Great if everyone is going to be on your page, would you still think it ideal if it was you having to be on the same page as everyone who don't think as you do?
What Earth-centric language would need to change...
- Thread starter NewHeavensNewEarth
- Start date
Nope, especially if that meant having slavery somewhere, or similar injustice. And that's my point about historic alliances that are based more on strategic mutual interests rather than shared cultural values, and why "human rights" is not a term that would automatically be understood the same way. We can't even get across this globe of ours without encountering several different ideas of basic rights.
And in a assemblage of over a hundred and fifty species, each with likely multiple cultures each, what are the odds that you'll find each and ever one of them acceptable to your own standards?
There was a scene in one of the Bond movies (QoS) with a government official talking to Bond's boss where it was said "if we only associate with good people there wouldn't be too many people we could associate with."
What you (or I) would call injustice, ninety percent of the Federation might consider perfectly reasonable and a integral part of their historical social systems.
At what point would the Federation inform you (congratulations you're Earth) that you're the one who doesn't fit in owing to not embracing that you can't require tens of thousands of distinct cultures to conform to you.
An interstellar alliance of the magnitude of the Federation probably makes for some incredibly strange bedfellows.
How many of the members are going to listen to your objections over another member sending their male seven year old children into a brutal desert with only the clothes on their backs, just to see if they come back in a few weeks?
Will others Federation members see your point about a member's one percent living in a lovely sky city, while the other ninety-nine percent toil on the surface? Or will you be told to mind your own business?
Chattel slavery might be a deal breaker, but how many other things will be seen as a member's individual internal matter?
If there was a stipulation that all new Federation members had to agree to some kind of uniformed single set of societal rules, likely the Federation would never have been formed in the first place.
Kirk: "And the highest of all our laws states that your world is yours and will always remain yours."
That's because while we are one species, we very much are not one people. Likely we never will be.
Last edited:
Obviously we’d get in situations where we have to turn a blind eye to sentient rights abuses of our allies and competitors, realistically speaking. They can’t be worse than what they do in Russia, China or Saudi Arabia. We’d just hash out treaties saying they can’t treat humans that way.
And there’d be interesting asylum questions.
And there’d be interesting asylum questions.
IIRC, that was a superior talking to Felix Leiter, Bond's CIA buddy.
Between alien races there'd probably be multiple tiers of what's acceptable and what's not.
Like, you bend on certain things you find immoral, but draw a hard line in the sand for extreme things like slavery and genocide.
Like, you bend on certain things you find immoral, but draw a hard line in the sand for extreme things like slavery and genocide.
They've got some nerve complaining about that, what with the conquering and subjugating THEY do.
Actually, nothing would change. Like it or not, English is the dominant Earth language. However, as seen in the movie "Contact", would-be extraterrestrials would not understand ANY language, save for one: mathematics (maybe two others as well: art and music). It would be from these that any dialogue would be developed and established. And, I would dare say, that a new "language", a "universal" language, could be created, one that would serve as the bridge between humans and "aliens", by-passing the usual hand-ringing of which Earth language should be used to speak to aliens.
I did read somewhere that there were a bunch of linguists who did develop a universal language system, though I am not sure how valid that was...
I did read somewhere that there were a bunch of linguists who did develop a universal language system, though I am not sure how valid that was...
Actually, the aliens in "Contact" understood language just fine, as demonstrated when Foster's character made her interstellar journey and chatted with her "dad." But yes, math was the means for transmitting the schematics for the machine.
The OP is more about terminology/lingo rather than English, but your thoughts on language are great. If the title of the thread is too vague, I'd be fine with a Moderator editing it.
Time references would have to change. The length of a day and a year are entirely different on every planet. A month only happens when you have a moon. Hours, minutes and seconds are an arbitrary human construct (and kind of odd having divisions of 24 and 60 - why not divided by tens or hundreds?). Thus, I guess, the reason for the stardate.
Our base then counting system is derived from our number of fingers. Other civilizations may have different hand structures and different counting methods. How would a species with random numbers of cilia in place of fingers count?
Our base then counting system is derived from our number of fingers. Other civilizations may have different hand structures and different counting methods. How would a species with random numbers of cilia in place of fingers count?
I think the bigger problem is taking language too literally. Lots of language is imprecise, yet we still manage. I think some of this terminology is like spelling — it doesn’t match pronunciation but we don’t dwell on the matter.
I thought I remembered Troi saying something about something that makes us all “human,” and I took it to mean that human meant *sentient more than “Terran” or whatever.
Maybe we’ll all speak Sheliak in the future and will only have to learn 2 or 3 billion new words to approach its level of descriptiveness and specificity.
(* whatever “sentient” means among different species of possibly different cognition levels.)
I thought I remembered Troi saying something about something that makes us all “human,” and I took it to mean that human meant *sentient more than “Terran” or whatever.
Maybe we’ll all speak Sheliak in the future and will only have to learn 2 or 3 billion new words to approach its level of descriptiveness and specificity.
(* whatever “sentient” means among different species of possibly different cognition levels.)
Last edited:
Indeed, they would probably consider those time measurements, like 24 and 365, to sound as random to them as traditional American standards of measurement vs the metric system even though they make perfect sense to us.
Similar threads
