Originally posted by tiger5
I think that these claims ofreverse engineering are very insulting to human ingenuity. Why couldn't humans invent all of what is given as examples
of having reverse engineering origins? There is always a precedence for things like fibre optics and stealth technology to name a few.
The planet's universities have an incredible level of scientific minds.
I find your point of view somewhat interesting but mostly amusing. Reverse engineering advanced technology? Ok, I can understand America reverse
engineering a Russian MiG as some of the technology was advanced (advanced in that the USA hadn't themselves come up with that idea), yet the
technology was still within the appropriate time frame.
Now, let's do a little time travel experiment. Grab your laptop, jump into the time machine and travel backwards in time just 200 years, hand
someone your laptop, tell them about the internet and then leave.
Now, the scientists have only a few hours to reverse engineer your laptop before the battery goes dead and everything stops working. What do they do?
Back then, they didn't have electricity, nicad batteries, printed circuit boards and etc, etc, etc. Pretty much the best they could do is make
assumptions what things do based on their current knowledge.
Jump to the Roswell crash and Phillip Corso's statements regarding fibre optics. Fibre optics may not be because of reverse engineering, but let's
just say that the scientists that were trying to reverse engineer the craft found these glasslike wires leading from one thing to another, but didn't
find any wires. Their conclusions might have been that these glasslike wires were transmitting signals and then they developed what we now know as
fibre optics. We may never know what the space craft's glasslike wires were really used for, but we now have fibre optics because the sight of new
and advanced technology sparked an idea that hadn't previously been considered.
Going back to your laptop, those scientists wouldn't be able to reproduce a printed circuit board or even the batteries in those days, but your
laptop could open doors to advancement merely by suggesting something they never considered.
Unless an ET sits down and explains what we are looking at, there is just no way that we could reverse engineer something that is 500 or 1,000 years
more advanced. Yes, your laptop may cause a TV to be developed 100 years earlier, but they aren't going to build a new laptop in 5-10 years.
To think that we reversed engineered a crashed alien space craft and built our own within a few years is just a silly thought.