It has been five standard years since our first contact with the humans.
I was sent as part of the evaluative delegation to
Earth. One of our stealthier agents had picked up a warning that humans had
some rather frightening ideas, chief among them being “You can't make an omelet
without breaking a few eggs.” The meaning of this saying was not entirely
clear, so we investigated. As the member of the team with the most human-like
biochemistry, I was assigned to investigate actual omelets. I objected that
this was a waste of my time, but we were told to be thorough. I've submitted my
report on omelets under separate cover. No one should bother to read it. In the
process of observing, though, I noticed two things that are of interest.
The first was the cook's spatula, which was
flexible enough to follow the curvature of the pan. Now, spatulas are pretty
common among industrialized omnivorous species, and flexible spatulas are
hardly unknown. But they're usually made out of organic polymers that don't
take heat well, and the pan was directly over an open methane flame.
“Aren't you worried the heat will damage your
spatula?” I asked.
“Nope,” he said, “this spatula is silicone. It's
designed for this.”
“Silicone?”
“Yeah. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it's
a silicate polymer with really good heat resistance. Great for cooking
implements.”
Silicate. Polymer.
Now, I learned in school that silicates form
crystals, and occasionally amorphous solids that are as rigid as crystals.
Silicates just don't form flexible structures. That's why the galaxy is full of
carbon-based life and not silicon-based. Silicon would be too rigid. You
probably know that too.
Apparently nobody told the humans. Despite the
fact that their planet is 70% silicate crystals with no naturally occurring
silicate polymers. They wanted a silicate polymer for their spatula and went out and made one.
This got me looking a little more closely at the
rest of his tools. I noticed that the half-made omelet wasn't sticking to the
pan at all, despite having some pretty sticky things in it. I asked about this,
and he said the pan was coated with teflon, an extremely non-sticky material.
“Why does it stick to the pan then?” I asked.
He laughed. Apparently this was a running joke of
some sort among the humans. Then he explained “It's a pretty involved process,
actually. I'm a little vague on the details, but there's some sort of
high-temperature ion-bombardment to strip the fluorines from the pan side of
the molecules.”
“Fluorines,” I repeated. That was the last thing I
had expected to hear in the context of cooking. I was too shocked to be
shocked.
“Yeah,” he said, as if there were nothing shocking
about this, “that's what makes it so non-sticky. The outer layer is all
fluorine, bonded to a carbon backbone. Stickiness is mostly about covalent
bonds, but no oxidizer in food that can pry the carbon away from those fluorines.”
“But... fluorine... how many scientists died
putting this together?”
“Teflon itself, I don't think any. The early
history of fluorine chemistry had a lot of casualties.”
So that's humanity. Forget breaking eggs.
Apparently, the saying should be: "You can't make an omelet without
completely rewriting the structure of matter and performing high-energy
transformations on the single deadliest corrosive gas in the universe. With a
lot of casualties."
So I do endorse opening trade relations. There's a
lot to be gained.
But we also need to employ extreme caution in
dealing with them. Because they won't be employing any caution at all.
