The first debate: Is the transistor based on alien technology?

Welcome to our first debate.

The teams are:

Team UP: K_OS, magestica, Jedimaster and ultra_phoenix (captain)
Team JB1: Dom, CoLD aNGeR, Bout Time, JohnBull1 (captain)

The proposition presented to the teams... "Is the silicon-based electronics technology that provided us with the first transistor, reverse-engineered from captured alien technology?"

Team JB1 has won the toss to represent the affirmative and argue in favor of the proposition. Team UP must argue against the propostion (transistors are the invention of intelligent scientists).

Team UP has won the toss and will present their case first.

The format:

Each team's captain presents an opening arguement.
Each team will then cycle through members in any order they choose, but each member must post three times to support your team's side of the propostion.
After each member (including the captain's first post) has posted three times, one member (doesn't matter who) will present a closing argument.

Please follow the general rules also posted in this forum.

Ultra_Phoenix... the forum is yours.

[Edited on 1-5-2003 by William]

By default of no response from the appointed captain of Team UP, Team JB1 now has the opening statement.

Team JB1, the forum is yours.

Is the transistor based on alien technology?

To suggest that mankind has apropriated alien technology, at first glance,seems ludicrous but after only a short period of research into this matter I, and the rest of my team, have been struck by the compelling evidence that will, I feel sure, lead ATS members to the stark conclusion that,yes indeed,the transistor was only the first of a number of discoveries adopted by mankind as a result of examining Extra-Terrestrial technology discovered only six months before it was announced to an unsuspecting world.

We are extremely lucky, on our team,to be debating this complicated issue before a group of people who by their very membership of ATS have shown themselves to be open minded and willing to judge our compelling arguments on their merits and not on the same pre-conditioning of thought that was the bane of Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, amoung other luminaries, who equally had their unconventional arguments questioned by closed minds.

In the following debate we will show conclusively that the discovery of the effects of the transistor was a discovery ahead of it's time.We believe too far ahead of it's time.

We will show how antiquated the pre-war radio sets were in comparison to this startling new scientific breakthrough which would quickly lead, in a direct line, to the miraculous technology you have, at this very moment, at your very fingertips.

In this opening statement I would like to establish a number of agreed facts.

1/In July 1947 there was an incident near Roswell,New Mexico.

2/Major Jesse Marcel(Head of Intelligence at Roswell Army Airfield at the time)visited the crash site,removing artifacts of some description.

3/ 6 short months later in December,of that same year,William Shockley,John Bardeen,Walter Brattain,working at Bell Laboratories produced the first Man-made transistor.

4/That the scrupiously honest Nobel comittee awarded the three men the Nobel Prize in 1956 not for inventing the transistor, as is often assumed, but for "discovering it's effects"

There will be other points that Our team will wish to make as the debate progresses but for now, for us, it is enough to establish these facts and to call on U-P and his team to show conclusive proof that Alien Technology was not used as a template for the first Man-made transistor by producing the original notes of the scientists for any work done on the transistor before The Roswell Incident of July 1947.

Perhaps U-P and his team can do something no one else has been able to do.Find the notes that have so mysteriously disappeared.

We need some response from any member of Team UP.

We have been granted a very nice opportunity, All we have to do is to simply convince everyone what they already know to be the truth.

First off I will address JB1 points.
Point number 1
1/In July 1947 there was an incident near Roswell,New Mexico.
We will not have to even argue against this...Why? You may ask...Simple, we will prove that the inventors were already working with silicone and were well on their way to creating the transistor many years prior to 1947.
The key to this debate is presenting the facts, so rather than you all having to take my word for it, I'll tell you some of the FACTS!
In 1874, 73 years before the Rosewell "incident" a discovery made by Ferdinand Braun, a German Physicist, proved that crystals can conduct current in one direction under certain conditions. This phenomena is called rectification. The original transistors were very crude, as is shown in this picture:

If this is the result of reverse engineering then I for one DO NOT WANT TO FLY ON THAT SPACESHIP...lol
The reason that the transistor is easy to make, is in large part that it is not based on an "alien" technology, but rather a vaccuum tube. Once the properties were known about how certain crystals, especially silicone, work, It was just a matter of time until someone figured out that they could make electric circuits.
In 1925, yes 1925, still 22 years before Roswell, Bell Laboratories brought together worldclass scientists pursuing research in electronics, chemistry, physics, communications technology, and lots of other disciplines. They realized that early discoveries by Braun and others about the strange properties of crystals could be used to make circuits. These materials became known as semiconductors-because they have properties that place them somewhere between conductors and insulators.
One of the most important of their discoveries was that impurities in their structure caused them to act in different ways, much like the vaccuum tube.
These facts alone should prove that the silicone transistor was brought about by the work of scientists. There was no "magic" look I invented the transistor, it was a long process that had its roots in the mid 18th century.
Points 2 and 3 were both answered in the above passage, but as a refresher they said:
2/Major Jesse Marcel(Head of Intelligence at Roswell Army Airfield at the time)visited the crash site,removing artifacts of some description.

3/ 6 short months later in December,of that same year,William Shockley,John Bardeen,Walter Brattain,working at Bell Laboratories produced the first Man-made transistor.

As stated before the work on the transistor predates the Roswell crash.

Now on to point 4:
4/That the scrupiously honest Nobel comittee awarded the three men the Nobel Prize in 1956 not for inventing the transistor, as is often assumed, but for discovering it’s effects
No argument there, after many years of research, they discovered how a silicone crystal functioned.
Given that silicone is made form sand and/or quartz, a substance in abundance on earth, there is no wonder that experiments weren't done on the substancess.
Saying that they "discovered" the semiconductor, would be like saying that early man said, "I wonder what would happen if we rub these two sticks together."
I hope that this opening argument is enough for you to see the truth (Even though I am sure you already knew it), but if its not my team will proceed to erase any doubt from your mind.
The only to disprove us, is to 100% show that the "aliens" did crash here PRIOR to 1874.
In other words, I know that ATS is open minded, but we are not gullible!!






[Edited on 2-5-2003 by K_OS]

The vacumn tube and the transistor are very different technologies. The actual research which lead to the discovery of the properties of doped Silicon when put together in the correct way to form a transistor was incredibly important, something which the scientific community thought was such a breakthrough that it deserved the Nobel Prize! The fact that a Nobel Prize was awarded for this discovery simply doesn't match up with the argument that this was just the next step in research. Something remarkable came out of the Bell Labs research laboratory. It is our belief that this breakthrough occured due to studying alien technologies.

From looking at the records of the discovery of transistors it quickly becomes obvious that something strange is going on. Initially Bell Labs announced that the transistors used Germanium, an element that had been widely used beforehand to produce rectifiers. In fact as we now know the transistors used Silicon semi-conductors. If this development was as obvious as is claimed, then why did the USSR spend 20 years trying to replicate this research? In the 1970s Soviet equipment was still using miniature vacumn tubes!

The problems with duplicating this research probably come down to the fact that transistors use substances which aren't found in nature. All previous research into rectifiers and diodes used naturally occuring elements during the manufacture. The transistor is the first case where an artificially produced substance was used. The Silicon needed for these experiments has to be "doped" with just the right amounts of another element to produce either "holes" in the atomic structure (where electrons are missing) or to produce areas where there are too many electrons. This type of substance *is not found in nature*.

It's my belief that the hints on what this substance was, and what it's properties were, came from analysis of alien wreckage from the Roswell crash. There is good evidence to show that Bell Labs didn't work out how to mass produce these transistors until some years after the initial announcement of the discovery of transistors, which does seem to indicate that they weren't fully in control of the technology when they announced their discoveries.

To summarise then, semiconductor transistors are a totally different kind of technology to vacumn tubes, and the materials necessary are not naturally occuring, unlike the materials used to build rectifiers and diodes. How did Bell Labs manage to make such a giant leap, that it left the Soviets at least 10 years behind?

And here for "obvious" reasons our team will prove this without all the "fantasy" and uncertainty:
As boring as it may seem sometimes to mankind himself, we humans invented technology of every sort by way of trial and error..period. The intelligence of the human mind is at an advanced state and has continued to steadily and even at times- rapidly advance to where we are now "centuries of our past SHOW this". We are always advancing, learning and progressing with time and growth.
So why is it so absurd that "aliens" invented the silicon transistor? Well for starters, there is no proof that "aliens" exist. And if there was/is...show me. That's just it..you can't. If they DID exist and infact give us certain knowledge or technology-wouldn't it make sense that they would be showing themselves left and right and possibly living amongst us here on earth? Why would they give us a reason to advance with their technology, then keep themselves so secret to our human race? That's because they are fictitious. Simply existing in the mind of those daft individuals who eagerly "wait" day and night for their "supposed" return, or just to catch a glimpse of an unidentified flying object and then run to the media on how they saw this odd shaped diamond in the sky and just "know" it's those space invadors! Right, how about "those" ufo's being flying objects of our own? If I lived under a rock and saw a stealth fighter or even a 747 for the first time...well I'd be in awe too. What is foreign or unknown to us, is surely avowed or invented by a human somewhere.
Now, with that being said...can we not agree on the great minds and inventors throughout the past centuries? We are capable of the unthinkable and even sometimes, the unimaginable, "our" inventions alone are continually showing this to be true. So to say that the silicon transistor was invented by a species that doesn't even exist, is blowing everything we know and have learned right out the window(which, btw.. "we" also invented). Every single day millions of people are inventing things, things that are small and perhaps even futile to us today, but noone knows what the future holds and that small invention, that you or I toss out today may become a necessity tomorrow. Just as I'm sure Sir Isaac Newton was refuted and perhaps even thought of as ignorant or silly for his inventions that are greatly utilized by us today.
These are just a few, very few of the reasonings behind mankinds great mind and technology and capabilities. It doesn't take a mastermind or scientist to see that. This is reasoning and truth, -plain and simple- as my team can attest to and our fellow readers can logically see.
Aliens are a fantasy created also within the mind of mankind.
Magestica

Well first i must say that as people believes in god and there is no proof of it and millions of people are basing their lives on it, the same with aliens,do you know how big is the universe? What makes you think that we are the only ones in this huge universe? I bit there more people that have seen UFO's Than see god himself...,ask UP if i am wrong (don't know if it is a joke or not but it seems that he has been kidnap by aliens...), anyway you are right in your point of the evolution of the mandkind, but you may know that the silicon transistor made possible have electronical devices such as TV, PC's Videos etc etc... It's not just the transistor is what becomes after the discover what makes the huge jump in technology in the mandkind, after that they were able to send starships out of space.All thanks to the first man made transistor, was a revolution for the technology.We are talking also about something that has been there since the beginning of the mandkind history,it's obvious that there is life out of earth, we are not the only ones, and why not another race that evolves like us? As you see it's is 100% possible that this accident in Roswell gave such a things as area 51 and the leap in technology in the mandkind.Anyway you can see that our team has shown that the transistor is not "something easy to understand and invent", and even look at how primitive they were with this at that time, just look at the picture of the UP team...
Also i wanna know how do you explain the coincidence with Roswell and few months later the first man made transistor?
How do you explain that such a primitive element would be the revolution of the technology?
Or that the major of the roswell airbase removed artifacts from the accident in 1947?
Thanks to it the chips were possible too.
thanks to the chip, the computers were not occupiyng entire rooms anymore, for locate it
in a desk or a workstation.
Also the electronic consume was reducted a LOT, multiplying at the same time the potence of the mathematical calculations.
Think about the communication systems, every single device now works with transistors, just that simple.
There is no fantasy, say that aliens is fantasy would be the same as say that god is fantasy as well,nobody saw him... understand what i mean? And ignore in history the signs of aliens in caves paints,draws, ancient races is just not good, there is more proofs that aliens are in the universe than the existance of god.

we need a response from team up

WE don't have a full team?? We are severely lacking organization here..I would "go next" but isn't that against the rules? Don't we need each person from each team to go, before we can go again?
Thanks Magestica

debate closed