On the other hand, they may have reached the point where their technology is so far beyond them, they don’t understand it at all anymore and merely use it. To them Arthur C. Clarke’s third law has become an unconscious LAW. . .
This was the point of my original and subsequent posts.
People use calculators today without “knowing” the underlying math. People drive cars without knowing “how” they work. Commercial airline pilots are more and more becoming passengers. There’s certainly many more examples of this.
The belief that just because/if they are here, they must be super intelligent as a necessity is false.
I don’t deny the necessity of a technologically advanced society required to conceive, design and build the type of craft that could traverse space and time in the first place. At the same time, I reject the idea that the operators of such craft MUST have the same “superior intelligence”.
I would suggest by most measures our “Advanced” culture has not led to everybody being advanced, quite the opposite in fact. As we have advanced we have also created a culture of idiots. A large percentage of the population that not only has no clue how things work, but has no interest in finding out. There is a bifurcation of intellect as the smart guys make more and more stuff that any idiot can use.
Personally, I don’t believe we have ever been visited by “Aliens”, ever.
Whether the alien “astronuats” invented or understood the technology that brought them to our solar system and planet and were thus superior, their civilization had to be of superior intelligence, or if you please, capability, to achieve such a feat.
At times I’m one of idiots but I have always liked to know how things worked and tried to pick up whatever I can.
I see so many educated types that absolutely cannot reason at all.
Good point about the super intelligent builders and not so smart operators and support people. Send the lesser beings out and see what happens. If any come back with something valuable then the higher beings take a front seat.
I doubt myself if there aliens that have dropped in on us. There is probably intelligent life or developing anyway. It would be a sad waste of space otherwise.
Excerpt
One thing that gives me sleepless nights is the thought of a group of survivors having access only to the selection of books stocked in an average shop. How far would a civilization get trying to rebuild itself from the wisdom contained in the pages of self-help guides to succeeding in business, thinking yourself thin, or reading the body language of the opposite sex? Even the books in the science section would offer little help. The latest pop-sci page-turner might be engagingly written but it won’t yield much pragmatic knowledge.
The vast majority of our collective wisdom would not be to the survivors of a cataclysm. So how best to help the survivors?
You can’t simply describe all the modern technologies of our civilization without first explaining the fundamentals on which they are built. There’s much more to making an iPhone than knowing the design and materials of each of its components. Each piece of modern technology requires an enormous support network of other technologies, all interlinked and mutually dependent. The iPhone sits as the capstone on the very tip of a vast pyramid of enabling technologies. These include the mining and refining of the rare element indium for the touchscreen, high-precision photolithographic manufacturing of microscopic circuitry in the computer-processing chips, and the incredibly miniaturized components in the microphone, tilt sensors and magnetometers in the handset, not to mention the network of radio masts and infrastructure necessary to maintain telecommunications and the functioning of the phone.
Even quotidian artifacts of our civilization still require a diversity of raw materials that must be mined or otherwise gathered, processed in specialized plants, and the distinct components assembled in a manufacturing facility. A potent demonstration of this gulf was offered when Thomas Thwaites attempted to make a toaster from scratch. He reverse engineered it down to its barest essentials, and then sourced all the raw materials, digging them out of the ground in quarries and mines. He also looked up more traditional, and therefore achievable, metallurgical techniques and used a sixteenth-century text to build a rudimentary iron-smelting bloomery furnace out of a metal dustbin, barbecue coals, and a leaf blower. The finished model is satisfyingly primitive, but also grotesquely beautiful in its own right, and neatly underscores the very problems I’ll address in this book.
You're right Zeneta - they could be of average intelligence or less - and have built on the collective wisdom of thousands of generations before them... interesting way to see it. Thanks for sharing.
technological advancement ≠ average population intelligence
however, in this context people are typically thinking of alien technology and ability to use it. not the bare individual capability of the alien beings themselves