Cringeworthy SF

[kengr]

Watch on YouTube

First of all, this *cannot* be "first contact". First contact is exactly that, the *first* time different species encounter each other. This will almost certainly occur on the frontier of each species space. Neither side will know much if anything about each other.

Now if contact is not physical (say intercepting each others radio of other long range communications) then it'll be a lot slower.

Either way, they'll have to figure out each other's language. "Universal translators" are unlikely for a number of reasons. They certainly can't exist before you've contacted a *lot* of other species.

It's not like other languages of your own species. There, you start out with one or at most a few original languages. All the current languages have evolved from those original ones. That means each language family has common characteristics.

With alien languages you've got completely independent "families" of languages. Plus, there will likely be other characteristics that differ from the languages of other species, due to different environments and different brain structures.

This makes figuring out alien languages *really* hard unless you are working with the aliens so you can to try get meanings across. Even then it's going to be very difficult.

The third problem with the story is that oxygen is *common* in the universe. So the aliens would have known about it. Also that means that Earth wouldn't have to export oxygen to the aliens. They could extract it from all sorts of things.

I could go on, but...