Reply #24: Reverse-engineering is a crock of shit. [View All]

[NinetySix]

In order to be able to reverse-engineer ANYTHING, the engineer must be on a roughly equal technological level with the designer. The principles of the technology must either be known already, or able to be extrapolated from other principles with which the engineer is already familiar. This is how the Soviets were able to derive the A-bomb and the H-bomb so quickly from the West from information gathered by their agents (as opposed to kidnapping Western scientists).

Does this assertion seem dubious? Imagine a seventeenth-century Swiss clockmaker. The intricate gears and mechanisms designed by the Swiss during this period were the state-of-the-art at the time, some of the highest technology to date. The designers were extremely intelligent and creative, and had a firm grasp of the physical principles necessary to invent these precision devices.

Now imagine that you were to surreptitiously travel back in time and slip a Discman or a solar calculator into the clockmaker's workshop. What would he make of it? He certainly wouldn't be able to reproduce it, but could he even make heads or tails of the principles involved in its function, not to mention making use of any of them? Perhaps he could reproduce the springy buttons that control the functions, but it is unlikely that he could have any understanding of the electronics at all, given that electricity was at that time considered a metaphysical force and was ill-understood. And that was only 400 years ago. How many years, centuries, millenia advanced are a race who can traverse the stars?

Such reverse engineering of alien technology must therefore be impossible after so short a time as 50 years. As Arthur C. Clarke observed, "Any technology, sufficiently advanced, would be indistinguishable from magic."