139
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
139 points (99.3% liked)
Asklemmy
44148 readers
979 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
“Reverse engineering” means tearing a machine down to figure out how it works.
Regardless of how much computation you can do with an abacus or an army of men with flags acting as logic gates, without sufficient microscopy you cannot reverse engineer a microchip.
That’s what this question is getting at: what previous incarnations of civilization would be able to study a computer and figure out what it’s doing?
Well if we're considering alternate histories where a civilization gains access to a working computer then it's basically impossible to tell. It depends on so many variable factors. Whether someone in that time period takes a significant enough interest to even look into it in the first place, whether they're smart enough to solve the question of what it's doing, and even who's hands the computer falls into.
There's a famous example of an ancient Roman trinket that was kept in the collection of a wealthy person. It was a small device that when placed over hot water would spin. We would recognize that device today as a steam turbine and we would know that it has the possibility of sparking the industrial revolution if the right person got a chance to look at it.
So if an ancient civilization got their hands on a modern computer and managed to do anything useful at all with it, it would alter world history in ways that we wouldn't recognize it anymore. Even if they didn't directly reverse engineer the computer but instead gained insight into other technologies like electricity or plastic production, it would alter world history in such a way that the modern computer would almost certainly be produced much earlier than in our own history which kind of nullifies the point of the question.