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. So they wanted a silicate polymer 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 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 that 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.
I tried to get the chemistry right, albeit a bit simplified. Silicone does have a bunch of carbon in it, and there's more than one way to get teflon to stick to a pan. There were a lot of casualties in early fluorine chemistry, though.