I read a story where a huge alien warship crash landed in Antarctica and a researcher with that same mentality saw it happen and ended up stealing superpowers from the ship.
She basically got the ability to duplicate herself an unlimited number of times. She used that ability to study the alien warship and discovered that it was a single stray ship from an enormous intergalactic war that humans were utterly unprepared to fight in.
So she used her ability to study the alien technology and grant superpowers to a large fraction of humanity, in the hope that people developed who could help humans to survive and win in the war. Civilization immediately collapsed and millions of people died.
Eventually, a group of people found and explored the wreckage and discovered that the war was already over. Both sides had wiped eachother out. The researcher failed to realize this because she had no outside perspective, only the perspectives of her fellow clones. She ended civilization because she was determined to keep fighting as long as there was no proof that thr fighting was over.
