I would not believe any pre-transistor level technology could understand how a smartphone functions without generations of reverse engineering.

Further back, impossible.

Could any of the best engineers working on, say, the Manhattan Project have been able to retro-engineer a smartphone?

It matters because the smartphone is, for one, *human* technology (who knows how aliens think?), and secondly, from not so very far in the future. But in order for the 1940s engineer to even work out what it *does*, it would need a compatible signal from somewhere, yes?

How about someone from further in the past? Could Thomas Edison have retroengineered a smartphone?
How about da Vinci? What would Archimedes have made of it?

The whole idea, that our scientists could retroengineer alien tech, assumes both that our current science is perfectly on the right track in all respects, and that interstellar-voyaging aliens are not really *that* far ahead of us — closer, even, than the Manhattan Project and Starlink.

Kyle – i think you are missing the point – the debunkers say just get into LEO then you only need a few squirts of the rocket to ‘fall’ to the moon, thus requiring minimal fuel. Your theory requires getting all the way to the moons distant orbit, presumably using lots of rocket fuel!

In particular, I wanted to briefly respond to the last point that getting from LEO to a Lunar orbit ~250,000 away from the Earth’s surface in a single burn is unbelievable. However, there is a name for such a maneuvre and it’s called the Trans-Lunar Injection burn (or TLI). I won’t describe all of it because there are other resources (see sources). While he is correct that the transfer isn’t a straight line, he seems unaware that the simplest way to do it is with a Hohmann transfer whereby the burn raises the spacecraft’s apogee (highest point in orbit around Earth) to match the orbit of the target (i.e. the Moon) and is done at such a time that the spacecraft reaches its apogee just when the target is passing by that location in its orbit.

The reason I want to respond to this particular argument is because -like many of the arguments throughout the series – it is a good example of a thing that might seem questionable at first glance or from common-sense, but which starts to make more sense with the requisite concepts and information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-lunar_injection

Not yet, but hopefully within the next couple of years! I mean, unless you copy/paste it into a Word doc or something manually. But I am working on a version for publication.