Alien Technology

April 2026

I've heard more than one person use the pace of our technological advances as "proof" of aliens. The idea is that we would have to have external help to have such things as integrated circuits. Besides the logical fallacy of these arguments, they also display a complete lack of knowledge of the history of technology. Let's take a short historical journey.

In 1825, British electrical engineer William Sturgeon (1783–1850) invented the electromagnet. Although intriuging, there was little application of this device at first. However, in 1835 the US scientist Joseph Henry (1797–1878) used the electromagnet to create the electromechanical relay. Samuel Morse later used these relays to carry morse-code over telegraph lines. And by the end of the nineteenth century, telephone companies began to use these relays in great numbers.

The purpose of the electromechnical relay was to allow one electrical signal (often a low-voltage signal) to connect (or disconnect) two other conductors (often higher-voltage). In effect, an electric signal could determine whether or not another signal could be propogated from one place to another. Prior to this a switch, operated by a person, was the only way to accomplish this feat.

Still, as useful as relays were, they were noisy, required a fair amount of power, and relatively slow. This made their use for calculations less desirable than purely mechanical adders that used gears to do their work. However, relays were faster than series of moving gears, and could be used to do more complicated operations. In fact, every type of logic gate can be created using relays. In 1940 Konrad Zuse created the Z2 computer, build entirely from relays.

The need for more efficient relays led to the use of vacuum tubes which had developed in parallel with relays. Humphry Davy, first demonstrated the principle of using electric current to heat a thin strip of metal to the point of incandescence (glowing white) in 1807. In 1879, Thomas Edison combined this with a vacuum tube (a glass bulb with all air evacuated from within it). Several years later, during experimentation, Edison discovered that the glowing metal strip (the filament) would allow current to travel through another conductor in the same bulb. In actuality, Edison created the first diode. But seeing no practical use for this, he proceeded no further along these lines. However, in 1906 another inventor by the name of Lee De Forest began where Edison left off and refined the design to create the Audion, which made long-distance phone calls possible. AT&T bought the rights in 1912.

What De Forest created is what we now call a Triode tube. It had the same capability as a electromechanical rely, but with several advantages. A relay could switch up to 100 times per second, although it would wear out quickly at that speed. The vacuum tube can swich 1,000 times per second and has no mechnical parts - thus does not wear out as quickly. Tubes were also quiet and use far less power than relays. The ENIAC computer in 1946 used both relays and tubes to operate as the first general-purpose computer. Tubes continued to evolve over time and were commonly found in radios, stereos, and televisions well into the 1970s.

Despite the advantages of tubes, technologists are always looking for better ways to do things. The first patent for a transistor was filed in Canada by Austrian-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld on October 22, 1925, but his work was ignored by industry as purely theoretical. In 1934 German physicist Dr. Oskar Heil patented another transistor, again solely as theory. There is no evidence that these devices were built. During World War II, diodes used in radar were created from germanium. These qualify as the first solid-state devices and replaced tube diodes in certain applications. Having created solid-state semiconductor diodes, William Shockley decided to attempt to create a solid-state triode. After the war ended Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain worked to realize this dream. Under the auspices of Bell Labs, after several years of research (including many failures), the first transistor was created in 1947 (first demonstrated on December 23) and publicly announced in May 1948. Independent research was also happening in Europe, with the "Transistron" unveiled in 1949.

In 1954, Bell Labs created the first all-transistor computer. Transistors cost 20 times as much as tubes, but the advantage of transistors made the cost worthwhile. The computer was a mere three cubic feet, compared to the 1,000 square feet of ENIAC. Even better, the transistor computer operated on only 100 watts of power, compared to 150 kW for the ENIAC. The transistor computer could only perform a million operations per second, which was slower than tube-based computers, but it demonstrated what the future would look like.

Germanium proved to be very difficult to purify and had a limited range of temperatures that it could work within, and so other semiconductor materials, and combinations thereof, were investigated. In January 26, 1954, Bell Labs developed a silicon transistor, though silicon did not eclipse the use of germanium until the late 1950s. By the end of 1958, the transistor radio was introduced.

After building a single transistor in a semiconductor, some innovators wondered if multiple transistors could be created on a single semiconductor device - an "integrated circuit". The first working germanium integrated ciruit was created by Jack Kilby in 1958. Then, with Kilby's help, the first practical silicon microship was developed in 1959 by Robert Noyce. Over the next decade, more and more transistors were packed into integrated circuits. Since multiple transistors could be placed onto a single piece of silicon, the resulting computers could be smaller, cheaper, faster, and use ever less power. In November 1971, Intel Corporation released the 4004 - an entire computer CPU on a single integrated circuit (IC) "chip". All modern computers are based on this concept. Advancements have come from continuous shrinkage of transistors, allowing the number of transistors in a single chip to double roughly every 18 months. Today, multiple CPU "cores" can be placed on the same chip.

So, we can see how there have not been any sudden or unexplained technological leaps. Instead, what we see is a process where A) someone comes up with a concept, which initially seems to have no practical use, B) someone finds a use for the concept and implements it, C) the technology is refined and developed enough to replace previous technology. Parallel with steps B and C, the same sequence of events starts with a different technology, which eventually supplants the older technology. Thus we see relays supplanted by tubes, supplanted by transistors, supplanted by integrated semiconductor circuits. At some point in the future, no doubt some other technology will come to the fore.

But hasn't the pace of development increased exponentially? Yes. But this has nothing to do with aliens. It stems from two things: 1) as new technologies are released, more people work on those technologies. Instead of a handful of people working for one company, now there are thousands of people working for multiple companies (or on their own). 2) As technology improves, the tools used to develop new technology also improve. Intel now uses computers to design new computers instead of humans hand-designing them. Once again, we can trace all advancement to the natural evolution of technology rather than a revolution that comes from outside. All of the foundational technologies of our modern world date back to well before the modern concept of aliens.