Timeline for How advanced can a civilization get without scientific thinking?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 18, 2020 at 5:44 | comment | added | Galaxy | @Halfthawed Have you heard about the Roswell incident? | |
| May 5, 2020 at 16:43 | comment | added | Nuclear Hoagie | Without any level of understanding, you'll get a cargo cult (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult). These people might be able to assemble a spaceship if given all the parts and a working example, but they will never build one from scratch. Looking at a microchip or a tank of rocket fuel tells you precious little about how to make one yourself. Unless the rocket-building instruction manual goes all the way back to how to dig raw materials out of the ground, they cannot replicate the finished product, since any gap in knowledge thwarts the entire endeavor. | |
| May 5, 2020 at 16:22 | comment | added | Neinstein | I feel like I agree with the comments. The point is, if they don't see how it's made they won't be able to reproduce. They can't recognize that oh this is a circuit like [etc.]. They can know how to drive the spacecraft by observing, but they will never know how to build one until someone builds it in front of them, from naterials they already know. And I don't want to involve alien reverse engineering anyway - humanity is their first contact (although I didn't specify this, true). | |
| May 5, 2020 at 15:57 | comment | added | elemtilas | @Kepotx - I don't think that's "Science" per se. I'd argue that to dó science, you need to have a certain mindset (and humans didn't really have that mindset until medieval Europe came along with its religious mindset). If you drop a ball into a shoe and your cat fetches it out; and then because you're busy decides to drop the ball in the shoe so he can fetch it out on his own doesn't mean he's doing science. This species could just be all "yay! we put all the bits here & we put all the bits together again! Let's make more bits so we can put all those bits together too!" They do but don't get. | |
| May 5, 2020 at 15:24 | comment | added | Halfthawed | I'm not sure this answers the OP's question, as it was a question about the civilization themselves and seeing as there's never been a alien crash in human history for us to reverse engineer, this isn't a valid assumption. | |
| May 5, 2020 at 15:20 | comment | added | DWKraus | I would guess the danger of cross-contamination would be high, but you would need the aliens to actually watch you make something before they would understand it. This would work if there had been another civilization on the planet. It's also the basis of the Foreigner series by CJ Cherryh | |
| May 5, 2020 at 15:20 | comment | added | Kepotx | "Then they pull a spacecraft apart and they know exactly how it's built." Seems like retro engineering to me, which is a form of engineering, which is a form of science. It's probably a definition problem, but I would argue that understanding science, or at least reproduce it is in itself science. | |
| May 5, 2020 at 14:29 | history | answered | Random Driveby | CC BY-SA 4.0 |