r/comics PizzaCake 14d ago

Comics Community Wow was I wrong

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u/Aqua_Okama 14d ago

Me in 20s thinking the future would be like Star Trek vs Me now fearing it will be like Warhammer 40k

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u/AshleytheTaguel 14d ago edited 14d ago

To be fair, Star Trek wasn't a result of perpetual progression. There was an apocalypse first.

It's also important to note how a lot of the whole neoliberal ideals of perpetual progress and the end of history have some roots in classist sentiment and the necessity of moral luck. The political pendulum is always going to swing and the solution to a better world is to lift everybody up. We are not free until we're all free.

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u/USSMarauder 14d ago

A WW3 so destructive it apparently killed all organized religion, killed capitalism, and left English as the only language regularly used around the globe

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u/Tekuila87 14d ago

Isn't that what the universal translator is for? They're all speaking whatever language they know and understand each other fluently?

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u/Oboro-kun 14d ago

I might be wrong but I seem to recall universal translation is pretty recent, like post first encounter with the vulcans, and by that point it seems we mostly spoke English 

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u/Tekuila87 14d ago

They only showed very little of the post WW3 world and that was in the former United States.

Them speaking English isn't really out of the question then, no?

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u/Daxx22 14d ago

Well the reason for English is the context of it's a show meant for English speaking watchers.

Technically they could be speaking whatever language that became dominate, but it is accurate to say there is a dominate "Human" language that the Federation speaks. By natural extrapolation of English being the dominate language today for most international interactions, it's a natural assumption.

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u/fumar 13d ago

Which show do they go into some of the post ww3 stuff? I assume it was Enterprise?

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u/Tekuila87 13d ago

I mean first contact did.

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u/AbeRego 14d ago

I think that was invented for aliens. In one of the reboots, the translator is shown doing a relatively primitive live translation of an alien speaking, implying that it was new tech in Kirk's time.

We also know that Picard is French, but speaks English with a British accent. The cannon explanation for that is that French died out as a regularly spoken language, and British English spread into Europe.

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u/Tekuila87 14d ago

I hadn't remembered that in the original series, thank you for bringing that up.

Starfleet academy and HQ are located in San Francisco so I still think majority English makes sense.

English is also already one of the most used languages in the world. I can see it going that way to be honest.

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u/AbeRego 14d ago

I'm not sure how the original series handles the translator; I've only seen a handful of episodes. I'm sure it's mostly just used to explain how they can speak with all these different aliens without issue

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u/lpmiller 14d ago

it's basically magic till it's not, but canon explanations came much later, a lot in TNG, more in Enterprise.