halcy 
a common affordance in scifi is that spaceships can just video call each other, even spaceships of different races who have never met before. this implies that there is a sufficiently mathematically obvious RTC protocol that all spacefaring races eventually discover
„but halcy, the computer simply adapts the signal“ try piping an opus bitstream into chatgpt, see how that goes
„This situation where everyone uses their own protocol is ridiculous.“, says Alien A, „We shall develop one protocol that satisfies everyones ne-“ and before they can even finish, they are handed The Document. No one remembers where it came from originally, what the letters „XKCD“ mean, or the significance of the number 927
Thomas Tuegel@halcy Just the idea of _having_ a protocol presumes that the various species have compatible visual perception. A human video stream isn’t going to make to a species that isn’t using RGB-sensitive receptors, no matter how it’s encoded.
LovesTha🥧@ttuegel @halcy Current tech yes, but there is no physics reason you can't have each pixel sampling the waveform from IR to UV with say 1000 samples and storing that. And it's what you'd want if really caring about colour rendering.
But yes, you are very unlikely to do that before encountering, and probably starting to staff species with different eyes.
I guess you might start doing it if people start bio engineering replacement eyes with exotic receptors.
RRB
Daburu Dar