Visions of the greater

In a very few of the SciFi stories I've read, the author contemplates what would happen to human science and technology after we met aliens with vastly superior technology. (Roughly equivalent technology doesn't change much: They have X and now we have X too, and aside from that we're peers.) Research science, as a field, disappears completely. Engineering turns into either reverse engineering or simply duplicating (if they let us) what the aliens build. We get discouragement. I think that was one of the points in Childhood's End, though I don't care to re-read it to check.

"What is there to do that has not already been done?" We're not big fans of doing the same things our forefathers did. Maybe that's not a virtue, but Is there anything of which one might say, “See this, it is new”? Already it has existed for ages which were before us. was a lament 2500 years ago.

In the face of true superiority, what choices do we have? If we can somehow unite with the superior without losing our own selves/souls, well and good. Otherwise, what's the use of doing anything?

God told Moses that "no man can see me and live." That's obviously true in the "firehose" sense--there is too much God for us to begin to handle. Perhaps there's something else analogous to those aliens as well. Aquinas set down his pen and said all he had written was so much straw. After the Beatific Vision, can we turn attention to the things of the world again?

Maybe. God did, and if we are united with Him maybe we can too. But it seems as though we were made to see in particular ways: "For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD," but with the glory incarnate through the physical things. We should have, not direct apprehension of God, but vision mediated and illustrated through His creation. (including ourselves, ideally--though not always so much in practice)

The resurrection of the body suggests that some of the old ways of seeing will remain; but at a minimum will be as they should have been.