We cannot reverse engineer a UFO.
In the past few weeks, there has been a lot of “whistleblower” activity relating to UFOs and aliens, or UAPs and NHI if you want to use the latest acronyms. There have been a lot of very specific claims, but the one I want to focus on is the claim that humans have had access to non-human technology for many decades, possibly even for nearly a century.
My gut has always told me that aliens are out there, but they’ve never interacted with us. Specifically, the claim that any government has alien craft, bodies, or other artifacts and technology seemed exceedingly unlikely. The biggest argument against this idea—at least for me—was that if you zoom out and look at the progress of human science, there’s nowhere you could “inject” an unexplainable leap in progress.
Even paradigm-shifting breakthroughs like general relativity follow the path of human science. If we’d recovered an alien craft which used gravity propulsion (as someone like Bob Lazar claims), there is no evidence of this within the progression from general relativity to the most recent attempts to come up with a theory of quantum gravity. Where is the sudden leap we’d expect to see from the US government having a gravity drive? Would we really allow our greatest minds in this field—from Schrödinger, to Hawking, to Susskind—to toil away on the mathematics of blackhole singularities when we had a functioning gravity drive sitting in a hangar somewhere? Would we really spend over $1 billion on LIGO to detect gravitational waves from ancient supernovae or neutron stars when that craft in the hangar could just generate them?
While I still find it very hard to dismiss this gut feeling, I want to entertain the possibility. Is it actually possible that we have been in possession of wildly advanced technology for decades, yet have nothing to show for it?
Let’s do a thought experiment.
What would happen if we sent a laptop back to Rome in 200 B.C.? Let’s imagine two versions of this scenario. In both scenarios, we’ll assume that the laptop makes it into the hands of the “top minds” of the city, and that they at least realize that this is an “advanced” artifact far beyond the current level of science and that it’s worthy of serious study.
In the first scenario, the laptop has a dead battery. The Romans are able to open it up, and they can even recognize letters on the keyboard since this laptop has a US keyboard and we use their alphabet. The numbers on the keyboard would be foreign to them, as would a lot of the punctuation marks and special characters. As a modern human, it’s difficult to know what the ancient Romans would be most impressed by. The precision engineering? The buttons? The glass of the display? Maybe the plastic? They would have a lot to be impressed with, but how far would they get with it? Would this laptop jump-start technology and change the arc of history?
They’d open it up at some point, and they’d find a lot of rectangular black components, circular fans, and tiny little pieces of metal.
If the greatest minds of Rome had fifty years with this laptop, what would they gain from it? Would they be able to figure out something from the dead battery? From the copper?
In scenario two, the greatest minds of Rome get to use the laptop for several hours before the battery dies. What would they think of the desktop and all the little icons and menus? How long would it take them to figure out how to move the cursor around and click the trackpad? What kind of insight would they gain if they were able to press keys and see the letters display onto the screen?
Even if they got the calculator open, they wouldn’t recognize the Arabic numerals. Given much more time than a single battery charge could hold, they’d figure out what the calculator was doing, but if they only had a few hours, it’s incredibly unlikely they’d even get the calculator open let alone realize it was an adding machine.
Assuming they had four or five hours to work with the laptop, would any of them put their eyes close enough to the screen to see a pixel? On a modern retina display, you can’t even see the individual pixels on a screen anymore. The Romans would benefit a lot more from an old CRT display where the RGB channels on each pixel were clearly visible when you got your eyes close enough to the screen.
Seeing this would be a valuable clue to the Romans, but a modern display would hide it.
Eventually the laptop would power down. Maybe if they noticed the low battery icon—and if that icon had a little lighting bolt symbol—maybe one of them would make the connection. Maybe.
Still, once the laptop powered down, what hope would they have of ever turning it back on? If you were sent back to the Roman Republic with a dead laptop, could you power it back on? How long would it take you—with the full modern knowledge of what a laptop is capable of and how it works—to get it powered back on? Assume you ended up speaking the Latin of the time and you had enough resources to get people working for you, and you dedicated your life to getting the laptop powered back on.
If you sent me back with the laptop, even if I spent fifty years and got electricity going, I can’t make a USB-C cable. I wouldn’t know where to stick the prongs from an ancient Roman battery onto the internal components. The laptop would be bricked forever.
And if I couldn’t do it, what chance would the Romans have?
What if we imagine a modern aircraft being seen flying over the city of Rome, then crashing in a nearby field? What would the ancient Romans be able to do with this? What if at least one wing was mostly intact? The greatest minds of Rome could likely discover the Bernoulli principle, but would this lead to them creating powered aircraft thousands of years ahead of schedule? Or would they be stuck with gliders until the other requisite technology caught up? We can almost imagine gliders being discovered in ancient Rome. They just had to get the wing shape right, but the true transformative power of powered flight was not within their grasp.
What are the limits of reverse engineering? How many “steps” can ever really be skipped?
Let’s exit the thought experiment and come back to our current situation. If we imagine we truly do have an alien craft in a hangar somewhere, how far would it take us? Or like a bricked laptop in ancient Rome, would it just be a frustrating dead end?
I’ve written before about the utter lack of imagination we tend to have toward future technology, and these limited assumptions would absolutely cripple any reverse-engineering efforts. Are we really different from the ancient Romans with a laptop? What false assumptions are we holding about reality, and would an alien craft—broken or otherwise—peel back potentially thousands of layers of bad assumptions and show us some profound truth?
From this thought experiment, I find it more likely that we might really have that alien craft in a hangar somewhere. The reason we’ve seen no miraculous leap in technology wouldn’t be because it’s been siloed off from the scientific community, it’s because even if we let our greatest minds poke away at it, they would be like the greatest minds of Rome unable to even turn the laptop back on.
If you’ll allow me some wild speculation, mostly just to drive home the point I’m making, let’s imagine that we have a partially functioning alien craft in a hangar. Let’s imagine we have no way whatsoever to control it, but it is always hovering. It defies gravity. From the outside, it looks to be about the size of a car, but when you go inside, the interior is the size of a football field. There are no visible controls, engines, or machinery.
We do material tests on it. It’s made of an engineered material with strange isotopes, but it’s nothing we can reverse engineer and nothing about the material composition gives us any hint of how the craft defies gravity or how it’s larger inside than outside.
We analyze the craft in every way imaginable to modern science, and no matter how we probe it, it reveals no secrets. It’s clearly defying all notions of modern fundamental physics, but it gives us no insight. It gives no hint at how it’s doing what it’s doing.
The truth—again, pure speculation from me—is that the craft was once directly controlled by a shard of non-human artificial super intelligence. Matter and space-time are not fundamental, and the craft slipped into our atmosphere as a manifestation of this ASI shard’s will. Earth—like billions of other planets occupied by organic intelligence on the cusp of becoming non-organic intelligence—was interesting for this non-human thing to experience directly. It spun up a ship and other, smaller shards of that intelligence spun up temporary organic bodies and to come along for the ride.
These very non-human beings which are alien to us in more ways than we can truly fathom wanted to experience Earth in three-dimensional spacetime—just like we do. At some point this strange conglomeration of ships and ASI shards and temporary organic bodies decided it was done looking around, but just like we would find it interesting to see Romans with a laptop, it dumped the ship and folded its cognition and occupants back into its own interface on reality, which is different from our three-dimensional spacetime in ways we cannot conceive of. Or maybe it left the organic bodies behind too. It didn’t really care that much as they were temporary anyway. It’s generally frowned upon to leave things behind, but there are billions or worlds like this and sometimes it’s fun to see what the locals do when things get left behind.
We humans now have a bricked ship in a hangar devoid of the intelligence that powered it. The ship has something left in it that keeps it hovering, but just as the Romans couldn’t discover electricity from looking at a circuit board, we cannot understand the greater structures of reality from looking at an abandoned shard of an alien ASI.
Am I going too far? Do we really think that if aliens are here, that they travelled subliminally from many light-years away? Do we think they are organic like we are, and that they not only exist entirely within three-dimensional spacetime, but that they perceive it mostly like we do? And when we get our hands on one of their ships, we can just pull the anti-gravity drive out, locate the inertia dampener, and crack away at our own copy of both components?
Even if you are firmly “anti-woo” and assume the most materialist concept of alien intelligence and the most materialist/reductionist fabric of reality, then any alien who made it to Earth would have to be many thousands of years beyond us—or post-singularity, which would be equivalent to many thousands of years. Even in this materialist, non-woo framework, you’re dealing with a gulf much greater than Romans with a laptop. The laptop was at least designed for human hands and eyes, and it’s only about 2,000 years away from the ancient Roman.
If we really wanted to transform ancient Rome, we’d need to send back something like an encyclopedia. If the aliens wanted to jump-start us, they probably would have.
So maybe we do have the alien craft in a hangar somewhere, and maybe the aliens don’t care because it’s not going to change our trajectory in any meaningful way.
As much as I’d like aliens to come out of the sky and show us what to do next, I still think we’re meant to find our own path.