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Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a brick.
The real reason we won’t recognize alien technology when we see it
1947 was the year of the Roswell incident. It also happens to be the year the transistor was invented.
The transistor, and the material science behind it, is the technology on which most of the modernity is based, culminating in the device you are reading this article on. It is less than a century old. If scientists at the Roswell crash site would have looked for advanced electronics, they would have been looking for vacuum tubes.
Only a hundred years before the transistor’s invention, any type of analysis carried out on your mobile phone’s heart, the silicon chip, that contains billions of transistors, would have yielded practically nothing useful. Even if opened properly, under an optical microscope, a modern day chip looks simply like a fancy, shiny crystal with structure. A chemical analysis will tell you that it consists mostly of silicone, copper or gold, and some impurities.
For the intents and purposes of even the most sophisticated Victorian scientist that gets a modern day mobile phone with a discharged battery, it is just a very odd, intricately multilayered brick with fancy patterns inside, but no obvious function. Any kind of…
