> How can you be so sure of that? ... Do you think we could figure out a material designed by a being a million years in advance of us? It's a fair question,

> How can you be so sure of that? ... Do you think we could figure out a material designed by a being a million years in advance of us? It's a fair question, but I'm pretty sure we could. We have constraints: we know the object can be stored in a warehouse, we presumably can infer it can be touched, and can be seen. Even if it were of alien origin, wondrously advanced, made of some kind of matter that fits outside our standard model of the universe, we would at least know it interacts with light, with the electromagnetic force. We understand that force very well, so we could still characterize it. And that's if it's something deeply weird; deeply strange. (And if it were really that bizarre, it'd be the discovery of the century and obscene to keep it locked up in a warehouse somewhere.) Far more likely, it's just made up of atoms (which is what we'd expect, given its temperature and density are within the realm of 'objects that can exist on earth in a warehouse'), and then we can use all our normal techniques just fine and it's not a problem. > Do you think someone from 500 years ago could analyze a microchip or some superconducting ceramic? Again, to emphasize, this is a valid question -- but we've already gone past that threshold. We can see individual atoms now, so there's not much further to go when it comes to the question of what things are made of, at least to a rough approximation. However, the next question would be "can we make it?" and the answer to that is very different. If someone gave us some electronics from the future, we could still find out what it's made from quite easily. Understanding how it works and how to re-create it would be vastly more difficult, and possibly beyond us. But this is true of the past too; there were ways of making steel and concrete in the distant past that we've long lost the knowledge of how to make.