[TheSpiceIsLife]

One solution could be to require different connectors for different protocols and power delivery.

I'm beginning to suspect The Great Filter is Jony Ive's minimalist design influence: any sufficiently advanced culture will annihilate itself before it discovers interstellar travel when someone connects two devices together that aren't compatible with the equivalent of a One True Connector™ USB cable.

[sgtnoodle]

I like to imagine there's an alien species zipping around in FTL space ships, and the only difference from us is they picked one endianness and ran with it.