It’s often said that alien technology would be inevitably hundreds or even thousands of years in advance of our own, but what if we were to discover that the means by which such a race actually reached our planet did not actually require much better technology than what we have today? What if the first entry into orbit was not by a hovering vessel that shot lasers, but rather similar to a disc shaped helicopter? What if their best weapons were no better than our own? And what if their society had similar problems to our own? If it seems unlikely to you, you’re certainly not alone. But we need only look at history to understand that flukes of science and technology can happen centuries before the rest. What if one of these flukes made interstellar travel possible?
When we look at technology, we generally see it as an arc that projects gradually up a slope over time resulting in increasingly advanced and powerful technology. But what if we learned that as the first saucer landed on the White House lawn it was being propelled by a turbine similar in form to a helicopter or a jet? Or what if it instead dropped into the ocean similar to how NASA vehicles reenter the atmosphere and started broadcasting a distress signal over radio waves declaring it needed to be rescued?
If space travel could be achieved by some fluke, and an alien civilization were learned, lucky, or dedicated enough toward exploiting this fluke of science is it possible they could arrive on Earth after having intercepted one of our transmissions from afar? Imagine opening up a strange space capsule made of extraterrestrial materials and finding the crew inside was not human at all.
The Antikithera Mechanism is only one example of a device that was designed and built years before it was allegedly possible such a device could exist. In fact, this particular device was so advanced it should have been available to other artisans in the form of clocks thousands of years ago. But instead, the device was used to chart the stars in ways that would have been beyond simple clock makers centuries later. Mainstream scientists have suggested that the device was likely a sort of fluke that sprang up overnight.
So if the Antikithera Mechanism was a fluke, then is it possible scientists working with say 1930’s era technology could have stumbled upon a way to generate power effectively and use a propulsion system like cosmic rays to take a ship off the planet’s surface and soaring through the stars? While they were traveling, they may lose contact with their planet and arrive on Earth with comparable technology to when they took off. In fact, through this very fluke it might be possible that they could even find a way of detecting our radio transmissions and follow our planet until they arrive here on Earth. While the object wouldn’t necessarily have to have lasers and an antigravity drive system, it might have advanced in other areas without even developing advanced computers. Some alien races might not even have found the need for simple calculators and therefore the integrated circuit might have entirely been an Earthly development.