How easy is it actually to reverse engineer a UFO?

Apparently, Jules Verne predicted the invention of the computer and the Internet!!!

 

Yes.

H. G. Wells was the one I was referring to though about cavorite

 

On a side note, Cavorite cannot be used to build a perpetual motion machine unless its gravitational field has a curl component.

Perpetual Motion Revisited (kilty.com)
The components of the curl - Math Insight

 

Step 2....

Initial approach of craft. I imagine the use of a Geiger counter carried by someone in protective gear. With cursory visual inspection of exterior.

Step 3. Transporting to lab. The particular method would likely depend on the circumstances,

 

But what if you had cavorite on a slide moving around and around a circular track just pushing itself along?

 

What are you getting at?

 

Well @Asbo Zaprudder was saying you can't use the fictional element cavorite for perpetual motion, well I was thinking if you put it on a slide mounted on a circular rail it would propel itself on that round and round endlessly so it would be perpetual motion wouldn't it?

 

Well, maybe but I was thinking the way they use it to go to the moon definitely qualifies. Going to the moon normally requires an enormous amount of energy but thanks to the cavorite, they can do it almost effortlessly.

 

That's true as well..... Plus constant acceleration wouldn't that mean a ship with Cavorite would reach sublight and beyond eventually?

 

Who is to say what its properties are? It's fictional after all and H G Wells died a long time ago so we can't ask him.

 

It would take a long time, as cavorite only allows you to use the attraction of different celestial bodies, like the Earth, the Moon, the Sun, and the planets... but that attraction goes weaker as you get farther away from the planets and the solar system, so I doubt you'd go much faster than a few tens of kilometers per second, IE very far from light speed. I mean it's ok to go to the moon, Mars, or even the other planets but it would take millennia to get to the nearest star.

 

Hey imagine the fun if future humans invent a time machine and then visit H G Wells.. The look on his face.

 

I'd expect The Shape of Things to Come to suddenly become a lot more accurate.

 

I suspect that most people if they had a time travel device would go back two millennia to see how accurate the story of Jesus really is and maybe to get an autograph or something, that's got to be worth a lot!!!

 

Definitely would be a time period to visit. Would JC even understand the concept of what an autograph is, but then if he really is also God he'd know you were a time traveller wouldn't he?

 

If he existed at all, which I doubt, he certainly wouldn't sign his name Jesus Christ or even recognise that as his name - assuming he could understand you at all or you could tell which putative messiah of the many claimants to that role was him. Jesus is our version of the given name Yeshua (Joshua), which was the most common Jewish male name of the period. Christ is just the Greek translation of messiah or anointed one. He'd have likely spoken Aramaic or Hebrew, perhaps with some knowledge of contemporary Greek and Latin. (The letter J was proposed in its modern usage by Gian Giorgio Trissino in 1524. Early Roman Christians would have difficulty recognising the written name Jesus, whose name they would have written as Iesus.)

It'd be no use trying to communicate in the English language that wouldn't exist in anything like its modern form until well over a thousand years in the future. Better brush up on the ancient languages of the period before making the trip unless your time machine has some magical device like the TARDIS does for performing instantaneous translation.

 

I think I would join the consensus that it strongly depends upon how 'differently' the UFO operates from stuff we already know. That might mean, specifically, how much more advanced it is than our technology (us lacking general knowledge), but it might also come down to, for example, their technology having taken a very different route. Perhaps this alien species conceptualizes in a way quite different from ours , and this also shows up in how their technology developed, making it a significant hurdle for us to understand what it does, as we only see the end result, but don't grasp the thinking behind it. In that case, reverse-engineering the stuff might be similar to reverse engineering biology (complex mechanisms that either evolved by a mechanism of coincidental changes and retaining what works, or were designed by a mind very different from our own, depending on your world views, but at any rate weren't designed by a human mind). It can be done, but it takes a lot of time and research.

 

Again if Jesus is also God then translation would not be an issue, he'd know who and what you are and that you violated physics to pay a visit

 

If Jesus were that smart, he wouldn't have got himself crucified. He would have created a laser blaster out of nothing and defeated the Roman Empire single handed.

 

Well you are thinking in logical terms it was all part of the plan man. He had a plan /s