to compete against papyrus and vellum. I fail to see a major advantage in that regard.

More likely, what would happen is that vellum and papyrus is used instead, resulting in lower circulation rates.

[Junghalli]

We know absolutely nothing about their physics and since it features a working interstellar drive, by definition their physics is totally different from our physics.

That depends on exactly what sort of "starship" we're talking about. An STL starship using some kind of fusion or antimatter drive or Bussard ramjet would still fit nicely into our physics. The technology would be way beyond us, but we'd be able to tell what it was and what it did, and have some realistic idea of the risks involved in tampering with the drive (relatively nil in the case of a fusion drive, horrendous in the case of an antimatter drive).

If it's FTL then yeah, we're like seventeenth century people trying to figure out a television set and we're probably better off not touching anything we don't understand.

It seems like a good rule of thumb here is if you don't recognize a piece of machinery you need to be scared of opening it.

[Stuart]

It seems like a good rule of thumb here is if you don't recognize a piece of machinery you need to be scared of opening it.

That's a good one-line summary of six pages of discussion

[Academia Nut]

The fact that we're developed enough to realize that "Don't poke it with a stick if you don't know what it is" is sound policy when dealing with the unknown I think speaks volumes about how far we've come scientifically, especially since "Poke it with a stick if you don't know what it is" was a sound development over "Poke it with your finger if you don't know what it is".

[Aranfan]

The fact that we're developed enough to realize that "Don't poke it with a stick if you don't know what it is" is sound policy when dealing with the unknown I think speaks volumes about how far we've come scientifically, especially since "Poke it with a stick if you don't know what it is" was a sound development over "Poke it with your finger if you don't know what it is".

For some reason, this paragraph had me on the floor laughing for two minutes straight.

[Academia Nut]

For some reason, this paragraph had me on the floor laughing for two minutes straight.

Glad I could be of amusement, although really it just sums up what we know. If we don't know what something is, then it must be so far outside our understanding that it would do Really Bad Things (TM) to us if we screwed up while tinkering with it with our current understanding of the universe. We know enough to know just how dangerous not knowing is.

The previous paradigm of 'poke it with a stick' is really just a way of saying "There are things that can kick us really hard if we poke at them, so we should put distance between us and what we're studying so that we don't die of radiation poisoning/steam explosion/electrocution/disease/etc". I suppose I could add on that even 'poke it with your finger' is an improvement on "If you don't know what it is, don't poke it" (ironic since that's the last stage as well) just that with that version it is born not out of knowledge that you could accidentally locally rewrite h_bar and uncollapse the wavefunction of Europe, but fear of the unknown and a refusal to take risks to learn something new.

[Darth Wong]

It seems like a good rule of thumb here is if you don't recognize a piece of machinery you need to be scared of opening it.

That's a good one-line summary of six pages of discussion

Hell, that's a pretty good rule even today, with modern equipment. Lots of idiots get killed because they blunder across equipment that they don't understand. Remember the guy in Mexico who opened up a piece of illegally dumped obsolete medical imaging equipment and let his kids play with the strange substance they found in a canister inside? The whole family died because the guy was an imbecile.

Besides, even if our primitive engineers could open up the equipment without hurting themselves, there are still the enormous hurdles to comprehension that we've already mentioned, and that's before we even get to the duplication stage or the modification stage.