How easy is it actually to reverse engineer a UFO?

It's funny but I don't remember Picard's reaction to that line.

 

Ever seen Cybertron? (from "The Transformers")

 

Oooh OK Star Trek version of that I can dig it. But do they transform?

 

Programmable matter?

 

OK OMG you are absolutely right. I had forgotten that detail, that is just like the element Transformium from one of the Transformers movies I kid you not that was the name

 

As long as it is air-gapped away from everything else.

 

In a Faraday and mu-metal cage and with an isolated power supply to be on the safe side. Even then there might be ways to influence the outside world - hypnotic suggestions fed to observers, psychological manipulation, directed vibrations, or more exotic mechanisms involving quantum state correlations and entanglement.

 

I love how at the end they're all worried about standing under the saucer as if it might fall or something.

 

Do you guys remember an old sci. fi. series called "The Invaders"? I remember that the aliens were said to be from another galaxy. I mean they come from a polluted planet that won't be able to sustain life for much longer (reminds you of anything) but in all the stars between there and here ours was the most suited for invasion!!! It's doesn't even have the correct air composition! Or maybe that's a lot closer to reality than Star Trek where any planet or moon they land on has breathable air, even when there's no life on it!

 

Also UFO, where the aliens, again on a dying world IIRC, needed to harvest humans for our organs. Perhaps that's where Voyager got its concept of the Vidiians. It seems very unlikely that an alien species' biology would be close enough to ours to do that.

 

That's the thing that pissed me off a lot about Star Trek that M Class planets abound but that's more because it's a TV show and TV budget they can't really escape that every planet is friendly trope. Spacesuit costumes would eat the budget.

UFO was a great show but it didn't have an ending that I know of and no real payoff. But on the subject of aliens why would it be such a stretch that the humanoid shape, our shape wouldn't be happening on other worlds under similar conditions?

 

There's also the aliens carrying around a book entitled "To Serve Man"... that turned out to be a cookbook.

 

The shape perhaps, but biology so compatible that it allows organ transplants? That's too much of a stretch for me. But then we also have an example of viable progeny such as Spock from a mating between a human and an alien. As I think Carl Sagan commented, that's less likely than a human mating successfully with a petunia.

 

It's likely that our air would be as toxic to them as theirs would be to us. It's also likely that their food would be indigestible to us. It would be like eating plastic.

 

Well in books im reading, planets can be close to "class M" but need terraformimg in some reguard. At the very least soil bacteria and other small things. Because you need the right mix of oxygen, nitrogen, co2 trace gases. Look at Pandora, plenty of O2 but way too much Co2. Atmo pressure moisture.. Etc.
Chances of aliens having even a 50% in common is not even remotely possible.
Having to use breathers..

 

You know there may be a way to terraform Mars and that would be to send ships in the Kuiper belt and analyze precisely the orbits of all the comets there. and then push some of them ( about a few billion) so that they would drop on Mars after a trip of a couple of hundred years. The energy from the crash plus the water and air contained in the comets would create an atmosphere and bodies of water so that the planet would be grossly terraformed. It would take then a few centuries more to fine-tune that atmosphere so that we could actually live there along with plant and animal life genetically engineered to live in that environment.

 

Having the beings from The Invaders and UFO being Preserver type off-shoots would allow some differences but let us here in the boonies still be “useful” to them.

 

I don't think that's how comets work or planetary bombardment, because that's what you are proposing with sending comets into Mars, Yes water and ice and all the nice stuff but the impact would be destructive.

 

Destructive of what? Terraforming is destructive, it transforms a dead planet into a live one with different kinds of erosion. As it is Mars is uninhabitable.