I ask this question because I got to thinking what if a car was sent back in time. Could the scientists of the time reproduce the technology. Let’s say it went back, 100, 200 or 500 years. Would the have even been able to understand the systems of a modern car?
We would probably be unable to fabricate a lot of the materials if they were from a more futuristic technology. For example, what if some of them require pure isotopes? There is only one substance we are able to separate out a pure isotope, which is uranium, and that is an major process in terms of effort. Possibly there would be a lot of nanotechnology involved as well, which we are not very advanced in yet.
Dude we are unable to move anything close to speed of light. the only thing we can move is light itself so dont worry about it cuz its gonna be a long time (i really mean a long time) till we invent the time Machine.
probably not.
consider what a victorian engineer would make of a computer. they would not be able to understand any of it, bcuz it is based on technology that just didn’t exist at the time.
It might be possible to reverse engineer an alien spacecraft. However, they could be so far ahead of us technologically that we wouldn’t be able to understand their technology at all. The Universe is about 9 billion years older than the Solar System. That leaves lots of time for other civilizations to develop technology that would be completely incomprehensible to us.
Sure is. It may take a long time to get to the stage where a full reproduction is possible, however there are many subsystems and materials that will get the scientists looking in the right direction.
depends on if the materials used in it’s creation could be found on earth, that would at least be a major factor in it
Its alot easier to reverse engineer something i.e. figure out how a piece of technology works and recreate it from a working example than it is to come up with that same technology without anyhelp.
However I think than if you sent a modern car back 100 years then alot of the technology would be familiar. They might come unstuck trying to reproduce some of the modern materials used in car manufacture however but they would be able to use alternatives. I believe they would be able to recreate a working modern car fairly easily 1909 isn’t so long ago. If you went back 200 years to 1809 then the technology would be more unfamiliar and even fewer of the components could be recreated, a clever individual might be able to get the car that was sent back working but it would be difficult to recreate the technology using the methods of the time. Go back 500 years to 1509 and the technology would be so unfamilair that i doubt it would be understood.
I guess to answer your question on UFO’s it would depend upon how far advanced the technology was and how greatly it differed from our own. The greater the differences the harder it would be.
Automotive engineering is based on fairly ordinary Newtonian principles. 100 years ago a modern automobile would still be very familiar to practicing engineers, although I’m sure they would marvel at the workmanship and may be momentarily confused by such things as digital control computers.
The basic principles of internal combustion and gear trains would be familiar to engineers 200 years ago. James Watt and his colleagues were filing patents along those lines with a sophisticated understanding of what they accomplished.
500 years ago you would have the rudiments of thermodynamic cycles and basic machines like gears and levers. Again, the crudity of construction prevalent at those times would hobble them in an understanding of how to employ those principles usefully.
Your point is that it would indeed be possible to transport a modern car to a point where the forebears of our species would be unable to discern its operation.
If you presume that an alien spaceship arrived at Earth, then from that you can infer that it would contain technology presently unkonwn to us. Of course delving into speculative details doesn’t really help in answering the question, so we have to sort of stop now. But humans possess highly developed skills in analysis and testing. Given time I think we could be somewhat successful at reverse-engineering something we didn’t invent.
I have to think that Tina L.’s model is probably most accurate. A computer, maybe not 100, but certainly 200 to 500 years ago, would be a complete mystery. Nothing about it would have made any sense and there would have been no way to even power it up and there’d be no practical use for its components.
A car, on the other hand, would be different. It would depend if when you sent the car back in time if it had gas in the tank and the keys in the ignition switch. If those conditions were met, it is possible that some of the car systems could be understood and possible reversed engineered, at least in part. There would have been some practical use for the car’s individual components such as wheels, axials, battery, lights, seats and other parts. They would have likely thought of the car as just a futuristic advancement over the wagon or cart.
If the car was an automatic and there was gas in the tank and the keys were in the ignition it is possible that they might have even learned to drive it. If they successfully accomplished that, it would have certainly planted in their minds a direction in which to advance the then wagon and horse-drawn cart technology. Certainly, scientists of the time would have tried to engineer new versions of carts and wagons along the same lines as the car.
And, think of it like this, they would have probably thought that the car was somehow left there by beings from other worlds.
You would have a good chance, but if the technology was too advanced we would have little chance of understanding it. If you gave a modern microprocessor to someone in the 1800′s then they would have no chance of understanding the principles of operation simply by examining the device.
Of course, that is not the only difficulty. To paraphrase Mrs Beeton, first catch your UFO.
It would be possible provided that the technology did not violate our current laws of physics. If the principles were not capable of being understood then even if we duplicated the hardware down to the micron level we would probably have no way of operating it successfully. If it was capable of being understood, but beyond the current capabilities of our technology, then I suspect we are ingenious enough to figure out how; in other words, it would trigger another technological revolution. Simply knowing it was possible would be sufficient to stimulate enough research until we got it right.
A car at most could be understood as early as 1800′s but not 500 years.If a craft from hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us crashed then probably no. It is so complicated, we would need newer technology. Im speaking on behalf of those who have worked with flying saucers. No joke here. Very serious stuff going on right now in secret bases.