Probably not.
Let’s do an example using our own technology. A hole in spacetime opens up and drops a 2025 radar system smack dab into 1940 Britain, where they’ve just invented the cavity magnetron, making plane carried radar sets practical.
Knowing how this Radar From The Future works would literally advance their knowledge over eighty years. And there’s a war on, so they’d be very motivated to do this.
So they crack open the case, and instead of seeing something that looks like this:
see something that looks like this:
None of it makes any sense to them. They can see signals go into tiny little boxes and come out changed, but have no idea how. They can’t open those little boxes – not without destroying them – and even if they could, they are still a good fifteen, twenty years away from having microscopes strong enough to even see the circuitry inside.
And if they could, tracing all the circuits would be the work of a lifetime.
And they couldn’t make a chip even if they did that. The processes to do that are at the end of at least a half-century of progress. Heck, they probably don’t even realize they’d have to make ultra-pure silicon to start with…or be able to if they did.
Basically what they’ve got is a device that to “reverse engineer” will take almost as long as it took to develop in the first place.
And that’s with Earth technology, less than a century in advance, created to be used by humans. Alien technology, possibly thousands of years more advanced…good luck with that!
