If humanity were contacted by a Type 3 civilization, and in the exchange, we were given access to a compendium of the entirety of that civilization's scientific and cultural knowledge, what would be the most efficient way to use it to advance our own civilization?
How do you imagine humanity usi...
We can read the book. I imagine there would be numerous concepts for which humans don't yet have words--these would need to be referenced by placeholders until humans understand the concepts sufficiently well to give them names of their own. Otherwise, we can assume there are no barriers to reading the text.
Notice to answerers: The hard-science tag is on the question, and requires the answers satisfy stringent requirements, as explained in the tag wiki. So far, no answer satisfies such requirements.
hard-science - "Requires answers backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Contrast with: science-based and reality-check tags." - which kind of paper, empirical(observable) evidence, scientific papers you would like to have about contact with type 3 civilization of great wisdom? Consider to use the science-based tag, is it more appropriate if you would like to have some scientifically based answers. The hard-science tag does not equal to hard scifi setting.
I'm curious as to how a question like this should be answered under hard-science. Answering this seems to necessarily require a lot of speculation in the soft sciences, and that's assuming you can find a comparable situation in history (which seems improbable, because contact between human civilizations of disparate development levels has to my knowledge never involved free exchange of technology).
Honestly, I don't think this can be answered with hard science. The closest recorded example of anything similar to this situation would be Columbus and the Native Americans, but that situation is still extremely different.
@JeroenMostert The only relevant research I could find was on collaboration in research. I suppose there may be other sorts of research along these lines. Perhaps the OP would like to outline what he had envisaged.
This needs to have "hard science" removed. All empirical evidence is of situations where technology was used as leverage for direct or political or economical enslavement (pretty much entirety of colonialism, and in fact, it keeps going to this day). Unless aliens offer single "pages" in return for blood/"permission" to strip mine entire planet/brains/women/anything important, there IS NO comparison in known history and answer is unanswerable. Not to mention that any answer based on historical facts, would obviously assume aliens behave same as humans.
About the hard-science issue: The question states that advanced technology is given for free to humanity. There should be plenty to find in history papers on indigenous people receiving higher tech machinery etc and what they do with it. E.g. plastics destroying the Amazon
@dot_Sp0T No. You are speaking of people getting products of technology, not technology. It's a massive difference. Cargo cults, for example are a very product of that difference - primitives seeing results of technology, without any other knowledge.
@dot_Sp0T There's also a considerable difference between a new technology (no matter how advanced) and a book that (practically, to our minds) contains absolutely every single thing that could ever be discovered - it would be like a way more extreme version of going back to the stone age and giving them everything we've ever discovered
"entirety of that civilization's scientific and cultural knowledge", surely such a vast civilization could produce more knowledge than we could hope to store, even assuming all hard drives on earth were filled with it. Look at the amount of scientific and cultural knowledge that we produce. If energy use is proportional to cultural knowledge then they have 10^23 times more cultural knowledge than we do. We have 10^22 bytes of storage. (Fermi estimates, VERY APPROX) Try fitting all of humanities cultural knowledge into a single bit.
@dot Type III implies ability to strongly model our actions in response to the book before they give it. So we will do whatever it is that the Type III intended when they gave us the text. There's nothing to model in history that approximates encounter with a Type III civilization.
Thanks for the discussion so far. As many of you pointed out, the hard science tag made this question difficult to answer, so I've removed it. @DonaldHobson, we can assume that the aliens built some massive data warehouse, using their technology, and networked it to our internet, in effect giving us a galactic Wikipedia, and eliminating any data storage concerns.
Discussion on question by Deomachus: …
Discussion on question by Deomachus: …