Humankind dreams of the day we might finally have first contact with creatures from another
world.
And, with so much of contemporary alien mythology preoccupied with UFOs, the search for an alien
spaceship goes on and on…
But even if we did stumble across one, an Identified Flying Object not from Earth, would
we have any chance of actually understanding it?
This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if we could
reverse engineer an alien spaceship?
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“Reverse-engineering” is, well, exactly what it sounds like; it’s the study of a
completed device and working backwards to understand how it works and was made, usually
for military or commercial purposes.
Businesses can use reverse-engineering to try and get a leg-up on their competitors,
or at least try to match their rival’s innovative designs… while militaries often use it to
understand the weapons of other armies.
Copyright law and patents mean that one company can’t legally steal an entire product from
another for profit, however… so whoever reverse-engineered something can’t just
replicate whatever technology they find for their own gain.
They might go on to develop similar products, but they can’t develop the same.
For today’s thought experiment, though, copyright law isn’t much of a problem!
Hypothetically hyper-advanced aliens aren’t about to sue planet Earth if we steal their
warp drive design, for example!
So, were an alien ship to appear here, and were we to somehow gain control of it, then
we could freely task Earth’s best and brightest minds with deciphering whatever alien tech
we’d managed to scavenge.
And the results could be life-changing!
The end goal of understanding alien technology would (hopefully) be to use it for the betterment
of humanity; repurposing the information contained within to potentially build spaceships of
our own.
Naturally, an alien spacecraft (especially interstellar) would have many crucial, technological
components that make it work, including components we already understand as necessary for deep
space travel.
For example, based on our current predictions, it would presumably need some form of radiation
shielding, a much improved propulsion system compared to our own, and perhaps even a working
hyperdrive.
One of the first things we’d do then, is to identify these aspects of the alien machine,
isolate them, and set about replicating them.
The things we’d been dreaming of for decades could quickly become a reality.
But, the technology on board such a ship could give us an edge in other, slightly less predictable
ways as well.
It could theoretically revolutionize our computers, microchips and processors in general, for
example, introducing next, next-level computing, and antiquating every digital technology we
had achieved up until that point.
There’s also the issue of weapons.
We might think we have powerful enough weapons on Earth already, but were we to get our hands
on an alien craft that had come prepared to fight… well, we’d have kick-started an
all new arms race purely by discovering it.
We’d have entered a fast-paced, technological age where rival nations and governments would
be striving to be the first to master the aliens’ guns, bombs and missiles.
Anybody without access to the craft would be left extremely vulnerable and at a severe
disadvantage.
Of course, all of this requires at least a few of our human minds to even begin to be
able to comprehend the ship in the first place.
In reality, would we really be able to pick apart a vehicle from another world?
Or even recognise it?
We often see a lesser version of this problem just in everyday life in the twenty-first
century…
Technology is already developing quickly enough on plain ol’ planet Earth that a person
who grew up just a few decades ago can feel flummoxed (or even alienated) by modern devices.
In the 1980s and ‘90s, cell phones, for example, weren’t yet widespread, let alone
the smartphones so many people have today - and smartphones now perform functions that
couldn’t have been dreamed of previously.
Sure, were a time traveller to have arrived in 1985 and introduced a smartphone early,
scientists and technicians may well have been able to reverse engineer it because, as history
shows, we were on the cusp of inventing it anyway.
But now imagine the same thing happening but one hundred years ago, or one thousand.
If we somehow had the power to go back and drop something like a phone or games console
into, say, the 10th century, well, an unsuspecting Viking would have almost zero chance of understanding
what they’d found.
So many aspects of it - its construction, its purpose, its use of electricity - would
appear impossible to anyone far enough in the past… but that’s the position we,
humans, would be in were an alien spaceship to show up today.
The vehicle could appear almost indescribably bizarre to us.
Say it would’ve taken humans another thousand years of research to build one ourselves,
well, we’d suddenly be the Viking with a smartphone - bewildered and amazed.
Add to the problem that the alien craft is also, by definition, alien… and the task
gets even more difficult.
Whichever extraterrestrial race built it may have devised things like circuitry and power
supplies that we, on Earth, could truly never get to the bottom of.
No matter how far into the future we might care to jump, replicating the technology on
our particular planet might always be impossible.
It was the renowned science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke who famously said that “any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”…
So, in some ways, we might never understand that this was a spaceship at all, perhaps
preferring to just explain it away as witchcraft.
Nevertheless, there are various conspiracy theories claiming that the reverse engineering
of alien tech is already happening right now, as we speak… with a lot of these roads leading
to Groom Lake in Nevada, USA, otherwise known as Area 51.
The official line is that Area 51 is used to develop new, advanced and top secret aircraft
for the US military, but theorists have long harboured beliefs that these planes are built
in part thanks to the continuous study of alien tech which (they claim) takes place
there.
With the advent of militarized space forces in recent years, from America and others,
these theories have only gained traction - with the idea presumably being that we’d one
day use alien tech for conflicts taking place outside of Earth’s orbit.
Of course, there’s nothing by way of confirmed proof that Area 51 (or anywhere else) really
is an alien research base… but if we could reverse engineer an alien spaceship, it’s
a good bet that it would all take place behind firmly closed doors!
But, let’s say that a ship crash lands on Earth and isn’t immediately seized by a
clandestine arm of government.
Perhaps its crashing was so public that there really was no way to cover it up?
With the eyes of the world watching, it’s perhaps easier to imagine the more positive
outcomes, where reverse-engineering actually is done with humanity’s best interests at
heart...
If we could understand what we were dealing with - either immediately, or in time - then
it could inspire us to finally spread out and safely settle onto other planets in the
solar system; or even to reach other star systems in the Milky Way.
At the very least, it would revolutionise how we lived life on Earth, helping us to
realise some of science fiction’s wildest ideas.
Potentially, it would mean we wouldn’t have to worry about over-population or depleting
resources, because it would open up a whole universe of other options and solutions for
us.
We could have fully-fledged space tourism and interstellar cruises set up in no time.
The discovery could even constitute our invitation to join some kind of higher level, intergalactic
community of intelligent, space-faring worlds.
From this point of view, perhaps this hypothetical alien ship that we’d hypothetically reverse-engineered
didn’t randomly crash here at all… but was instead placed on Earth to test whether
we’d be able to unravel its mysteries, and thereby prove ourselves worthy to traverse
the stars.
In which case, maybe it’s already here, and we just haven’t worked it out yet!
If we began with suspicion, distrust and divided intentions, then work on an extraterrestrial
ship could spell a new-age arms race and eventual war and destruction.
But, with well-meaning and forward-thinking goals, there’d be no limit to the places
we could go, the creatures we could meet, the things we could build, and what we could
achieve.
And that’s what would happen if we could reverse-engineer an alien spaceship.
What do you think?
Is there anything we missed?
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