History Main / InsufficientlyAdvancedAlien

* From ''Webcomic/{{Xkcd}}'': Aliens visit Earth to [[https://xkcd.com/2477/ teach us how to build the Pyramids]]... in the modern day''. After finding out we already have them, they offer [[https://xkcd.com/2478/ other "advanced" technology]]: biplanes, blimps, and leaded gasoline.

** The Bajorans have supposedly tens of thousands of years of recorded history, including the best part of a millenium of manned spaceflight, at the very least. Captain Picard himself noted how advanced Bajoran civilization had already been at a time where humans were still not walking upright. But their technology seems to have stagnated at some point and most of the people behave like [[MedievalStasis Medieval peasant stereotypes]]. Of course the fact that their religion is based around worshiping [[SufficientlyAdvancedAlien Sufficiently Advanced Aliens]] might have something to do with this. The whole thing with the Cardassians going all Holocausty on them probably didn't help either. Gul Dukat even cites the Bajoran stagnation as a ''justification'' for the Cardassian occupation at one point, arguing that the conflict (though costly) ultimately ''helped'' Bajor. Major Kira, a former resistance fighter, doesn't buy it.

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In many Science Fiction settings, especially in AlienInvasion genres that focus on Earth as the only home of humanity, this trope might be very essential for the progression of the plot, since if any alien that wants to invade the Earth will most likely have a higher technological level that makes them have an easier time to rapidly taking down humanity. It also serves as a means for humans to be able to fight back. After all, an alien invasion that simply involves launching weapons from a vast distance with deadly accuracy (or worse, invading aliens having the ability to change reality) will quickly end the war in their favor.

** Another from ''Voyager'': the Vidiians are suffering from the "phage", a disease which destroys their internal organs. They are able to steal organs from every other sentient race for transplant with no risk of rejection, a feat that even current Federation medical science cannot replicate. Despite this, they seem unable to actually cure the phage to begin with. It seems hard to believe that the Vidiians [[AliensNeverInventedTheWheel have no knowledge of virology or immunology]], given that preventing organ rejection requires knowledge of immunology to begin with -- more likely the writers decided not to research the matter. At one point it's revealed that Klingon tissue is resistant to the phage, setting up a plotline putting half-Klingon B'lanna Torres in jeopardy of being harvested -- never mind that a simple tissue sample, along with cloning technology, would be all that the Vidiians would need. Both are within ''20th century technology'', let alone what the Federation has available, and yet this win-win (the Vidiians cure the phage without harvesting B'lanna, and ''Voyager'' gets a valuable ally in return) never occurs to ''anyone'' involved. Worse still, there was one point where the Vidiians kidnapped B'lanna and somehow physically split her into her component human and Klingon halves. If you can do that, surely you could have just taken a blood sample and made yourself a full-Klingon B'lanna without all the fuss. You don't even have to clone a ''person''. Just clone organs. Or make due with ''animal'' organs, since a race capable of cross-species transplants with ''aliens'' certainly ought to be able to use livestock as organ banks.

** The eponymous beings in ''Literature/TheTommyknockers'' are an odd example. It's unclear how much of the principles behind their technology they actually understand, but what ''is'' clear is that they're technically advanced but ''dumb'' in a lot of common-sense ways, and a lot of their high-tech solutions are AwesomeButImpractical at best. For example, they run their entire operation off of AA, AAA, and C- and D-cell batteries [[spoiler:with the occasional [[PoweredByAForsakenChild forsaken]] LivingBattery as a supplement]] and even go so far as to send two of their own on a SuicideMission into a hostile atmosphere to get more rather than rely on the electric grid. It simply never occurs to any of them to just buy a goddamn AC/DC converter. Their violent tempers don't help either: when their stupidity regarding the batteries is pointed out, they explode because they never thought of it.

* ''Literature/TheTommyknockers'' portrays the titular aliens this way. One character says that they have more in common with UsefulNotes/ThomasEdison than UsefulNotes/AlbertEinstein, in the sense that they were a race of [[PsychopathicManchild brutes]] and {{Smug Snake}}s who barely understood the advanced technology that they relied on, let alone knew how to use it to its full potential. [[DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything Direct allusions are drawn]] to misuse of nuclear energy by humans. On a [[RealitySubtext meta level]], the influence that the crashed alien spacecraft exerts over the town is also metaphorical for the CreatorBreakdown of the book's author Creator/StephenKing, who was in the throes of alcohol and cocaine addiction when he wrote it. When he went back to read it again after sobering up, he realized that he had written a bunch of Cokeheads from Outer Space.