How does finding an alien spaceship help research&science?

[Lord of the Abyss]

Another possibility. Suppose we analyze the alien's genetics and find that while being obviously anatomically alien they also have DNA and a common genetic ancestry with Earth life. At that point, you've just demonstrated strong evidence for the old speculation of panspermia; while probably not of practical use that's certainly interesting scientifically. And it would tell us to keep an eye out for evidence of ancient visits by some other alien species. Especially off Earth, since it's unlikely anything left here has survived hundreds of millions of years.

[Darth Wong]

The development of all of these technologies is very well documented and entirely logical. AFAIK there are no apparent 'missing links' in any of our non-military technology (though in many cases some of the key steps were previously classified). I can't imagine why you'd need this conspiracy theory to explain anything - only someone profoundly ignorant of the history of recent technological development could even contemplate it.

That would be an excellent argument if conspiracy theories were actually about explanations. They're not, a conspiracy theory is supposed to make the proponent feel smart and good about him/herself.

Sort of. Conspiracy theories are about explanations the same way creationism is about explanation: they have a vision of the way they want the world to be and they construct their explanations with that in mind. They're not scientific explanations, but they are explanations - in the same sense that Zeus is an explanation for thunder & lightning.

My preferred way of saying this is that conspiracy theories and creationism theories are not theories: they are stories. There's a difference between a story and a theory.

[Isolder74]

My preferred way of saying this is that conspiracy theories and creationism theories are not theories: they are stories. There's a difference between a story and a theory.

That idea makes sense. After all unless it's their conspiracy they don't like it. It can't be crazy guys in a 'cave' it HAS to be their uber super Illuminati Conspiracy and can't be anything else. It has to be the EVIL government rather then some rich dude in the desert.

[Darth Wong]

My preferred way of saying this is that conspiracy theories and creationism theories are not theories: they are stories. There's a difference between a story and a theory.

That idea makes sense. After all unless it's their conspiracy they don't like it. It can't be crazy guys in a 'cave' it HAS to be their uber super Illuminati Conspiracy and can't be anything else. It has to be the EVIL government rather then some rich dude in the desert.

That's one of the distinctions: a story has all sorts of unnecessary detail which does absolutely nothing to help explain the mystery in question. Even if one is unsure of certain things, one does not concoct an entire story complete with villains and/or heroes to explain it: one would normally just propose a mechanism and then look for ways of testing that mechanism.

Look at creationism for example: they wish to propose that life had some kind of mysterious source other than chemical reactions and sunlight. OK fine, so if it were a theory, they would attempt to define that source in such a way that there would be a testable mechanism. But instead, they leap to the assumption that this source is omniscient, omnipotent, planned everything out, and is highly intelligent. Why? How do those assumptions help? The answer is that they don't help at all. They don't explain anything. They simply happen to be part of the story. Similarly, why do they assume the "intelligent designer" has good reasons for whatever he does? Why don't they suspect that he's evil? Or a soulless machine? Or extra-cosmological scientists who created us as an experiment for unfathomable reasons of their own? The answer is that this story is about hero-worship, not terror.

If it was a real theory, it would not include all of these unnecessary and arbitrary elements. It would only include the minimum necessary to explain any gaps in our knowledge. Unfortunately, that's the one thing their so-called "theory" does not contain; it seems to contain everything else.

Similarly, look at 9/11 tower destruction theories. They want to believe something other than the planes caused the buildings to collapse. OK fine, let them bark up that tree if they want, but why must they leap to bizarre stories about government agents and secret operations? None of that is necessitated by the idea that another mechanism was fully or partially responsible. Why don't they suspect that Al-Quaeda planted a bomb in the basement in order to hasten the building's collapse, as a secondary part of their operation? Why leap to the US government as the culprit? Why not suspect that there was a flaw in the building construction, and that the blueprints don't reflect it because the building contractor covered it up? Why not suspect Martians? They create an incredibly open-ended doubt into which you could plug anything, and then they fill this void with (you guessed it) a story, with completely arbitrary elements.

[Surlethe]

Thanks, that's really an excellent way of packaging the point. I'll have to keep that in mind.

[Knife]

Plus he assumes that the only observation would be visual instead on any other type of sensor available with ease with our current level of technology. As if a Victorian scientist observing would have the same procedures as a modern day scientific observer.

[Tolya]

In a lot of cases, just seeing that something EXISTS would help. If England circa 1890 were to have an F-16 crash near Sussex, it would prove that powered flight IS possible and that more research should be done.

It also could be seen as evidence that powered flight ultimately leads to disaster And that we should stick to rail.

[Starglider]

It also could be seen as evidence that powered flight ultimately leads to disaster And that we should stick to rail.

The Victorians had fatal rail accidents on a regular basis (far more often on a passenger-mile basis than we do now), and that hardly slowed railroad expansion. So no, I don't think so.

[Broomstick]

It would probably be more appropriate to liken this to a Nimitz class aircraft carrier getting beached sans crew in ancient Rome.

While a lot of it is going to be pretty incomprehensible, there are a lot of personal items aboard a ship of such stature and I would imagine the same would be true of any alien craft intended to be crewed.

Just take your own room for a moment and pick out those items a roman would be able - with difficulty - to comprehend. My own analog watch is one example. It's clearly worn on the wrist, performs a simple, extremely rhythmic function and is marked with symbols. This would allow a potentially bright roman investigator to comprehend digital watches all the easier, and have a beginning of understanding of our math and from there, our language.

Actually, given that a fair number of watches and clocks even today use Roman numerals they might catch onto the concept pretty quick. The Romans did have clocks even if they were clumsy by our standards and would no doubt leap at a chance to reverse-engineer small portable ones. Between the increase in precision/small engineering with metal that would require and the sudden availability of accurate, portable timekeeping they could wind up making advances in navigation that didn't occur until Harrison invented his timepieces in the 1770's. For a far-flung empire that depended heavily on sea trade any advance in navigation could well be priceless, and even after the fall of Rome the technology could well be maintained.

How would the world be different if there was regular contact between Europe and the Americas before firearms gave the Europeans overwhelming tactical superiority?

This is ignoring potential books, technical manuals, and so on.

Not to mention things like photographs, mass-produced text, writing implements, cloth, new metal alloys (the Romans would have killed for what our common knives, forks, and spoons are made of)

Plastics will puzzle the hell out of them - they had nothing comparable - but our paper and glass would most likely be recognized as highly refined versions of what they already had.

Getting a "rosetta stone" for an Ancient Latin/Modern Language the Romans could use would be difficult, particularly for technical terms, but they would certainly recognize our alphabet. Internal combustion engines and steam driven machinery would give them some pause but there is no doubt that the Romans were accomplished engineers of their era and with time they probably could figure out how the engines worked. I'd expect them to figure out that modern body armor is, in fact, body armor. Firearms and such would take them a bit longer, and there would probably be some accidents along the way.

It would take them centuries to really understand the whole of the Nimitz, but they would definitely profit from even a slice of what was on board.

Unlike the hypothetical lost-in-time Nimitz, though, we probably would have no clue about alien writing - oh, we might recognize it as some sort of text, but is it an alphabet like Latin-descended languages use, ideograms like the Chinese favor, a syllabary like Cherokee or a mix like Japanese? Would the aliens wear clothes, and if they did, would we recognize them as such? (Well, maybe if we had a few bodies....) Is that bottle full of food, fuel or bath soap? (Keep in mind that there are substances such as alcohol that have multiple uses - we consume it, burn, and use it as a cleaning agent/degreaser) If we know the size and shape of the aliens that will help in analyzing the ship interior, but if their sensory systems are significantly different would we recognize their photographs or video displays, be able to hear what they use for audio? What if they kept scent replicators instead of family photos on their desk-equivalents?

What we would know is that we are NOT alone in the universe nor is our species uniquely intelligent. We'd know long-distance space travel is possible - the equivalent of the Romans discovering one of our aircraft and realizing powered flight is possible. Depending on what conditions are like inside the ship we might know that life is possible under radically different temperatures or pressures

Obviously, the longer we have the crashed ship the more we learn, but we learn something just by its mere existence.

[Broomstick]

It's also worth pointing out that we are living in an era of unprecedented high literacy levels. So high, in fact, that we take it for granted that everyone can read, even the lower class. For most of human history, this was far from the truth. In the Roman era, you probably would have been lucky to find one man in a town who knew how to read and write.

Actually, from the quantity of correspondence we have from Roman times it seems most towns DID have at least a few scribes who made a decent living writing things down and reading them back to people. The Romans, particularly by Imperial times, had a pretty sizable government bureaucracy and a tradition of written legal documents. They still had a very low literacy rate compared to our era, but among the upper classes some literacy nothing unusual unlike Medieval times when kings and nobles were more or less expected to be illiterate. Even illiterate Romans would most likely be able to recognize writing and could probably distinguish between Latin text, Egyptian, and Semetic writing systems even if they couldn't read them (I can't read Chinese or Korean, but I can identify if a text is one or the other). Romans encountering books written in English would not be able to identify the language but they would recognize the alphabet and know to take it to a scribe.

The Romans would probably be quite intrigued by the manner in which our books are constructed, puzzled as to how they are produced, fascinated by the quality of paper and stability of the inks, and dazzled by any color illustrations. Multiple copies of the identical text/photos would probably really stump them. Without our technology of chemical analysis, though, I don't think they could even start to reproduce the paper, ink, glass, alloys, and so forth that they would encounter on the Lost Nimitz. Artifacts from the ship would become highly prized, valuable relics.

But, again, our writing system is directly related to the ones the Romans used - with an alien spaceship we might recognize their text as writing (assuming their visual system work closely enough to ours) but we'd have no way to know how their writing system worked - alphabet, syllabary, ideograms, a combination...? What if they used a tactical system? Or relied more on audio recordings in a language pitched too high for us to hear without special machinery?

[Broomstick]

Why don't they suspect that Al-Quaeda planted a bomb in the basement in order to hasten the building's collapse, as a secondary part of their operation?

I actually asked a 9/11 conspiracy nut that once. The answer? The bomb in the basement in 1993 didn't cause the building to collapse so that couldn't be the answer.

(What? The bad guys couldn't build a bigger bomb by 2001?)

[Darmalus]

Getting a "rosetta stone" for an Ancient Latin/Modern Language the Romans could use would be difficult...

Actually, a Nimitz has a chapel, and in that chapel are bibles written in Hebrew and English (the pages are mirrored). As the Jews were part of the Roman Empire for quite a while, I have no doubt they would know how to read this and use that as their "rosetta stone". I'm sure there were similar English/Arabic Qurans on the shelves as well, but I didn't exactly do a search at the time.

[KrauserKrauser]

How would the world be different if there was regular contact between Europe and the Americas before firearms gave the Europeans overwhelming tactical superiority?

99% of the population still dies to disease except this time we can blame their dark skin as their failing for a few hundred more years until germ theory comes around.

[Broomstick]

Getting a "rosetta stone" for an Ancient Latin/Modern Language the Romans could use would be difficult...

Actually, a Nimitz has a chapel, and in that chapel are bibles written in Hebrew and English (the pages are mirrored). As the Jews were part of the Roman Empire for quite a while, I have no doubt they would know how to read this and use that as their "rosetta stone". I'm sure there were similar English/Arabic Qurans on the shelves as well, but I didn't exactly do a search at the time.

Wow - good catch. I hadn't thought of that. Technical terms would still be a problem, but a basic vocabulary would be supplied by that.

How would the world be different if there was regular contact between Europe and the Americas before firearms gave the Europeans overwhelming tactical superiority?

99% of the population still dies to disease except this time we can blame their dark skin as their failing for a few hundred more years until germ theory comes around.

Yes, there would still be massive die-offs from European-brought disease, but the survivors would be on a more equal footing with the invaders if they were predominantly Roman-level tech than if they were 1600's tech. Also keep in mind that the Romans were far more tolerant of other religions than the later Europeans. The Americas would still experience a massive population crash but a lot of tribes might wind up as viable cultures afterward instead of complete or near complete genocides.

[Adrian Laguna]

99% of the population still dies to disease except this time we can blame their dark skin as their failing for a few hundred more years until germ theory comes around.

I don't think it was that high a percentage. The majority of the population in most of Latin America are a mix of the natives and Spaniards, particularly in Mexico and the Andes, since those areas were very heavily populated. I've also seen some research that indicates that the disease that afflicted the Aztecs, at least, might have actually been local rather than introduced. A periodic plague that showed up every few generations, like the black death. Not sure how much traction that research got, but it looked pretty interesting. (A question that comes up immediately is why the Europeans weren't affected).

Also worth noting that it wasn't that the Spaniards just waltzed in, wowed the natives with their guns and horses, and then took over when everyone got sick and keeled-over. The Aztecs were right on the edge of civil war and the Incas actually having one when the Spaniards showed-up, and the leaders of the expeditions were savy enough to ruthlessly exploit the situation. More than 80,000 men laid siege to Tenochtitlan, only a thousand of those were Spaniards.

[NoXion]

Getting a "rosetta stone" for an Ancient Latin/Modern Language the Romans could use would be difficult...

Actually, a Nimitz has a chapel, and in that chapel are bibles written in Hebrew and English (the pages are mirrored). As the Jews were part of the Roman Empire for quite a while, I have no doubt they would know how to read this and use that as their "rosetta stone". I'm sure there were similar English/Arabic Qurans on the shelves as well, but I didn't exactly do a search at the time.

Wow - good catch. I hadn't thought of that. Technical terms would still be a problem, but a basic vocabulary would be supplied by that.

Aren't a lot of English technical terms derived from Latin/Ancient Greek? Therefore it shouldn't be that difficult for them to decipher such words.

[Samuel]

That might not help- for example, Hydrogen comes from Greek and means water creator. That is a little... unclear as to what the heck it is. Derived words are going to be so wildly divergent from their origional meaning to make decryption hard.

[KrauserKrauser]

I don't think it was that high a percentage. The majority of the population in most of Latin America are a mix of the natives and Spaniards, particularly in Mexico and the Andes, since those areas were very heavily populated. I've also seen some research that indicates that the disease that afflicted the Aztecs, at least, might have actually been local rather than introduced. A periodic plague that showed up every few generations, like the black death. Not sure how much traction that research got, but it looked pretty interesting. (A question that comes up immediately is why the Europeans weren't affected).

Also worth noting that it wasn't that the Spaniards just waltzed in, wowed the natives with their guns and horses, and then took over when everyone got sick and keeled-over. The Aztecs were right on the edge of civil war and the Incas actually having one when the Spaniards showed-up, and the leaders of the expeditions were savy enough to ruthlessly exploit the situation. More than 80,000 men laid siege to Tenochtitlan, only a thousand of those were Spaniards.

My quote on that one comes from the book 1491 and its claim that within the 400 years of discovery the Americas had experienced around a 99% population reduction due to the introduction of Eurpoean diseases.

It has quite compelling evidence with the descriptions of early visitors to the Mississippi Valley being amazed by the population density to accounts only decades later that claim the area to be deserted.

[Darth Wong]

The bigger problem for the Romans would be grokking the entire empirical scientific and specialist mindset which we take for granted and which is implicit in all of our scientific and technical writings.

Also, many of our technical manuals are incomprehensible even to most laypeople today. How much of a chance does the average primitive have of understanding them, even if he already knows the language (itself a huge assumption)?

They're not going to find a "Nuclear Physics for Dummies" book on the ship.

[Ghost Rider]

I'd like to point the discussion to the time we did discuss this.

The reason? Both Mike and Stuart made some very relevant points that people are glossing over. Reverse engineering is almost always misunderstood as some "Just poke around, we'll find something that works!".

[Isolder74]

They're not going to find a "Nuclear Physics for Dummies" book on the ship.

Even if they did it isn't going to help them that much. It is only going to help them define a few of the simpler concepts at best.

[Broomstick]

They're not going to find a "Nuclear Physics for Dummies" book on the ship.

Even if they did, I'm not sure how much good it would do them - I doubt they'd have the basic mental database of science and technical facts required to understand even that level, and in addition our mathematical notation system is completely different. While some algebra goes back to the ancient world calculus had to wait for Isaac Newton and even if they figured out the mathematics the periodic table and many of its elements would be completely unknown to Imperial Rome. Could they figure out Nuclear Physics for Dummies eventually? Sure. Eventually.

I agree with Mike that they biggest obstacle would be their lack of scientific approach to data gathering and problem solving, the "mindset" if you will. The Imperial Romans were just as smart as we are, but they didn't know as much about the world and, as already mentioned, tended to take a brute-force approach to problem-solving.

[Glass Pearl Player]

They're not going to find a "Nuclear Physics for Dummies" book on the ship.

Some declassified Navy manuals, including one "Nuclear Physics for Dummies"
The US Navy did (and most likely still does) write documents aimed at laymen, discussing topics like nuclear physics, weapons, ballistics etc, so that book certainly does exist. The question becomes if the ship has one of them in its library. (I'm afraid the answer from a knowledgeable person would be: "I can neither confirm nor deny if the ship carries such literature. But I can state with some degree of certainity that it is capable of doing so.")
Browsing through some of these - especially the ones on submarine operations - shows quickly how complex even a relatively small vessel like a WWII diesel submarine really is. The only technical components that do something the romans can understand at once are probably the ship hull, the rudders and maybe the screws, if someone bright remembers the Archimedian screw for comparision. The rest will be an enigma shrouded in mystery. For starters, the Nimitz has a nice big tower, but all windows are glassed. How is one supposed to shoot arrows through them? They know what plumbing is, but why by Neptune would one want to put plumbing on a ship? How does the captain communicate with the helmsman? By mail? (they will most likely locate the helmsman near the actual rudder machinery, but one likely can't see outside from there, nor from anywhere within convenient shouting distance. When will they figure out voice tubes?)
How is one supposed to see anything deep within the hull and do some work, as there are no torch holders? Etc etc until their heads spin...

[Ariphaos]

That's going too far. They might be able to figure out that it's a timekeeping device which uses foreign numerals. They might even be able to figure out our numeral system. That's pretty much it. Forget about learning anything substantial about our math.

There are multiple versions of them, a lot of them, and analog devices could be taken apart and analyzed with relative impunity. It may not help much, but it's better than nothing.

The biggest thing they'd learn from the beached carrier is that monstrous metallic sea-going vessels are possible. How long was it before mankind figured out that you could make a boat out of metal?

I was mostly thinking there might be enough batteries on board to get them to eventually figure out rudimentary electricity - copper is widespread and the concept of a wire won't escape them, and there will be thousands of batteries of different sorts on board, some of them replicable at a basic level.

Building steel ships requires the Bessemer process. They can't even get coke from coal yet. Did the Romans even -produce- fifty thousand tonnes of iron over the course of their civilization?

The vessel would probably take on religious significance, since it is almost a certainty that they would assume such an imposing and fantastic structure must have been made by the gods themselves. Under Pagan beliefs, that might not be a huge problem in terms of continuing to study it: the entire Promethean myth is, after all, a story about mortals stealing the gods' ideas.

There are tool shops on board. It certainly would not be worthless. A lot of things are going to have obvious uses (hammer, nail...)

Oh not this again. No. No it isn't. Progress isn't linear like that. There's a fundamental, qualitative change between pre-scientific thought and post-enlightenment thought. There's a somewhat less severe qualitative change between pre-industrialised scientific instruments and engineering thought, and the post-industrialised equivalent. Finally the latest two and least significant qualitative changes were the availability of computers and the dawn of modern particle physics. The rate at which we are finding new and mysterious physics to investigate dropped off sharply through the 20th century. That doesn't mean we will be able to replicate advanced technology, but it probably reduces its capacity to thoroughly mystify us far, far below the Romans/nuclear carrier level. It's not inconceivable that there is magic physics that lets a block of apparently undifferentiated quartz crystal act as a Alcubierre drive, but at this point it's looking rather unlikely, and even if it did we have a vast battery of instruments, investigative techniques and theoretical approaches to throw at the problem.

Presumably, an alien spacecraft is going to have millennia of advanced math on us, if not thousands of them. Reproducing the ship or more critical components may not even be possible and might require stellar levels of output. An FTL capable craft most certainly uses one or more levels of new physics beyond our current understanding and it would be surprising if it were just one, as there is quite a lot in modern understanding to work around.

A lack of Newtonian/Galilean understanding is more crippling than we face, true, but that wasn't my argument, and the Romans did have the basic mathematical building blocks for algebra and calculus (Eudoxus, Archimedes, etc.). The Romans are not scientifically hopeless. It would take an enlightened Emperor to think of gathering his best minds for the job, however, but that is probably a more appropriate comparison since the majority of modern Earth would want to either study the craft, destroy it, or leave it the hell alone. Wackos wanting to worship it would be mocked accordingly.

Actually, given that a fair number of watches and clocks even today use Roman numerals they might catch onto the concept pretty quick.

I didn't want to imply that, though granted, we actually have linguistics as a study and if their idea of black and white are both black to us we can see across any number of wavelengths to cope.