Jones Beene <jone...@pacbell.net> wrote: In that case, the most likely thing ET would need to continue their mission > is replacement of advanced chips and electronics. To get these parts, > however, they might first need to intervene somehow in the normal process > of R&D on earth by influencing progress and directing it in a certain way > to meet their needs, not ours. >
Every breakthrough in semiconductors was made by people without help from extraterrestrials. The people who made these breakthroughs documented their work very carefully, for patent purposes. The history has been preserved in detail. There is no doubt the people came up with the ideas themselves. There is no mystery or gaps in the development process. Individual discoveries were not great leaps of imagination. They were not extremely surprising or unthinkable, especially compared to cold fusion. If Shockly, Brattain and Bardeen had not discovered transistors, someone else soon would have. Arguably, Lilienfeld did discover transistors in 1925. The Bell Labs patent lawyers thought he did, and they wrote the patent so as not to infringe on his patent. It is not likely Lilienfeld ever demonstrated the effect, and his device might not have worked, but it was similar to first devices from Bell Labs. I think there is no likelihood aliens would need help from us, and no likelihood they crashed or their equipment failed. A technology capable of crossing interstellar space with devices as large as this would be "indistinguishable from magic" (Clarke) and it would be hundreds or thousands of years ahead of anything we could understand -- or make. It would be so reliable there is no chance it would fail catastrophically. That is not to say we could not send probes to other stars. There are already laser, solar wind and other proposed devices that might do that. But the payload would be measured in grams. Hundreds would be sent, and it would take ~30 years to reach the nearest stars. http://spaceref.com/interstellar/relaying-swarms-of-low-mass-interstellar-probes.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot If these aliens wanted to make some equipment, they could do it themselves, easily. They would have universal replicators. That is, machines that can make anything -- another idea Clarke was one of the first to describe. Don't leave Alpha Centauri without one! We are quickly developing such tools. 3-D printers are the first generation. Primitive, of course, and only capable of using one material. Far more advanced ones that can use any element are likely to be available in a few hundred years. A thousand years at most, I expect.
