A question for the fen.

[kengr]

You are wandering through the dealer room at a medium to large convention (Westercon, Baycon, that sort of thing).

There's a table with a couple of people wearing some pretty good spacesuit outfits, complete with mirrored helmets. Even have "translators" with an appropriately "computer" voice.

They're selling toy radio controlled flying saucers. They zip around nicely, making a humming noise much like the cars in the Jetsons.

They want $50 for them.

What do you do?

Comments

Other obvious Gotchas...

[seawasp]

... hidden (backdoor) control,activation, self-destruct systems. Bugs (monitors) incorporated into the device. Interactions between several operating in a given radius. Cause emission of various forms of radiation; nondangerous over short term, terrible over long term. Cause unanticipated changes in local material (catalyzes nitrogen oxide formation, weakens metal crystal structure, etc.) I could go on for hours. I'd like to believe that whoever did this is purely benevolent, but the method is odd, to say the least, and the risks considerable.

Re: Other obvious Gotchas...

[kengr]

I figure that there are two main possibilities:

A: These are usful, but as in Turtledove's "The Road Not Taken" they lead away from other technologies and into a blind alley it'll take use a *long* time to work our way out of.

B: They aren't a booby trap, but are sufficiently ahead of us that can can make "monkey copies" (and worry) or throw a *lot* of effort into research. Or both. Either way, we;'ll be busy for a while and have had our faces rubbed in the fact that we don't know as much as we think we do.

That would either piss us off or teach us some much needed humility.

Considering that they "gave" us this (even in such a roundabout fashion) one has to assume that they aren't articularly worried about the "pissed off" option. :-)