Comment on Sokath, his eyes uncovered!
Olgratin_Magmatoe@startrek.website 7 months agoThey may have tried that in the past to no avail. The episode specifically mentions there was several failed attempts at first contact.
Comment on Sokath, his eyes uncovered!
Olgratin_Magmatoe@startrek.website 7 months agoThey may have tried that in the past to no avail. The episode specifically mentions there was several failed attempts at first contact.
rtxn@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Take a look at the Pioneer spacecrafts’ plaques. NASA scientists have broken down our abstract expression of distance to language-agnostic universal constants. I refuse to believe that a space-faring civilization with friendly intentions wouldn’t do everything in its power to find a common language, no matter how far removed from their spoken language.
Olgratin_Magmatoe@startrek.website 7 months ago
They’ve also run things like the pioneer plaques past other scientists, who often have difficulty discerning the meaning behind them. If human scientists have difficulty discerning the meaning, I can only imagine what kind of difficulty aliens who speak in metaphor would have, let alone if they weren’t linguists/scientists, which appear to be the case in the episode.
We evolved to hunt, and so it is suspected that as a result of that, we understand arrows to indicate direction. A species that hasn’t evolved in such a way might not understand the meaning of arrows. Apply that same principle to language and you potentially have your problem.