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.
Frost, wolf of winter 🐺🎄
@ttuegel @halcy What if you didn't use RGB? Maybe they've all got full-spectrum cameras and can transmit the spectrum data. Or I wonder if there's some fancy signal processing way to produce a synthetic spectrum from an RGB-channels signal so you can convert it to a different-primaries color space.
This'd be a problem even on earth! Wolves don't have the same color receptors as humans, so if I ever somehow got to transition (I won't :<) I'd have issues with every existing display.
@ttuegel @halcy ... Apparently purple is weird. But it sounds like most everything else can be mapped to a wavelength.
I wonder how accurate such a mapping would be. I bet it'd fail for a bunch of stuff because it probably doesn't reflect one singular wavelength, just a mix that humans can't distinguish from that singular wavelength. Other critters with different eyes would be terribly confused.
Andreas, DJ3EI, he/himExactly.
"I wonder if there's some fancy signal processing way to produce a synthetic spectrum from an RGB-channels signal."
Can't be done, for mathematical reasons. If you pick only four different wavelengths out of the optical spectrum and amplitude-modulate each independently of the other three, you have a whole dimension of additional options than can be covered with the three RGB sensors.
Next, use 100 different wavelengths...