Opportunity

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The most notable opportunity for human-alien mutual collaboration evolved in the Plescari encounter of 2316. The Plescari turned out to have an extremely rich system of poetic expression, which they traded for human art. It was not until 2413, when Diana Horn finally decoded the Plescari system of symbolic expression, that Earth realised the true value of these ditties, expressing as they did the fundamental nature of quantum reality in terms that finally enabled the marriage of Newtonian mechanical models with quantum theory into a coherent whole. It was with some embarrasment that the human diplomatic corps then faced the task of explaining to the Plescari that human art served essentially no scientific purpose. It is still a subject of some debate amongst scholars as to whether or not the Plescari have grasped this yet. Ranjit Bhopal offers a persuasive thesis that since Plescari interest in our cultural heritage is still at a high level, with intense scrutiny by many Plescari scholars, that they may still in fact be searching for a coherent understanding of our science as expressed though our art, being unable to grasp the concept of separation between the two.

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