” I believe the government will look us in the eye and lie about them.”
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As well, they should. Lie and deny, with a clear conscience too.
History has demonstrated over and over and over that whenever advances in technology become know, or worse when they become exploited against them, any viable competitive will work diligently to make their own advancements, either matching the technology itself, or some type of counter measures. When the soviets sent up Sputnik, the U.S. brought full resources to bare in their space program. When the U.S. got the atomic bomb, the soviets went full tilt to get their own.
It would be in our best interest not to expose the existence of certain technological leaps.
A better analogy would be this—imagine an Indian scout discovered the first white men they had ever seen far away on the horizon.
They would report it to the chief and then the tribe leaders would probably be consulted.
Should they tell the rest of the tribe—or hope to secretly capture some tech and reverse engineer it to use against other tribes?
The answer—it does not matter, the tribe is toast.