There was a terrific TNG episode in the later seasons that explained the proliferation of bipedal humanoid aliens as the byproduct of galactic DNA seeding by an original ancient humanoid race. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Yes. By far one of the best TNG episodes, and perhaps most emblematic of Roddenberry’s overall point of view: “If only we could sit down together…”
Another episode that comes to mind, as long as we are walking down memory lane: does anyone recall the Enterprise coming on a seemingly-isolated satellite of some sort – whereupon a beam of some type scans the ship? Nobody is affected by the beam, aside from Picard. Immediately, Picard falls to the deck, where he remains for most of the episode.
Then we switch to the surface of a planet, where Picard finds himself, in full possession of his identity as Captain of Enterprise, alternately confused, or angry. Time passes; after initial resistance, Picard bows to the inevitable, carving out a life, finding a lovely wife, fine children and close friends.
At the end of a normal lifespan of some decades, we see Picard on his death bed, on the planet. Entering right and left are friends long dead, and mourned, reappearing, gathering around him with current friends and extended family.
They explain to him what has happened, that his entire span of life was lived on some sort of holodeck, fashioned by a race of bipeds anxious to be remembered by history as they face a supernova with equanimity.
As he passes, Picard-on-Enterprise wakes, finding that only minutes have passed, while he lived an entire life.
A viewer unmoved by this episode is made of some sort of steel. It’s amongst the most memorable episodes. This race of people are truly remarkable.
That’s the ‘flute’ episode, ‘Inner Light.’ It is really poignant when in juxtaposition with Captain Picard’s ‘real’ life in which he never had children or a family of his own (which he lamented over after the death of his brother and nephew at the beginning of the movie Star Trek: Generations.)
Sorry this seemed to have devolved into a Star Trek discussion thread, Keith 😉
Suspension of disbelief is the only option if the language is completely unknown to the translating device. Language uses words to represent physical and abstract concepts. Without any other input other than listening to someone talk it would be impossible for a device, no matter how advanced, to decipher the unknown language. The best that it could do is determine that it is a language (i.e. not gibberish) by sensing patterns and isolating words, perhaps determining some grammatical function. But the device would have no way to know what any of those words actually meant.
Well, yes, science fiction does require some willing suspension of disbelief. For example, faster than light travel is a nightmare for causality, no matter what new discoveries an author postulates. Even reasonable sounding things, like the use of an Earth flyby to take a spacecraft back to Mars (critical to the plot of _The_Martian_) might not survive a detailed examination. But if the errors are below a certain level, why ruin a good story by letting that bother you?
On the technical details of learning and translating other languages, it’s even worse than you suggest. The President of France, a fluent speaker of English, recently embarrassed himself by describing the Australian Prime Minister’s wife as “delicious” when the word he wanted was “delightful.” And there is the old and probably apocryphal story about someone trying to learn a language by pointing at things and trying to get the names for them. After getting the same word for everything he pointed at, he eventually realized he was getting the verb for “point.” Worse, there are some languages (on Earth, so alien languages would be worse) which don’t even have nouns for many things. “Chair” is a form of the verb “to sit”, as in “[a thing used for] sitting.”
Yep once Dathon and Picard started visually communicating concepts combined with spoken words, understanding each other’s language could begin.
Although the episode was still stretching things a bit since even before then the universal translator was understanding words and their meaning, it was just puzzled by the use of allegories, essentially the Tamarians seemed to be “speaking in riddles” which according to the story was the only roadblock to translation. Whereas in reality the universal translator would not have been able to even understand words initially.
But hey for the sake of entertainment I’m all for it. Just like I am in full favor of beaming crews down to planets even though scientifically that may be even more impossible than traveling faster than light, but it’s way cool and should always be a part of Star Trek.
Yes, but science fiction movies and television shows are (or used to be) high budget productions. Physical and special effects were expensive when the original Star Trek was produced. So the aliens tended to be hominid since that just required an actor with some makeup. More modern movies and television shows have aliens with more exotic bodies, and I think that is because CGI graphics make that more affordable.
It’s a filter. When a feature length science fiction movie cost $45 million to produce (and I believe that’s the inflation adjusted cost for Star Wars), it was hard to sell a badly-written screen play. If you can do equally good special effects on a laptop and stream it on YouTube, any idiot and a few of his friends can produce some really bad science fiction movies.
On the other hand, some of the new stuff isn’t bad. I actually like _Orville_, but it would never, ever have been produced if effects costs as much as they did in the 1970s or 80s.
Well, you may remember Einstein’s comment about the weapons which will be used to fight World War Four. Although post-apocalyptic fiction is a slightly different genre than what we were discussing…
But, even so, some authors pull off the hands and swords fighting well. Frank Herbert did so in novel, _Dune_. He wanted the hands and swords fighting as part of the plot. So he invented a new technology to justify it and introduced it at the start of the book. Specifically, a sort of “force field” (poor hard science fiction, but quite common) with an efficiency dependent on the speed of whatever was trying to go through it. Hands and slow, subtly used edged weapons would go straight through. Fast sword moves or very low velocity bullets, maybe. High power rifles, no. And lasers would just make everything explode. I think that’s good science fiction, since the initial assumptions and fictional ideas are introduced at the start, and the implications follow logically from them.
Thanks for recalling that. My gripe was the result of a ship’s captain vs some bad guy deciding the Fate of Humanity is just silly.
Still it looks like to some extent modern warfare can just grind down to some sort of endless, “Forever War”, just as Haldeman described. Isn’t that what we are seeing in Afghanistan? And in northeast Africa as well? It’s possible that decisive ends like WW2 will become much rarer.
Indecisive wars that seem to go one forever aren’t exclusively modern phenomena. The First World War certainly looks that way, until four years of attrition had most countries involved about to collapse, and two collapsed before the others. European naval battles almost all indecisive in the century or so before Trafalgar. And the war in Afghanistan, as far as the British are concerned, was effectively the _Fourth_ Afghan War. Military tactics and technology constantly change, and there are just certain times and situations where it’s relatively easy for the losing side to cut their losses and avoid a decisive defeat.
One of the reasons the Star Trek Cartoon series was so good is that the writers, the same as TOS, were freed from that limitation. I actually think some of them were better than the original series.
Hey, multiple limbs and tentacles! It’s not a true “starfish alien”, but at least it’s some variety added to the stereotypical design.
True. Even Star Trek, particularly TNG, mostly posited bipeds, aside from Tholians, I suppose.
But does anyone remember the alien in this TNG episode? It’s Mr. Worf revealing his often-deprecated poetic side – Klingon opera, anyone?
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
There was a terrific TNG episode in the later seasons that explained the proliferation of bipedal humanoid aliens as the byproduct of galactic DNA seeding by an original ancient humanoid race.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Yes. By far one of the best TNG episodes, and perhaps most emblematic of Roddenberry’s overall point of view: “If only we could sit down together…”
Another episode that comes to mind, as long as we are walking down memory lane: does anyone recall the Enterprise coming on a seemingly-isolated satellite of some sort – whereupon a beam of some type scans the ship? Nobody is affected by the beam, aside from Picard. Immediately, Picard falls to the deck, where he remains for most of the episode.
Then we switch to the surface of a planet, where Picard finds himself, in full possession of his identity as Captain of Enterprise, alternately confused, or angry. Time passes; after initial resistance, Picard bows to the inevitable, carving out a life, finding a lovely wife, fine children and close friends.
At the end of a normal lifespan of some decades, we see Picard on his death bed, on the planet. Entering right and left are friends long dead, and mourned, reappearing, gathering around him with current friends and extended family.
They explain to him what has happened, that his entire span of life was lived on some sort of holodeck, fashioned by a race of bipeds anxious to be remembered by history as they face a supernova with equanimity.
As he passes, Picard-on-Enterprise wakes, finding that only minutes have passed, while he lived an entire life.
A viewer unmoved by this episode is made of some sort of steel. It’s amongst the most memorable episodes. This race of people are truly remarkable.
That’s the ‘flute’ episode, ‘Inner Light.’ It is really poignant when in juxtaposition with Captain Picard’s ‘real’ life in which he never had children or a family of his own (which he lamented over after the death of his brother and nephew at the beginning of the movie Star Trek: Generations.)
Sorry this seemed to have devolved into a Star Trek discussion thread, Keith 😉
Did they give an explanation for why practically everyone in the galaxy speaks English?
Yes. Everyone has a universal translator built in! ‘Enterprise ‘ deals with this effectively (if you can tolerate Yoshi).
Or, Coleridge has said, poetry and fiction requires a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, as descriptive and useful a phrase as any in literature.
Suspension of disbelief is the only option if the language is completely unknown to the translating device. Language uses words to represent physical and abstract concepts. Without any other input other than listening to someone talk it would be impossible for a device, no matter how advanced, to decipher the unknown language. The best that it could do is determine that it is a language (i.e. not gibberish) by sensing patterns and isolating words, perhaps determining some grammatical function. But the device would have no way to know what any of those words actually meant.
Well, yes, science fiction does require some willing suspension of disbelief. For example, faster than light travel is a nightmare for causality, no matter what new discoveries an author postulates. Even reasonable sounding things, like the use of an Earth flyby to take a spacecraft back to Mars (critical to the plot of _The_Martian_) might not survive a detailed examination. But if the errors are below a certain level, why ruin a good story by letting that bother you?
On the technical details of learning and translating other languages, it’s even worse than you suggest. The President of France, a fluent speaker of English, recently embarrassed himself by describing the Australian Prime Minister’s wife as “delicious” when the word he wanted was “delightful.” And there is the old and probably apocryphal story about someone trying to learn a language by pointing at things and trying to get the names for them. After getting the same word for everything he pointed at, he eventually realized he was getting the verb for “point.” Worse, there are some languages (on Earth, so alien languages would be worse) which don’t even have nouns for many things. “Chair” is a form of the verb “to sit”, as in “[a thing used for] sitting.”
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
🙂
Yep once Dathon and Picard started visually communicating concepts combined with spoken words, understanding each other’s language could begin.
Although the episode was still stretching things a bit since even before then the universal translator was understanding words and their meaning, it was just puzzled by the use of allegories, essentially the Tamarians seemed to be “speaking in riddles” which according to the story was the only roadblock to translation. Whereas in reality the universal translator would not have been able to even understand words initially.
But hey for the sake of entertainment I’m all for it. Just like I am in full favor of beaming crews down to planets even though scientifically that may be even more impossible than traveling faster than light, but it’s way cool and should always be a part of Star Trek.
Yes, but science fiction movies and television shows are (or used to be) high budget productions. Physical and special effects were expensive when the original Star Trek was produced. So the aliens tended to be hominid since that just required an actor with some makeup. More modern movies and television shows have aliens with more exotic bodies, and I think that is because CGI graphics make that more affordable.
Humbug!
Better special effects, lousier story-writing. Guess it’s a trade-off.
It’s a filter. When a feature length science fiction movie cost $45 million to produce (and I believe that’s the inflation adjusted cost for Star Wars), it was hard to sell a badly-written screen play. If you can do equally good special effects on a laptop and stream it on YouTube, any idiot and a few of his friends can produce some really bad science fiction movies.
On the other hand, some of the new stuff isn’t bad. I actually like _Orville_, but it would never, ever have been produced if effects costs as much as they did in the 1970s or 80s.
You’d think the price would make the stories better, but we still see battling by hand or sword for the future of the universe.
Well, you may remember Einstein’s comment about the weapons which will be used to fight World War Four. Although post-apocalyptic fiction is a slightly different genre than what we were discussing…
But, even so, some authors pull off the hands and swords fighting well. Frank Herbert did so in novel, _Dune_. He wanted the hands and swords fighting as part of the plot. So he invented a new technology to justify it and introduced it at the start of the book. Specifically, a sort of “force field” (poor hard science fiction, but quite common) with an efficiency dependent on the speed of whatever was trying to go through it. Hands and slow, subtly used edged weapons would go straight through. Fast sword moves or very low velocity bullets, maybe. High power rifles, no. And lasers would just make everything explode. I think that’s good science fiction, since the initial assumptions and fictional ideas are introduced at the start, and the implications follow logically from them.
Thanks for recalling that. My gripe was the result of a ship’s captain vs some bad guy deciding the Fate of Humanity is just silly.
Still it looks like to some extent modern warfare can just grind down to some sort of endless, “Forever War”, just as Haldeman described. Isn’t that what we are seeing in Afghanistan? And in northeast Africa as well? It’s possible that decisive ends like WW2 will become much rarer.
Indecisive wars that seem to go one forever aren’t exclusively modern phenomena. The First World War certainly looks that way, until four years of attrition had most countries involved about to collapse, and two collapsed before the others. European naval battles almost all indecisive in the century or so before Trafalgar. And the war in Afghanistan, as far as the British are concerned, was effectively the _Fourth_ Afghan War. Military tactics and technology constantly change, and there are just certain times and situations where it’s relatively easy for the losing side to cut their losses and avoid a decisive defeat.
One of the reasons the Star Trek Cartoon series was so good is that the writers, the same as TOS, were freed from that limitation. I actually think some of them were better than the original series.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
I have been saying it for years… aliens taste just like chicken..
That depends on what you are used to. Someone else might say chickens taste just like aliens.
Was this a Super Bowl commercial? Did you catch the commercial for Amazon Alexa that features Scott and Mark Kelly and the ISS?
https://youtu.be/8y-1h_C8ad8
And, unless I am mistaken, I also noticed Harrison Ford in that video. He has acted in a number of good, science fiction movies.
Yes the ad played during the Super Bowl. And the Harrison Ford segment was shown again later in the game as a separate commercial.