It’s almost as if it’s a convenient distraction by design.

If a private, but not secret agency has access to the physics and can’t engineer it, there’s a question of why. As much as we’d like to disassociate engineering from discovery, they’re linked together. Engineering leads to further observation leads to discovery and vice versa back the other direction. It’s entirely possible there’s “new physics” at play even if they’re only theoretical to the Discovery Channel right now. Who’s to say, really?

So while I’m not gonna disagree with you, and you’re right there’s a difference between engineering technology and physics itself, I still don’t really see the distinction as that important to the discussion here.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, after all. We’re talking about exactly that level of technology, commonly being called physics-defying by many engineers today. That’s magic to common understanding, for all intents and purposes, even if it’s possible that we could all eventually understand and demystify it given the education to do so.

Until then? Hard to close doors other than just “do we need this for the story”. And aliens don’t need to be there, hence my whole line of thinking above. That’s just another example of “any secret is the exact secret I want it to be” kind of thinking. See also “everything I don’t understand is a communist” or more recently, “everything I don’t like is woke”. I like to make reference to dinosaurs, because no one ever does. Why not? It could be dinosaurs in those crafts too! There’s more evidence for that than aliens, right? We know 100% dinosaurs existed, here. They would’ve had much much more time to develop technology than we did, eons longer. So again why not? “Because it’s absurd.” Yep. It is. Every argument against it counts against aliens too.

I detect sarcasm. Y’all think those same minds weren’t participating in any shit? Great minds led to climate change after all. Great minds are behind average rich chumps like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos. Great minds enable horrific things throughout history. It wasn’t stupid people developing plastics and chemicals through the last century. So let’s remove the idea that any of these people are inherently good.

Beyond that, compartmentalized knowledge is kind of the whole schtick of military intelligence. They’re good at it. Arguably that’s the whole core framework all military hierarchy is built on, otherwise it’s just militia. We’ve built cities in secret before, military bases exist in secret all over the place. And many of those secrets involved quite literally the greatest minds of the century. Hard to keep quiet about bombs though, right? That was going to come to light. What if it weren’t a bomb though? What if it could stay quiet?

Over and over and over history shows us great minds faced with the ethical problems of developing weapons of war and what do they do? Arrive at the nearly universally the same conclusions. Bigger weapons mean fewer wars, so they develop them. Archimedes to Oppenheimer, Da Vinci to Einstein. Tesla. Von Braun. Seriously all of them were weapons makers for the same idyllic reasons, “ending war”.

But were they wrong? Isn’t war much less than it ever was?

I’m a fan of looking to history for answers about our future because human beings - despite all the technological and social changes - really haven’t had the time to truly change in even five thousand years. The brains still work largely the same as always, we’re just given more tools to work with.