Cultural Transfers

In the jolly question box recently, I received this:

If tomorrow morning the Eldrae were to make contact with Earth, what cultural item (besides a good Popsicle) would be the most taken with aplomb and glee and why?

After due consideration and extensive contemplation, I find I can only answer thus:

I haven’t a bloody clue.

(Which is partly because, y’know, comparing a set of trillions to a set of millions is intrinsically hard, but also because my grasp on Earth culture is kind of weird and idiosyncratic. So. Or maybe my brain just doesn’t feel like working on that this month, although it could probably name a few very specific items. Enh.)

So on the way answerward, I’m going to throw this one open to you, gentle readers. After all, you’ve been reading along for some time now, and probably have a few ideas on this front yourselves. Send ’em in, and I’ll see what my representative cast of characters has to say about ’em…

4 thoughts on “Cultural Transfers

  1. I think the Eldrae cultural anthropologist equilvantes and the xenocryptobiologists would be ones to be the most delighted. After all, here is both the origin of greenlife, and also pre-redesigned origins of the Eldrae themselves.

    The average Eldrae-on-the-street would be both curious and repelled, sort of how in the real world we would react to being faced with a band of pre-agriculture h.sap precursors. But the researchers, they would come and scan and analyze our history, all of our genetics and biology, and all our writing and research about ourselves (sociology, anthropology, psychology), as a compare and constrast to themselves.

    I think they would immediately recognize the fumbling way we are already trying to be like them (the fumbling cultural evolution towards individual autonomy, the halting and fumbling discovery of wealth-creation economics, the few of us with classic liberal and libertarian ideals, the few of us able to focus on For Science, our deep mythology that something is seriously seriously wrong with the universe and with ourselves).

    They would learn more about themselves by finding us, than they could learn about themselves without us, I think.

  2. Pingback: Contact: Earth Thoughts | The Eldraeverse

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