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It's probably not fair, but I've asked similar questions about alien encounters in science fiction shows. Those like Star Trek that have a universal translator
by banana_giraffe 8y ago
It's probably not fair, but I've asked similar questions about alien encounters in science fiction shows. Those like Star Trek that have a universal translator hand wave away language issues, but even then, how do they deal with the video transmission itself?
I can imagine an engineer figuring out an analog broadcast, but once either party uses anything digital, all bets are off, especially once you imagine some codec being used to save bandwidth.
Of course, showing a season of some engineers trying to decode a broadcast makes for poor TV, so I get why they never bother mentioning this, but the thought process makes me realize how much I'm standing on the shoulder of giants when I debug a video player issue.
- delecti 8y agoEven just PAL and NTSC analog broadcasts would take some work to figure out if the alien ship was using the other one, and those were both developed from a common base of technology (early 20th century Earth). Enterprise had them working around the universal translator on several encounters, and IMO even just that got old. It makes me glad that most series handwave away those concerns most of the time, and try to make it an interesting plot point when they don't.