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So some aliens come to Earth, and offer us their technology, but at a price. Unfortunately, this price includes some non-negotiable aspects that are quite frankly unpalatable to the human psyche and we decide that while we want the technology, we don't want to pay the price.

Naturally, being humans, we decide that we want to have our cake and eat it too, so against all logic we elect to force the technology from the aliens.

So, what would the best way to steal the technology be?

Do we murder or enslave the aliens who come to teach us the technology and then immediately attempt to build ships to attack our alien "oppressors"?

Or would it be better to lie low for a while, subverting their plans for humanity as much as we can until we are advanced enough to attack them with a chance of winning?

Or maybe you have a better plan? Any ideas are welcome, just so long as it involves us backstabbing a bunch of gullible aliens with advanced technology.

Gullible AND Advanced? Well, you'll notice the Blitzkrieg lost in the end. No matter how cool it'd be to go kicking alien ass, even if we had rough parity to them, they'd bog us down and then destroy us, as they apparantly have greater industrial capacity and technology than humanity, even if it is far away from the front lines. I could draw a parallel to the United States in 1940 here.

We sit back, bide our time, and prepare a massive attack (attack fleet?) that will destroy them utterly. You don't mess with anything technologically advanced enough to travel the stars without assurances of total victory.

What are we going to attack them with? Two functional unarmed space shuttles? We have enough trouble sending a few people into space, never mind logistics. We're fucked.

Robert Walper wrote:What are we going to attack them with? Two functional unarmed space shuttles? We have enough trouble sending a few people into space, never mind logistics. We're fucked.

Nah not a shuttle,just a Jewish computer nerd,a US Marine pilot and an alien fighter ship

Montcalm wrote:

Robert Walper wrote:What are we going to attack them with? Two functional unarmed space shuttles? We have enough trouble sending a few people into space, never mind logistics. We're fucked.

Nah not a shuttle,just a Jewish computer nerd,a US Marine pilot and an alien fighter ship

Unfortunately, since OSX Macs are no longer compatible with alien computer systems from across the galaxy.

We attack them with the power of us not wanting them to change our culture.

RAR!

You know... we'll act like the panicky xenophobes that we all know ourselves to be in the depths our iddy biddy hearts.

I'll fall back on Larry Niven canon ...

The only way we win is through infiltration -- us poor barbarians have no chance in a straight-up fight, but we might have a chance if we're far cleverer and far more war-like than our new alien masters can imagine.

*Known Space spoiler alert*

This is exactly how the Kzin, humanity's enemies in a series of interstellar wars, became technologically advanced in Niven's 'Known Space' universe.

The Kzin were at a medieval level of technology, stuck in millenia of feudal warlordism, when the Jotok, a spacefaring civilization, make First Contact and begin recruiting Kzin as mercenary soldiers (the Kzin being physically much more fearsome than the Jotok). This turns out to be a big mistake for the Jotok, as the Kzin eventually revolt, overthrow them, and start their own empire based on conquering other planets and either enslaving or eating (or both) the inhabitants.

This sounds like the only way barbarian Earthers are going to win against interstellar invaders, and it takes a lot of time.

You know what I do? I go buy an empty missle silo and migrate there with abotu ten years worth of food. Aliens are not good things for my future.

An alien fleet turns up and no-one on earth thinks about how their ships or anything else they demonstrate works? Just knowing a thing is possiable is a huge leg up.

That and getting to talk to their engineers and buttering them up with whatever. Also, there's liable to be some in the fleet who don't agree with the entire plot maybe they'ld help more with the right incentives.

Given they are 'hipothetical RAR!' aliens we could bribe them with alcohol and Playboy Bunnies.

Lusankya wrote:So, what would the best way to steal the technology be?

It rather depends on the circumstances. More on that later.

Do we murder or enslave the aliens who come to teach us the technology and then immediately attempt to build ships to attack our alien "oppressors"?

Depends. Do they have FTL communications they can use to call for help if attacked? If so, attacking the first expedition would be a bad idea. If not, what will their reaction be when their ship goes missing? Will they just write it off? Will they send a follow-up mission? If they'll ignore it, or their ship speeds are really slow so it'll be years until they learn the ship's missing, then this might not be a bad idea. Generally, I'd be against overtly provoking a much more powerful civilization unless we had no choice.

Or would it be better to lie low for a while, subverting their plans for humanity as much as we can until we are advanced enough to attack them with a chance of winning?

We'd pretty much have to lie low for a while. First, there'd be the problem of actually building ships capable of reaching other star systems. Then we'd have to bring our technology (most importantly our military) up to speed. It would be simply impossible to fight anything but a defensive war with our present level of technology.
Ideally I'd use the advanced technology to found our own empire, founding colonies around nearby stars and conquering primitive planets, before seeking out the advanced aliens.

Hate to have to tell you all this, but the chances of us reverse-engineering anything from an FTL civilisation and particularly one with a very alien mindset to our own are about as close to zero as makes no odds. The technology base isn't there, the industrial base isn't there, the understanding of basic principles isn't there, and the materials-science isn't there. Thought-experiment: imagine plopping a Trinity-class atomic warhead in Leonardo daVinci's lap and setting him the challenge of producing a working duplicate with the knowledge and technology of 1505 at his disposal.

Patrick Degan wrote:Hate to have to tell you all this, but the chances of us reverse-engineering anything from an FTL civilisation and particularly one with a very alien mindset to our own are about as close to zero as makes no odds. The technology base isn't there, the industrial base isn't there, the understanding of basic principles isn't there, and the materials-science isn't there. Thought-experiment: imagine plopping a Trinity-class atomic warhead in Leonardo daVinci's lap and setting him the challenge of producing a working duplicate with the knowledge and technology of 1505 at his disposal.

To which I repeat my earlier assessment: We're fucked.

personally i would be first up for the choice of “traitorous diplomat”, negotiating a favourable surender treaty for my country and the combined non fundies of earth.

Patrick Degan wrote:Hate to have to tell you all this, but the chances of us reverse-engineering anything from an FTL civilisation and particularly one with a very alien mindset to our own are about as close to zero as makes no odds. The technology base isn't there, the industrial base isn't there, the understanding of basic principles isn't there, and the materials-science isn't there.

But it may speed up our technological development a good bit. Like that guy said in T2, we won't be able to replicate the machines but it'll give us ideas...

Junghalli wrote:

Patrick Degan wrote:Hate to have to tell you all this, but the chances of us reverse-engineering anything from an FTL civilisation and particularly one with a very alien mindset to our own are about as close to zero as makes no odds. The technology base isn't there, the industrial base isn't there, the understanding of basic principles isn't there, and the materials-science isn't there.

But it may speed up our technological development a good bit. Like that guy said in T2, we won't be able to replicate the machines but it'll give us ideas...

Nope. We've got plenty of "ideas" coming from science fiction as it is, but so far none of them have accelerated the development of an FTL system. Scientific and technological development are rigidly evolutionary processes and ones which won't proceed without all the pieces in place. To go back to the example of Leonardo daVinci, he certainly had plenty of ideas (and ones proceeding from a far sounder intellectual base than SF), but it still took four centuries of development before any of them became even remotely practical.

Patrick Degan wrote:Nope. We've got plenty of "ideas" coming from science fiction as it is, but so far none of them have accelerated the development of an FTL system. Scientific and technological development are rigidly evolutionary processes and ones which won't proceed without all the pieces in place.

Well, if the technology is all so advanced it basically comes out to being a black box then you may have a point. But I'll bet examination of the tech will yield up at least some possible solutions to present technical problems. Take fusion power for instance. We can't make a practical fusion reactor. If we had their working ship's reactor to poke around in and could see how they accomplished it then it would point us in the way we want to go to make one ourselves, and save us a lot of exploration of dead ends that normal scientific progress entails.

Lusankya wrote:So some aliens come to Earth, and offer us their technology, but at a price. Unfortunately, this price includes some non-negotiable aspects that are quite frankly unpalatable to the human psyche and we decide that while we want the technology, we don't want to pay the price.

Naturally, being humans, we decide that we want to have our cake and eat it too, so against all logic we elect to force the technology from the aliens.

So, what would the best way to steal the technology be?

Do we murder or enslave the aliens who come to teach us the technology and then immediately attempt to build ships to attack our alien "oppressors"?

Or would it be better to lie low for a while, subverting their plans for humanity as much as we can until we are advanced enough to attack them with a chance of winning?

Or maybe you have a better plan? Any ideas are welcome, just so long as it involves us backstabbing a bunch of gullible aliens with advanced technology.

If they are advanced enough to master interstellar travel, and simultaneously be able to dictate unpalatable terms, then they would wipe the floor with us. Let's analyze what would happen in each scenario.

A) Kill oppressors, take battle to them, RAR! Take the battle to them . . . with what? The only ones building craft an any quantity right now are the Russians, and it takes then a fairly long time to produce one Soyuz or Progress craft. And they're only capable of LEO. The aliens can retreat to the asteroid belt, or to Earth's Trojan points, and throw asteroids at us until we give up, or until there's nothing left. They could set up mass drivers on the Moon and pelt us with moonrocks. If they have an antimatter rocket, they can point the exhaust at Earth and turn it on, bombarding the planet with nasty pions and gamma rays.

We could try to nuke them, but ICBMs are suborbital, and don't have the sort of guidance system you need to hit alien ships. And, we'll presume they've invented radar, and will see what you're doing. Even the slowest alien will grasp that you're shooting at them. Immediate resistance would end badly for Earth.

B) Go along with them until the time is right: This idea, too, is fraught with difficulties. It would only work if their terms weren't sufficiently unpalatable to make humans even consider armed revolt, as sufficiently noxious terms are likely to involve us crippling our ability to put up any meaningful resistance to them. Presumably, if they're advanced enough to come here, then it would be trivially easy for them to monitor our radio transmissions, since we don't yet have the sort of encryption technology that can't be forced with arbitrary application of brute-force computing power. Worse still, there will be some nation, or bloc of nations that would be willing to pay the price, and become alien cronies for a shot at having a nasty edge against their enemies. The only way it would really work is if they were stupid enough to give us everything at once, and then handily ignored the suspiciously sudden flurry of activity.