If there's anything to this (and I don't really think there is), it's entirely possible that if the government is forced to reveal it, they're going to say, "We've had this thing since 1946, we've spent billions of dollars researching it, and all we can figure out is it's made of some sort of titanium-osmium metal foam that appears to be completely undifferentiated with no structures or power sources at all, but we know it used to work because we shot it down after it vaporized a Jeep".

It seems the crucial element (pardon the pun) is that they wouldn't know what to look for. The Victorians knew enough about chemistry that they could figure out the material composition of various components. And we similarly know how to enumerate all sorts of chemical and physical properties of any exotic materials and objects we might come across. But it's all based on our own patchwork model of the physical universe, which has plenty of gaps we know about, nevermind those we can't even imagine. We don't know what we don't know.

If we assume aliens are visiting then it's almost certain that their technology is thousands, if not millions, of years ahead of ours. And if we assume that follows an exponential curve (which may not be a valid assumption - we really only have ~200 years of history upon which we could base such a supposition), then it follows that their technology would be indecipherably complex for us to understand.

You're arguing for a sort of technology threshold beyond which we cannot see (presumably within a reasonable time frame). However, which side of said threshold we are on, even for technology from a civilization a million years older, isn't clear. I am not convinced it can be clear, since we'd be arguing about properties of a hypothetical craft.

A time-based argument is probably not useful. The difference between ourselves and ancient Egyptians is huge, but it isn't from exponential change in technology over time. That change in technology was driven by (and drives) both our different (from the Egyptians') model of the world, and our ability to sense the world.

Consider a recovered alien ship hull. If it crashed in ancient Egypt, they might make use of the metals and conclude the ship was a god or its vessel cast down from the heavens. If it crashed in the modern United States, we could figure out the chemical makeup of it, test its properties, hypothesize about how it works, and try to recreate it. All of that could wind up being incredibly valuable, even if we couldn't recreate the shell itself.

I would posit it's not even Victorian era scientists looking at an iPad. It's like presenting an iPad to pre-agriculture humans. We might not even fathom how it works or what it's even supposed to do when our frame of reference is so far behind technologically

The government isn't even revealing the existence of search-warrant-type documents. Who do you imagine would have the ability to compel the revelation of a secret of this magnitude?

I'm using 'forced' in the sense of 'circumstances cause it to become necessary to do', not 'some more powerful entity will make them do it'.

We can't even hold some NIH administrators accountable for funding research that led to a pandemic. It's laughably naive to think that we could hold accountable, nevermind investigate, whatever faceless perpetrators are responsible for a government program cloaked in so much secrecy that not even presidents have been aware of it.

The mid-19th century would make eventual headway with an iPad, but not much if all they were left with was the remnants of one that had been vaporized.

So, DARPA doesn't exist, and it can't put out calls for things it'd like developed in certain areas? /s

I mean, it doesn't really take much thinking at all to figure out ways to introduce "future generation" technology that's not going to raise many eyebrows.

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.

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.

Wouldn't have to be the biggest challenges getting solved right away. Alien "mundane, old crap" would probably turn out pretty useful too. :D

It could also be a misinformation campaign meant for adversaries to make it appear that these hypothetical discoveries are backed by a source that may potentially yield more.

Beyond this, perhaps we now have evidence that adversaries reverse engineering the same tech are ahead of us, and enlisting the broader scientific community is now the primary goal.

And again, I’m not saying these are likely explanations. But in the unlikely event that we’re really talking about alien tech, they seem plausible.

- The tech is so far beyond our own that it would be unreasonable to claim it was developed in secret labs within plausible timeframes

- They know it exists, but don’t know how it works, and there are growing concerns about adversaries beating us to that understanding

- They believe adversaries have already figured things out or have surpassed our progress, and there is growing urgency to drum up public support for another space race type of research project

Any technology that much more advanced than our own would require intermediary technologies before we could replicate it. If you took a car back to ancient Rome, they wouldn't be able to replicate it in one step even if they understood it, because you need sufficiently refined fuel, metallurgy, manufacturing precision, etc.

The technological baseline needed to rollout any wildly advanced technology would necessarily lead to an incremental advancement before we got to the end result, and each step would be a plausibly "natural" advancement on current technology.

There doesn't seem to be any particular place where a bunch of wild advancements are emerging from, which leads to a few likely possibilities: we haven't found alien technology; we have, but it's so advanced that we haven't cracked the surface yet; or we have, and have cracked the surface, and are replicating it, but they're doing a very good job keeping it secret. I don't think it's possible to keep the lid on something that big, and space is so big that I'm very inclined towards the first one.

A bicycle is an even better example. It is 100% understandable to a Roman just via looking and touching, but replicating a bicycle in Rome isn't as easy as it looks. The chain alone is a problem.

The real difference is that it would take an army of ancient craftsmen to make one bike.

The real distinguishing factor with modernity is mass manufacturing and precision at scale.

Even moreso income inequality and competition with slavery.

Any roman who could afford a bicycle would rightly think it was rubbish compared to a horse. All this expense just to propel myself around?!

The same goes for most modern conveniences. Even the best modern dishwasher is less efficient than a human slave doing the same task, if you're indifferent to the suffering of the slave, as the Romans were.

I would vote for this one, but this hypothesis doesn't need the ET part.

I can't figure out what you mean by this, unless you're referring to Pepper's ghost which is not a hologram at all. If you photograph a Pepper's ghost illusion you get a regular photograph, not a hologram.

Because the type of exotic field propulsion these things are using is so far beyond the current state of the art it wouldn't be remotely plausible.

It would be like going from vacuum tubes to 3nm EUV in a single step, no one would believe you.

They would just release it and come clean. No one would be mad that we suddenly have near-magical solutions to energy problems.

What you're describing is essentially what happened with the Manhattan Project, which was a tightly guarded military secret. But once it became clear there were civilian applications, they stood up the Atomic Energy Commission and helped the rest of the country get to work on nuclear energy.

On the other hand, if we have our hands on ET craft, you'd have to imagine there are some capitalists who would like to profit hand over fist over whatever this technology might offer, people who aren't well leveraged for this revolution be damned and left to fight amongst themselves while your cabal maintains the largest technological advantage relative to other groups in human history. We have plenty of examples of capitalists profiteering at the expense of humans and the earth today.

This is all speculation of course, who knows what is happening.

Maybe I'm being naive, but unless there was an imminent invasion, I don't think it would change most lives at all in any significant way.

You go to work because you need to eat and in order to eat you need money from working. You pay your taxes because there are penalties for not doing so. Generals and politicians already lie to everyone, so you keep fighting their wars regardless. None of these change for anyone unless there's some breakdown in society from some external cause, such as an invasion or war.

The only one of those that has any real merit in my mind is that it would probably cause some people to question religion. But the opposite could also be true and the religious types might herald it as evidence that there is a god because only a god could conceive of such technology.

This just comes across as conspiracy mongering. Yes, there will be people who think like that but those people already think like that. There wouldn't be some mass collapse in society or government. The most that would happen is people would be interested in the information released, acknowledge the government has secrets just like they did yesterday, and move on with life.

Alien intelligence would be one of the most important discoveries of our species but you still have to wake up the next morning and go to work.

But no, their entire country is being blown up on a daily basis, apartments being hit by cruise missiles, streets being shelled and people just go to work and school or whatever like it's business as usual. I guess in the end, what else can you really do? Life is banal.

Like if the imminent threat of grisly death doesn't get people to stop living in a society then literally nothing else will. Not aliens, not AGI, not the return of Jesus, not even everyone magically turning into frogs. Well ok that last one might do it.

That's the thing - except for places very close to the front lines, only very tiny portion of the country is getting hit.

So no, it's not "the entire country, on a daily basis".

You are correct though that the media loves to paint it as a 24x7 apocalyptic hellscape (mostly via selective imagery, independent of what is actually said in the articles). That's how they get your anxiety molecules jumping, and thus make their money, after all.

For cities actively under siege, that's exactly how it is though. Read about St. Petersburg or the battle of Vukovar.

I wouldn't word it like that

People going to work every day while there are bombs dropping, in the middle of a war, trying to keep the exchange of goods going so they can pay for the war and to survive, is not banal. It's not obvious that people would go to work in a war zone, and it's not boring, and in many times in history people did not go to work during a war (except for farmers, whose lives depended on it)