From: David Billinghurst <davebill@c...>
Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2008 10:46:25 +1200
Subject: Re: [GZG] Gzg-l Digest, Vol 10, Issue 1
Eli said: > One element that almost never seems to be represented in any sort of > have There is three possible reasons for this; 1) Laziness on the part of the writer or film/television maker; 2) The aliens encountered all come from one subsection of the alien race - eg in both Tuffleyverse and Traveller 2300 various ethnic groups colonise various regions of space. If an outsider were to turn up and run into the ESU block or the Chinese Arm, what extrapolations would they draw for all humanity, based on the sample they had encountered? 3) Before a race can tap enough resources to expand into space, some form of Globalisation of the home world must happen. So, not only do smaller/weaker languages and cultures become absorbed, but "racial" characteristics become blurred as artificial boundaries such as state borders become obsolete and people move and mingle more. Perhaps variations remain within the resulting blended culture, but to an outsider they are too subtle to catch. So, on Earth, we have everyone speaking English, watching American style movies, working in a form of state-regulated capitalism, and looking vaguely like East Asians or Chinese, or statistically, anyway.