Speed of light engine conversions

It starts off with 911 and moves on. Mate, search for your own answers

Okay, I did.  And I lost heart when he proclaimed that integrated circuits were reverse engineered from captured alien tech.  No.  That just isn't true. 

It's frankly insulting to the teams of scientists and engineers who collaborated and competed, who worked step by step through the processes of investigating the properties of semiconducting materials and then managed to create functioning point contact transistors and then developed the lithographic processes of manufacturing robust devices on a substrate, leading a few years later to the major advance of making multiple transistors on a single substrate allowing an integrated logic gate to be made as a single device.  This is history.  Not magic.  It developed step by step.  And it's technology which most certainly didn't drop into our laps from orbit.  Real people actually did this work and it's a travesty that their brilliance, hard work and dedication is waved away by some bloke who wants to pretend it was space aliens.

Not impressed.

<edit to add>  I'd ask anyone to consider what the original Bell labs transistors were like.  Big, clumsy point-contact germanium devices.  Now look where those transistorised devices are now - exclusively silicon and mostly field effect rather than bipolar.  If you showed a current generation microprocessor to Bell labs (or Philips who nearly beat them to it with their own design) in the late 1940s they wouldn't have a clue what it was. 

Now imagine what our electronic tech might be like in some far future when humans venture to other inhabited planets.  Then imagine one of our spaceships crashes among aliens at a similar stage of development to ourselves in the 1940s.  What are they going to make of our technology?  The one thing you can say for certain is that they won't find any big, clumsy point contact germanium transistors to copy.

Is that fair?  Do you really think that's what I'm doing?  I'm not handwaving stuff away and burying my head in the sand.  I'm trying to give reasoned arguments. 

Honestly, do you take his word for it that the idea for integrated circuits was reverse engineered from captured alien spaceships, or would you consider maybe reading a bit about the history of semiconductors instead and seeing that he just yanked that idea out of his butt?

While I believe a lot of the stuff in the media is dumbed down and often there's a hidden agenda, I do struggle with a lot of this stuff.

I'm a frim believer in the simplest explanation is often the correct one. Occam's razor applies to an awful lot of the nonse that gets posted on the internet.

So yeah. Do I believe in the New World Order? No. do I believe the rich and powerful exert their influence on governments to further their interests? Yeah of course, It's human nature to protect your interests and feather your nest.

Aliens? I'd say there's almost certainly other life out there but the chances of us ever stumbling across each other are tiny and they'd probably just zap out of existence for being so self obsssesed to the detriment of the very planet that gave us life.

Ultimately I could spend loads of time worrying about all this and reading it up in the jnternet but I don't. Firstly I just don't have the time to devote to it. Secondly 99% of it is the ramblings of people who can't back it up with any science or proper documented evidence. At worst it's just badly researched and full of obvious errors.

For clarity I have the same issue with religion. I'm not naive enough to rule a god out but nothing so far in my life has given me any hard evidence to believe in one. I'm not a faith kinda guy. Show me how it works and I'm in, tell me to just believe and I'm out. That's the way I am. Part of me envies people who have a comfort blanket in being able to believe there's a greater power out there looking out for them. Of course there's a few nutters who take it all to far. ISIS, I'm looking at you!

a lot of bets are hedged on future tech and prarrie canoe like pacific rim are just there to keep us entertained. ideas have their time and place. right now it's time to chill.