Or maybe earth is the only suitable stop en route with the resources they need/want. Or maybe it's somewhere they can torture the occupants for their amusement. Who knows.
It could just as easily be something horribly destructive plus orbiting cameras to beam back the resulting show. Aliens must be motivated to survive but beyond that their nature could be anything.
Mobile phones. Laptops/tablets. Alexas & Echoes. Maybe drones. Overpriced headphones. Or just cash.
NT
But they don't tolerate our atmosphere very well at all. If only the C02 level could be reduced somehow, they'd really like to stay here on a more permanent basis.
An interesting observation. I always thought it worked the other way round.
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Filing was a normal procedure to make a screw to a measurement standard, and a sliding 'nut' with a cutter can be made to cut a regular thread (though not to a precise standard pitch).
So, the staircase to better precision DOES work by amplifying the virtue in subsequent generations: there are some odd economies involved, though. Like, making a six-foot-long threaded gizmo to get a two-foot-long precision section. Part of the process was written up in an old book, _Measuring the Universe_ that described apparatus-making about a century ago...that amusing item was in Granddad's bookcase.
whit3rd wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:
files? Internal cutting edges on a nut? Back then? You're not thinking this through.
Reporting on historical facts doesn't involve thinking things through.
The last item mentions hand-filed screw threads. Vaucanson is known to have worked out ways of making imperfect lead screws more nearly perfect.
snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:
Yes... it was AFTER the lathe.
Before the lathe were there 'files'?
Yes, I know a file is not made on a lathe.
I was likely machining things long before you even knew what machining was.
There were lots of different lathes. Vaucanson is credited with inventing one of them.
"In 1760 he invented the first industrial metal cutting slide rest lathe."
Of course there were.
This doesn't seem to have give you any grasp of the history of the development of the lathe.
is now generally accepted to be false, so this conclusion wouldn't be surprising even if the original proposition hadn't come from somebody frequently known as AlwaysWrong.
There's an illustration of such a 'nut' here:
/Screw>
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