I could see them as hyper advanced metamaterials with effects we don't entirely understand. Materials science is still a very empirical field with lots of physi

I could see them as hyper advanced metamaterials with effects we don't entirely understand. Materials science is still a very empirical field with lots of physical experimentation, trial and error. We can observe with SEM, x-ray etc. without fully connecting the dots to the end result. Sort of like dropping an iPhone X into the hands of a Victorian era scientist, who just dismantles it and sees it's a bunch of metal, without a chance of ever being able to reverse engineer it. It's just too advanced. But this is probably nothing.