art and stuff

So, genuinely no hard feelings, I get where y'all are coming from, but that was actually kind of my entire point

The Rosetta Stone was and is real.

This is indisputable. You can go see the Rosetta Stone on display right now!! I'd say you could even it touch it, but there's museum glass in the way, so that the oils on human skin can't further degrade this 2,000-year-old stele, which is one of the most important surviving historical texts in the world.

The Tower of Babel is not real, and it never was.

The Tower of Babel is a millennia-old religious story about a mythological tower, which serves as a mythological explanation for the origin of different human languages. Yes, there are some religious historians who speculate that the myth was inspired by one or another physical tower, but no, that doesn't prove anything other than "this is how many people in this cultural explained or understood that sort of event."

The Rosetta Stone, on the other hand, is an object of translation that actually exists

Photo credit: By © Hans Hillewaert, CC BY-SA 4.0, retrieved from Wikipedia article "Rosetta Stone." https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3153928

That picture is of a real object. It is not of a picture of a 3,000+ year old myth.

Our attempts to understand each other will not result in us being struck down by some force from on high!

And the true path to a world where we can all understand each other does not involve us all speaking the same language. That's racist bs

The reason it was so important for narrative purposes, was that the plot concerns the visit of the Astronaut, in his completely opaque spacesuit, to a planet populated entirely by self-aware robots (originally from Earth) who have built their own society and are petitioning to be allowed to interact with Earth again as equals.

They have a democratic government and free choice of careers etc. as the orange robot serving as guide tells the Astronaut.

The Astronaut notices that there are two different types of robot on this world; the orange ones, who are in charge, gifted access to all information and facilities. and the blue robots, who are seen as more limited in function, have less access to information and resources, and are not allowed positions of power or as wide a choice of employment opportunities. Even transportation is segregated.

The Astronaut investigates further and discovers that the blue and orange robots are actually structurally identical, there is absolutely no difference between their potential or capabilities, and it is only because the orange robots are instructed by their Educator system to consider themselves superior, that the difference exists.

The Astronaut tells the robots they are not ready for re-alignment with Earth, until they come to terms with their own unfairness, and how Earth had had to deal with this issue themselves. When that time comes, the robots will be able to ally with Earth.

Then he leaves in his spaceship, and it's only in that one final panel that we see the Astronaut is black.

Not subtle, nor should it be, but for 1950 this was a breathtakingly powerful statement, perhaps the first of it's kind in the genre.

GO OFF BESTIE