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Why do Star Trek aliens often have childishly ritualistic cultures full of taboos and sacred shit they’re eager to trot out? “This is our sacred thingie!”, “it is forbidden!”, “we do this to honor ancestors” Despite being high tech they’re usually kinda Bronze Age culturally.
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If aliens hailed us, we’d tell them please hold and then bicker for a week at the UN to come to some hasty half-ass consensus about what rituals and robes to go with. In the meantime dozens of hackers and non-state actors would create a babel of chaos trying to hack the contact
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Aliens would say, “we’ll go hang out by Saturn for a bit, get back to us after you get your damn act together if you want to talk”
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A problem with strange new worlds is that none of the most interesting aliens like borg, Q, ferengi etc have even been encountered yet, and we none of the ones already encountered are that interesting otherwise they’d show up in later in-world plot lines
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The unbelievable part is not that they have ritualistic culture, but that they have enough of a consensus around it to present a consistent ritual API to aliens. At most there’s a dominant culture and some rebel culture. There’s no noisy pluralist babel dissensus.
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The largest human unit with a star-trek-alien level consistent cultural API is maybe a few hundred people. Polyglot persistence microservices mess is what we are. If they hail me personally, I’m going in a t-shirt and telling them our sacred text is Futurama. Hail Bender.
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yeah, they are happy to call out all the distinct human cultures but if it's an alien it's just "Vulcan" or "Klingon" as though that means one thing
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This is a common problem in sci-fi (and fantasy): tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki. Real humans do have a harder time distinguishing between folks that don't share their ethnicity. So there's an accidental verisimilitude, in that there's a strong chance we wouldn't see their differences.
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