Independence Day/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions
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**** Or, to suit the 50-year time frame better, accessing the Colossus or ENIAC with an iMac. I suppose that it could work if you assume that the alien computer technology has plateaued pending the next technological revolution (akin to vacuum tubes/transistors) for the entire five decades, or at least that significant advances weren't integrated into the fleetships. That is not entirely impossible given the probable limitations on what seems to be a society of nomadic [[Planet Looters]] that would have to build such a mobile fleet well in advance to move in force, but it's not necessarily plausible either, and it leaves aside matters of software interface and compatibility. Even trying to get Win95 to talk to [[Win XP]] can be a bit of a hassle, and that is a single decade's difference with a single evolutionary tree that was designed. Creating a working interpreter/adapter to cross-link alien and human computers with no knowledge at all of what changes and advances the ET has made on their own for five times that length begins to stretch disbelief a bit, especially given that even human computers alone are divergent enough to be unable to communicate with each other.
***** Unable to communicate with each other? Um, the TCP/IP protocol runs on every OS in the world!
****** Said protocol is also 41 years old as of this writing and is overwhelmingly like to still be in use 9 years from now, which makes the idea of computers still able to sustain a network connection with each other after a 50-year development much less far-fetched than it would seem.
***** Plus, you're forgetting that the iMac only has to communicate with the alien fighter that Area 51 has been studying for 50 years. The uplink to to the mother ship is by using their own fighter as a ''relay''. The backwards compatibility problem thus ''lies entirely on the aliens'', in that all that's needed is for their ''mothership'' to be able to sustain a network connection with an earlier model fighter.
****** And any interstellar empire would have to be capable of long-term backwards compatibility simply because when you send out a subgroup of your fleet to scout space for decades, you need to be able to work with your scouting party when they get back. Unless the alien civilization has a way to update every part of its computer infrastructure at the same pace, parts of it will be screwed after a while if there isn't at least 50-year of backwards compatibility available.
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