I have been reading the debate about humanity reverse engineering Integrated Circuits from Alien Technology and have a few responses to give. First of all, I am a Program Manager for a company "highly" involved in the Tech Industry, I have a degree in Electrical Engineering from a Major University and feel as though I can comment on this.

The main point of contention seems to be if humans were indeed able to reproduce an IC from damaged alien crafts in the 1950's, the answer is quite simply no, no they could not, they did not have the abilty to produce dies small enough to create the linear pathways needs for connectivity across the leads. Not to mention the actual mil-spec lead spacing you still see today. It is my opinion and that of many of my colleagues that there had to be some time of guidance to oversee the actual process that had knowledge of component engineering (not even a blip of the radar in 1950) so to me it means 1 of 2 things:

A) The military was 20 years ahead of its time (right now they are only about 1-2 years ahead at any given time, for example right now they are using neurons, small BGA's that can handle the job of the original pentium computer boards, soon to be your Pentium 5 processor for lap tops)

B) ET's showed us how to Phone home, so to speak.

Understand one thing though, designing an IC before you have created passive capacitors, resistors, diodes, sram's, etc, supporting the circuit is kinda like installing a TV in a home that has no walls or electricity, your priority is out of line. It would seem to me than an ET who was many years ahead of us would have started small and worked towards the future. We could not have used IC's in any real capacity until 1955 and even then the use was extremely limited, almost needless. I will continue to read the debate and post some comments for everyone in this forum, I am interested to see both sides of the arguement.

(8k in the appollo got us to the moon?, you're dads 1986 Texas Instuments calculator uses more memory, I digress)

To be Continued::

[Edited on 7-5-2003 by Shining Wizard]

Just curious, have you ever read Phillip Corso's The Day After Roswell? He has some interesting bits on the integrated circuit in particular...

My personal belief is that we did reverse engineer the chip, as according to everything I can find...what we were working on in the late forties, compared to the chip that then emerged...are like night and day. An advance that took others decades to replicate, and then only through industrial espionage...

I believe the other team argued their point better, but in the end, we didn't invent it...we just learned how to make it (imho)....

In the fact that you are correct about the preliminary capacity for memory in the late 40's to early 50's was night and day. but my question is this, if an alien was able to transverse the galaxy to see us, why would they still be using semiconductors? We are pretty much passing those by now in favor of BGA's and ASICS.

What is your opinion?

to be so much more advanced than us to cross millions of miles of space? The way I see it, all we're lacking in this regard is one single solitary invention....the propulsion method, and we're right there with them. Not to mention...it's a good bet that they haven't been idle for 50 years as well. My personal belief is that we are closer to the aliens' level of technology today than most likely realize (in fact, this is a direct result of such reverse-engineering....otherwise, we'd still be listening to radio programs right now, hehe...) This rapid advance that we've been having for the past half century, seems to have resulted in us at least being in a position to defend the planet adequetely enough to at least make them hesitant to do much else....

Of course, we are assuming that aliens come from far distances requiring advanced propulsion. It is equally possible that these civilizations could come from closer start systems, our own solar system, or even our own planet.

I have two reasons for being suspicious of ET's using semiconductor technology is two-fold:

1)By nature, semiconductors are doomed to fail, the are only semi "conductive" hence the name, and would have had characteristics (such as Tolerance, temperature, +/- analog digital distortion) that would not lend themselves well to space travel or entry into planets.See the space shuttle, no ability to compensate for uneven weight dispersion and unfavorable air flow due to damage, and this is 2003. This is failed logic, a fault of all computers (as we all know) but that is more in line with my second point.

2) An ASIC (more likely alien tech IMO) due to Hybid crystal growth (yes, they are grown) can perform functions at a rate that makes a semi-conductor look timid and its 1000's of times more reliable.To this point, I believe that the most important equipment needed for long distance travel would need to be accurate and resilient to a fault almost. Imagine the math functions needed to properly ascertain a path through space at speeds that no human can understand, sustain and support life, give feedback, control temperature, etc, it's almost mind numbing. the number of possible fatal "logic" issues with modern day computers is why we are not on Mars right now, not propulsion.


Next

Hmmnn...

My guess is that, if there were some sort of tech exchange between the USA and ETs, the ETs wouldn't give us their most advanced technology to begin with. I don't mean to say that they'd be treacherous or stingy (though they might be both, anyways), but it just wouldn't make sense to dump your best equipment on people who don't yet even know the principles behind your level of science. The fact that we are now moving beyond semiconductors doesn't necessarily mean we didn't get them from ETs, as it would be an assumption to say that they gave us their 'best' equipment to study... it would make just as much sense to assume that, if there was some sort of trade going on, that they would give us equipment we could understand. For instance, if the US government was teaching Maori tribesmen how to fly, they wouldn't start out by giving them a supply of 747s and SR-71s. They would start with one guy in a Cessna 182, then move up from there.

Now, my response is based on the idea that the IC came from 'trade'... if it was pulled from a crashed vessel at Roswell, it wouldn't make sense, I admit, for the aliens to be using semiconductors... but, then again, maybe electronics with semiconductors was the only thing that could be understood among the wreckage. To extend the analogy above, if a 747 crashed near a maori village, in the deepest jungle, the only thing the tribesmen might be able to pull from the wreckage and reproduce might be a certain type of buckknife, or a weaving method for clothing. I doubt that they could, within one generation, reproduce the most advanced elements of the 747.

Jim

PS
and I should also add that it would be dangerous to think that we could 'fend off' aliens with our level of technology...
If they can fly faster than the speed of light, I doubt that they will take sidewinder missiles very seriously. True, in an 'invasion' they might lose one vehicle to accident or a lucky shot where an entire squadron of F-15s surrounded it... but it would, for them, be like the way it is for the US when it invades a fundamentalist middle eastern country-- a rapid campaign wherein the 'people' at home will, perhaps, be almost entertained by how easily their forces dismantle the primitive opposition.

War (if we could even call it that) probably wouldn't last very long. I liken it to the modern day usa invading ROME, would be over before it started.

Shining Wizard, your two points though, are based on the assumption that they actually travel far through space. If (as most theories and logic would suggest), they use some kind of "folding" of space to travel, then those two points are out the window.

The invention of the propulsion/space folding mechanism, may just be one of the few differences between our technology and theirs... Why does everyone assume that they (the aliens) are flawless and perfect? If they were....they wouldn't be crashing every once in a while, now would they?

Ah, jeez, just like an electrical engineer to babble and wander while yammering!

This avionics technician can clear it up in fewer words.
If I can understand how a transistor and a diode works, it wasn't necessary to reverse engineer it from squat.

Same goes if an electrical engineer figures out how it works before he graduates college!

S.W., While my point that if I understand it, it is not alien technology is my opinion, my jabs at your engineering field is all in fun, unless you are a design engineer for Sikorsky. Then I'll track you down and hurt you. Bad.

Nah, ugliest planes and choppers I have ever seen. Most of my designs are for CAT and PET Scans, Northrup, and Stanley (yes that Stanley).


I believe the overlooked point is this:

we didn't even understand RAM in 1946, I read my grandfather's old electrician's handbook, but the same complany 3 years later had explanations of RAM and freaking CMOS for cruds sake. An almost and yes I say almost impossible leap in tech.


And to the other point:

If a being can get to out planet from Light Years away, or if they inhabit this planet or another dimension of time (Thats bs, impossible, techno jargon, we invented time, now we think we can travel backwards in it? we invented toilets, doesn't mean its gonna wipe my ass nice and good when I am done taking a #). I would assume that if they can "fold" or whatever that is that they could also use it as a weapon. You forget our general strategic problem, WE CAN'T GET OFF THE DAMN PLANET, seems to be an issue yes/no?

Comments?

I think that it sounds a bit silly to be totally honest. There seems to be so little evidence which acually stands up to scrutiny (in so many other cases) that I'd just add this to the "paranoid fantasy" pile without some more concrete evidence. One slightly paranoid guy talking about J-ROD and secondary evidence from another paranoid guy called BJ quoting a doctor who may or not be in any way related to the document involved in the article... just doesn't seem like enough of a justification to take this story seriously.

This guy, if faking, is pretty amazing:


The symbol for the transistor is made up of three pieces: positive, positive and negative; or negative, negative and positive...silicon dioxide doped with arsenic and boron, in 1947. Now, in 1947, doping things with boron was not easy. It required the sort of equipment that even Bell Labs in 1946 did not possess. They had this type of equipment at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories - but it would have taken thousands and thousands and thousands of man-hours to invent the transistor.

If you look back at it historically, what AT&T was claiming was that one day this "genius", William Shockley, was working with a rectifier; he looked at it and he noticed it had unusual propensities, and there, bingo, he invented the transistor! He figured it out right there! And to verify that, the two other "geniuses" that they got to help work on the transistor, Dr Bardeen and Dr Brattain, both said: "Oh yeah, I remember a guy by the name of Case was [allegedly] talking about transistors in 1931, and I knew back then we were going to have them."

That is the history of the transistor at AT&T prior to 1948, other than claiming it was invented in December of 1947 by Dr Shockley. Anybody believe that story? Me neither. And I knew, because the administrative head of the transistor project was Jack Morton - the man at whose house I was staying to go to school and whose sons I was friends with - and he often commented on the fact that it was really a shame that those three idiots got responsibility for the transistor and he didn't. And I always wondered, because he too didn't possess the scientific ability to develop the transistor. He was a brilliant man who had invented the radiobroadcast vacuum tube, the close-spaced triode, but it appears as if he was brought in to head up the project to try to draw back the transistor in time to radio tubes and the things that Shockley talked about; and it was as if the whole thing was just a ploy and he might as easily have been given responsibility and got the Nobel Prize as Bill Shockley. Professional jealousy?

Hehe...we did this quite a while ago actually...

Or, do you believe that the Apollo landings, and the Mars rover landings, were filmed at sound stages?

I think he means that manned vehicles cannot leave Earth's 'gravity well', or whatever you want to call it. Also, in comparison to aflight between here and another star, our flights to the moon in the 60s and 70s were short. Also, I'm guessing that he's trying to point out that our 'space transportation system' is inoperable right now.

As for the idea that ICs had to have been invented by humans because humans can understand them... there are various apes that have been taught sign language in institutions. Did they invent those languages? No. Do they understand them? Yes.

Like I tried to say above, if the ETs gave us technology, it most likely would only be stuff we would have invented anyway within a few decades. Think of Scotty in ST4 saying, "Who's saying he wasn't going to invent it, anyway?" while giving the secret to transparent aluminum to a contemporary day person (sorry for the Trek reference, it was the clearest example I could think of!). The point about our understanding of circuits developng out of nowhere, at least within the public realm, is an important thing to note. Just because you can understand it doesn't mean that you're more inventive than Koko the Gorilla, who learned sign language, but did not invent it.

This may be a stupid question. If IC technology, was developed from reverse engineering alien craft, where did all the supportive technology come from? Now yours truly was just a stupid software type (The EE's thought he was stupid until he took their 120k kludge and may it run bug free in 40k), but I vaguely understand that there is all sorts of technology required to manufacture an IC. One thing he does know: you need to be able to build a clean "clean room". Also he seems to remember something about microscopes being required in chip manufacture and a lot of knowlegde about chemistry being required. Did aliens give us the supportive technology too? For example if you were to land a B-52 in a 18th century technology and say here it is - now build one, the people would not have a clue to know where to start. They would have to figure out how to use electricity (build generators) to be able to make aluminum (remember pure aluminum was more expensive than gold in the 1800's), they would have to learn a lot about chemistry just in order to replicate the canopies, then the is the development of machine tool technology to considered. By the time the 18th century people built the B-52, they would have replicated the entire technology of 1955 (year B-52 entered service). The point is that technology is interrelated, to have an advance in one area, you need development in another. (Just to build turbojet engines, you need a fairly precise dynamic balancer - which means you know how to dynamically balance a rotor.) If IC's were developed from alien technology, then there must have been a massive flow of information concerning the supportive technologies. By the way was Tokay and Cooley in contact with aliens?