How long would it take before a global research effort could replicate alien technology?

Question

It's the distant future of 2000 and for several years a group of renegade aliens have been hiding out on Earth, which is treated by the more advanced races of the galaxy as a nature perserve. However a different species attempts to invade Earth but are routed at the expanse of practically all the worlds ICBMs. After the failed alien invasion the human race is forcibly thrust into the galactic stage, and the newly formed United Nations Earth Defense Force is desperately trying to level the playing field. The renegade aliens have their ship and weapons confiscated by the UNEDF so that they can study it.

So my question is: if humanity acquired some samples of alien technology how long would a united global research effort with basically unlimited funding take before it could produce working replicas of the alien ship and their weapons?

Answer 1

Possibly as long as it took the aliens to invent it starting from the existing technology level of humans in your story.

The problem here is that even if I gave you the plans and unlimited samples of the device you want to replicate, or even come close to replicating, you don't have any of the technoilogy or infrastructure to make it. And that's assuming you can even figure out how it works.

A simple example would be a jet engine. I can give you all the schematics and plans for a Pratt & Whitney PW6000 (a modern jet engine) and some examples. But you cannot make the parts because your technology (which for this example we'll set at start of WW2 level - 1939) cannot make the required components. You don't have the material manufacturing processes, the precision engineering equipment, the smelting and alloying technology and the integrated circuit technology required - and plenty more besides (e.g. can you make fuel for it ? Lubricating oil ?) You have to build up all that technology and understanding. If you were very lucky you might shave a decade off the time it would take anyway using the systems you have as a guidance.

But that example is very simple compared to taking tech from a culture capable of interstellar travel and reverse engineering it (and the science and technology and manufacturing systems) to make your own version. If there was some radical new science required to do this (e.g. you had to discover a new theory of spacetime) you could be centuries trying just to find that.

So you might save basically no time to reach the same tech level.

But it's worse than that.

A culture that develops this tech as part of a gradual process of space travel and exploration would also develop wider resource bases, as they can gather resources from other planets and even other systems. The humans can't do that as easily and they are likely to be prevented from doing that in order to prevent them gaining access to more advanced technology. Just for economic reasons other cultures might want to prevent humans advancing too fast.

So humans might never develop any technology they were not allowed to.

Answer 2

If the aliens are a few years ahead of us and use the same basic principles that we do, you'll be fine. Except we already know that they have at least some tech that we don't have, and clearly they have some branches of science that we know nothing about or they wouldn't be flying spaceships around the galaxy.

Worse, we don't have access to their knowledge about things like materials science, manufacturing processes, etc. All we have is some of the products of their technology to examine. Sure, we can put bits in a spectrograph and figure out what it's made of, but that doesn't tell us how it's made. We have plenty of examples in our own history of things made with lost techniques, like the very best Samurai blades from ancient Japan. After many decades of study and attempts to replicate them, we still can't reproduce the work of the master swordsmiths like Motoshighe, Tadayoshi and Masamune. We can know everything about the composition of the materials, but the production methods - in an age where hitting metal with other chunks of metal was the height of technology - are unknown to us.

For a more recent example, there are plenty of companies that use proprietary techniques to make their products. A lot of the time they won't even patent their processes, preferring to gamble on the chance that nobody will be able to figure out the process independently. Some tiny trick that their researchers found that enables them to produce something new, or even produce something old in a new way, and they know that only the same lucky break by a talented researcher is going to figure it out. And these people all share the same basic science and technology.

Now let's look at your alien ship. Start with something simple: the hull plates. Lightweight, extremely high tensile strength, good thermal conductivity and so on. We can run a piece through a spectrograph, do some crystallography, maybe a few other things to figure out what it's made from. But we can never figure out that the reason it's so strong is that the alien shipyard casts the alloy and uses some weirdly distorted electromagnetic fields to encourage the growth of cross-aligned crystalloid filaments in the metal during a quenching phase. We can make the alloy by the ton but it's no more useful for armor than plain aluminium sheet.

Things get worse from there. The power distribution systems on the ship use an insulator that we can't even figure out the basis for, other than that it appears to be a long-chain polymer of some sort. It's produced by a gene-tailored creature similar to a silk worm, then treated by an enzyme produced by synthetic bacteria in... and so on. Each step of the process to create the insulator requires technologies we don't have access to, and even if we did we still don't know the process.

The FTL drive? Not only does it work on principles of physics we never even heard of, is made from materials we can't even examine, but there's some weird spatial distortion thing going on that we can't quite explain. All we know is that every time we bring a screwdriver near the damned thing it turns into a pretzel before disintegrating.

Under those conditions? Sorry, we're looking at a couple of centuries of work and some very, very good bits of luck on the way.

Your only real option to get it done quick is if the renegade aliens have enough knowledge and are willing to teach it to you. Better make nice with them pretty quick.

Sorry, this isn't an HFY-friendly answer, and it kind of spits in the face of shows like Stargate, but humans just aren't going to suddenly make some sort of leap just because they have some busted up spaceships to work with. I mean, like, we've had those alien ships at Area 51 for, what, half a century? Where's my hoverboard???