The Grand Experiment

They came on December 21, 2012. Their mothership was silhouetted against the moon, making it appear as an eye in the night sky. The next day a ship landed outside the United Nations building in America. They came under a flag of peace. They represented an alliance of many species across many worlds, and they wanted us to join them. The leaders of the world were ecstatic and apprehensive. They asked, “Why would you want us to join you?” The aliens confessed that they had watched our world for three of our years, observing us to determine if we would be able to contribute to their Alliance of Cultures. They had determined that we had many qualities that could benefit the Alliance, and had decided we should get the opportunity to undertake what they called a “Grand Experiment.” They said it was the test every species went through to see if they were ready, or even able, to become a member species of the Alliance. “In it,” they said, “the species awaiting admission would exchange a number of its myriad people with people from the myriad species of the Alliance.” The exchange would be a cultural one, with the people involved charged with learning and sharing as much about and of each other’s culture as possible in a span of time roughly equaling three standard years in the time scale of the waiting species. This they would do by immersing themselves in the foreign culture, living it as a native might, as well as answering as many questions about their own culture as they can, as completely as they can, within the time they spent within the foreign culture.
“But,” the world leaders said, “We have no one culture on our world.”
“That is okay,” the aliens said, “there are many member species in the past that have been in the same situation. We know how to compensate for it.”
And so the talks began. The talks of who to make all of humanity take part in a Grand Experiment. The talks themselves took place behind closed doors, for the eyes and ears of the world leaders and aliens alone. But, inevitably, whispers did escape to the outside world. Whispers of what joining would mean for the people of Earth, whispers of scientific exchanges of all kinds, of the Holy Grail that could save our world from its approaching, inevitable annihilation: resources. They tell of asteroids aplenty, of entire worlds set aside for mining the riches they contain. The whispers contain the promise of things that, should they be true, made the final announcement of the decision a surprise to absolutely no one:
“Humanity shall take part in a Grand Experiment!”