While Star Trek's transporter is hard to imagine -- perfect matter movement across vast distances with no equipment on one end -- it may not be the most far-fetched piece of tech on the Enterprise. While there are several contenders, I strongly suspect the universal translator is the most unlikely MacGuffin. Of course, no one wants to watch 30 episodes of TV about how we finally figured out what Klingons call clouds, so pretty much every science fiction movie has some hand-waving explanation for speaking the viewer's language. Farscape had microbes, some aliens have telepathy that works with alien brains of any kind, and still others study English from afar for decades off camera. I was thinking about this because of an article I read by [Alizeh Kohari] about [Jiaming Luo's] work using AI to decode dead languages.