Would advanced alien tech surprise you?

[Crewman47]

With all that Sci-fi shows have shown us over the last 50 years or so if aliens were to make contact with us or a lone alien were to stop by and visit would you still be surprised by there technology?

The way I see it is that if an alien did visit and started to describe there technolgy then, with what we've seen ourselves in fiction, we could probably interrupt them and guess that they probably use Matter/antimatter reaction system for propulsion or something similar. Same goes if they had a ship that a larger interior than what was the outside.

So what would it take to surprise you?

 

[RoJoHen]

So what would it take to surprise you?

If we met them and the first words out of their mouth were in English.

 

[sojourner]

If the mere sight of them didn't scare the bejesus out of us.

 

[ngc7293]

If they were little aliens that spoke with their hands just like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That would creep me out.

 

[Jadzia]

I wouldn't be surprised by the aliens having advanced technology. After all, there's a 50/50 chance that any alien race is technologically ahead of us.

What I would be surprised about is if we could see quite clearly how to improve upon their technology in ways that they could not see.

 

[infinix]

The fact that they want to establish contact with us at all would surprise me. Hell, if I had the human race as a neighbor, I would want to stay the hell away and avoid all contacts. I will not have anything to do with my neighbor until they get their acts together, cleans up their yard, stop fighting all the time.

 

[PurpleBuddha]

So what would it take to surprise you?

If we met them and the first words out of their mouth were in English.

Assuming they are not so alien that their means of verbal communication are completely different, their ability to study us and learn our language before making contact would not surprise me too much.

 

[sojourner]

^In which case it would probably be Chinese or Indian.

 

[PurpleBuddha]

Or all three.

 

[John O.]

Indian's not a language.

I had a dream a couple weeks ago I met some aliens. I was chosen in a sweepstakes to go to Mars and strangely I only got a day to train (you'd think I must've watched Armageddon recently but I hadn't). I ran into some aliens there that didn't seem to know or care that I was a human, or that I was totally stoked to be meeting aliens. I started to ask them how they got here, what kind of propulsion they use to travel between the stars (I'm an aero, what can I say?). When she started to answer (the alien I met was a chick), I interrupted my own question and asked her how they subdivide up physics differently from us, like what areas they might have that we don't even "know" about (like E&M, QM, classical mechanics, etc) and she paused and thought awhile and said "Memory Physics". And then I woke up.

I'm pretty sure she was talking about memory materials, not memories

 

[Myasishchev]

^In which case it would probably be Chinese or Indian.

Hindi-Urdu is spoken by significantly fewer people than speak English (or Spanish); Mandarin is only perhaps close in number of speakers, but is not a global language. But I'll grant that presumably Klaatu would at least be aware that other languages exist.

Anyway, yeah, if aliens had FTL, that would really pleasantly surprise me. Most everything else would be quite cool, but not shocking.

 

[FPAlpha]

I wouldn't be surprised by the aliens having advanced technology. After all, there's a 50/50 chance that any alien race is technologically ahead of us.

What I would be surprised about is if we could see quite clearly how to improve upon their technology in ways that they could not see.

Make that 100% more likely to be technologically more advanced.. we can barely leave our solar system with drones and have only hopped a few times to our moon but they are travelling interstellar distances to meet us.

I think we'd be very surprised by their tech.. heck, we'd be surprised by our own tech that's currently in the lab stages and that won't see the market for another decade or two but if it would work today we'd be amazed.

 

[Myasishchev]

There are some unlikely scenarios I could imagine where a less-advanced species still managed to make it here. We've arguably had the technical ability to do interstellar flight for a few decades.

It'd be kind of hilarious to see an alien habitat module lashed to an Orion rocket run by Apollo-era computers. That might be surprising, and it'd also be dreadfully disappointing, given how we generally expect our nice aliens to appear as Jesus-like savior figures.

 

[sojourner]

^That would probably be the most favorable (though most unlikely) condition for us to meet aliens without going to them. Aliens with superior technology would screw us up in so many ways.

 

[JustAFriend]

How does the ant feel about your technology when you mow your lawn and wipe out the majority of its civilization without you even knowing it???

You're great-great grandfather would be shocked by your everyday tech, let alone someone from ancient Rome.... how would you even begin to comprehend the tech of a civilization a billion years older than our own???

 

[John O.]

How does the ant feel about your technology when you mow your lawn and wipe out the majority of its civilization without you even knowing it???

You're great-great grandfather would be shocked by your everyday tech, let alone someone from ancient Rome.... how would you even begin to comprehend the tech of a civilization a billion years older than our own???

That's assuming that technological advancement is linear over an extremely long time scale, and it isn't necessarily. I mean, our first instinct might be to say "well no it's not linear, it's exponential, look at the last 100 years compared to the last 1000" and that's a valid point, however; there are certain constricting parameters to this question of 'how advanced can technology get?' like - the laws of physics. Engineering, as a general discipline (for all fields) is constantly fighting to push the envelope of what is possible - but, at least the paradigm says anyway, there is a limit - there ARE things that are simply fundamentally not possible. Good example would be designing a chemical rocket that can get you to another star in a realistic lifetime. Of course, there are always 'tricks' to getting around those very specific impossibilities, like not USING a chemical rocket, using a nuclear rocket, etc.

But ultimately there are boundaries - like the luminal barrier, within the known laws of physics. Supposing it should ever be established that it isn't possible to warp spacetime to produce superluminal velocity (DON'T KILL ME FOR BLASPHEMY IT'S JUST A SUPPOSITION!), then naturally there's a practical limit to the type of alien technology we could encounter with respect to propulsion systems.

Overall, there is going to come an epoch in any technologically advancing intelligent civilization when that race moves away from the exponentially increasing section of this technological model and enters a period of diminishing technological returns in which their ability to manipulate the laws of physics to further enhance general technological parameters like efficiency, power, sustainability, durability, and scale is going to slow to an infinitesimal crawl. Just how far that level of advancement is from our present day capacity is hard to predict.

 

[Bill Morris]

About the speed of light, we know it's lower through glass than through air and lower through air than through space, for example. Something slows it down in those cases. But in space, as well, there must be a cause for that speed limit, be it virtual particles, gravitons, zero-point energy, whatever, and clever thieves, magicians, and engineers look for ways around barriers. So there may be surprises in store.

What aliens might show us other than tech, though, that could be surprising would be some details about our own ancient history.

 

[John O.]

About the speed of light, we know it's lower through glass than through air and lower through air than through space, for example. Something slows it down in those cases. But in space, as well, there must be a cause for that speed limit, be it virtual particles, gravitons, zero-point energy, whatever, and clever thieves, magicians, and engineers look for ways around barriers. So there may be surprises in store.

What aliens might show us other than tech, though, that could be surprising would be some details about our own ancient history.

I agree there could be surprises in store - I was just making an example. If it were to be determined superluminal propulsion isn't possible, that'd be a fundamental limit on potential alien tech.

 

[FordSVT]

I wouldn't be surprised by the aliens having advanced technology. After all, there's a 50/50 chance that any alien race is technologically ahead of us.

What I would be surprised about is if we could see quite clearly how to improve upon their technology in ways that they could not see.

Make that 100% more likely to be technologically more advanced.. we can barely leave our solar system with drones and have only hopped a few times to our moon but they are travelling interstellar distances to meet us.

I think we'd be very surprised by their tech.. heck, we'd be surprised by our own tech that's currently in the lab stages and that won't see the market for another decade or two but if it would work today we'd be amazed.

I was about to write this in response to Jadzia, but, knowing how logical she is, she wasn't making the assumption that the aliens would be visitors to Earth from across the galaxy when she wrote her reply. The OP didn't specify the context of our meeting, it's simply something that the rest of us have assumed. If we found them, it would be anyone's guess as to their level of technology.

 

[Bill Morris]

Actually, an alien probe could reach us that's not all that far ahead of us in technology. We could send a probe to a star system three light-years or so from Earth. It's more a matter of budget than technology. And if it took a few decades to get there, it could be receiving software upgrades en route and arrive more advanced than it was when launched, at least in its AI.