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You're assuming they've been able to figure anything out and are just sitting on it. If tech from an interstellar craft is here on Earth it's so far beyond anyt

You're assuming they've been able to figure anything out and are just sitting on it. If tech from an interstellar craft is here on Earth it's so far beyond anything we can make that we probably don't have a chance of figuring it out. It'd be like the first Europeans to reach America giving the natives guns and asking them to duplicate them, they don't even have the ability to smelt iron so it's just not going to happen and just having a gun isn't going to advance any of their other tech in the least.

jstarfish 3y ago
Whoa, that's far from true. They would not be able to duplicate an AK-47 as-is, no. Their reverse-engineering efforts of its components would absolutely advance all of their other tech, even if none of it ever produced a working firearm. The gun is inspiration-- an outcome to work towards. Producing gunpowder and trying to create a musket out of reeds may not work out, but would have led to their independent discovery of fireworks.
- throwaway4aday 3y ago
  Without knowing what gunpowder is, can you discover how to make it just by looking at a sample if you are a stone age tribe? The only part of it you'll be able to identify is the charcoal. The other components are going to be unknown to you and besides that they are so finely milled into the powder that they are inseparable without techniques for decanting and knowing that you had to evaporate the water to get the salt out of it. Same with the steel, they'd have to identify that it was a type of iron but before that they'd have to know what iron was. They had no metallurgy so the chances of that happening are extremely slim. Iron ore looks nothing like iron metal. They'd probably need to discover other metals like copper first to develop smelting techniques and nothing in the gun is going to teach them how to find, mine and smelt copper or iron.
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    I agree, but that's the point-- they're going to try a lot of things to achieve those ends. They may not create a single component of a functional firearm, but they're going to develop a lot of unrelated technology in trying. Even if we never made it to space, the attempt would still have given us Velcro.
    - throwaway4aday 3y ago
      I don't think that would be the case for being presented with such a big discontinuity. Comparing it to the space race isn't accurate because while we hadn't achieved spaceflight before we had pretty much mastered atmospheric flight and were using turbojet engines and rocket powered planes to reach the stratosphere and even the mesosphere before the first man reached orbit. We were steadily going higher and higher so reaching orbit was the next step in our progression. Even if you gave a modern rocket engine to someone in 1940 their society would understand almost all of what went into it. Go back further to 1840 and their engineers would be amazed at the strength of the materials but they would recognize a combustion chamber, valves, fuel tanks and even the wiring. In 1740 they would still probably have enough knowledge of fluid dynamics to deduce how it worked although the concept of combining oxidizers and fuel would be foreign to them, though only for another 30 years. Even as you push it back further and further people would still recognize that it was made of some type of metal and could understand that liquid or gas could flow through it and burn and they could probably build a very crude and simplified copy that used the basic principles. The point is that even bronze age civilization was far more advanced than people who had no metallurgy. There are incredibly difficult things you need to learn to go from zero to having any of the components that make up a gun and none of that knowledge is encoded in the gun itself. It's just not obvious to someone with no information about how gunpowder or iron are made how you would go about obtaining and processing the raw materials. It's probably even completely counter-intuitive that you would make something like iron from stone or that you have to burn the stone for a long time at a very high heat. Who would even think of that in a stone age society? The best guess as to how it was invented is by accident and observation. Having a chunk of metal won't give you that insight.
      - justinclift 3y ago

jstarfish 3y ago

Whoa, that's far from true. They would not be able to duplicate an AK-47 as-is, no. Their reverse-engineering efforts of its components would absolutely advance all of their other tech, even if none of it ever produced a working firearm. The gun is inspiration-- an outcome to work towards. Producing gunpowder and trying to create a musket out of reeds may not work out, but would have led to their independent discovery of fireworks.

throwaway4aday 3y ago
Without knowing what gunpowder is, can you discover how to make it just by looking at a sample if you are a stone age tribe? The only part of it you'll be able to identify is the charcoal. The other components are going to be unknown to you and besides that they are so finely milled into the powder that they are inseparable without techniques for decanting and knowing that you had to evaporate the water to get the salt out of it. Same with the steel, they'd have to identify that it was a type of iron but before that they'd have to know what iron was. They had no metallurgy so the chances of that happening are extremely slim. Iron ore looks nothing like iron metal. They'd probably need to discover other metals like copper first to develop smelting techniques and nothing in the gun is going to teach them how to find, mine and smelt copper or iron.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  I agree, but that's the point-- they're going to try a lot of things to achieve those ends. They may not create a single component of a functional firearm, but they're going to develop a lot of unrelated technology in trying. Even if we never made it to space, the attempt would still have given us Velcro.
  - throwaway4aday 3y ago
    I don't think that would be the case for being presented with such a big discontinuity. Comparing it to the space race isn't accurate because while we hadn't achieved spaceflight before we had pretty much mastered atmospheric flight and were using turbojet engines and rocket powered planes to reach the stratosphere and even the mesosphere before the first man reached orbit. We were steadily going higher and higher so reaching orbit was the next step in our progression. Even if you gave a modern rocket engine to someone in 1940 their society would understand almost all of what went into it. Go back further to 1840 and their engineers would be amazed at the strength of the materials but they would recognize a combustion chamber, valves, fuel tanks and even the wiring. In 1740 they would still probably have enough knowledge of fluid dynamics to deduce how it worked although the concept of combining oxidizers and fuel would be foreign to them, though only for another 30 years. Even as you push it back further and further people would still recognize that it was made of some type of metal and could understand that liquid or gas could flow through it and burn and they could probably build a very crude and simplified copy that used the basic principles. The point is that even bronze age civilization was far more advanced than people who had no metallurgy. There are incredibly difficult things you need to learn to go from zero to having any of the components that make up a gun and none of that knowledge is encoded in the gun itself. It's just not obvious to someone with no information about how gunpowder or iron are made how you would go about obtaining and processing the raw materials. It's probably even completely counter-intuitive that you would make something like iron from stone or that you have to burn the stone for a long time at a very high heat. Who would even think of that in a stone age society? The best guess as to how it was invented is by accident and observation. Having a chunk of metal won't give you that insight.
    - justinclift 3y ago