cthia wrote:But evenso, my thoughts wander to a Nimitz on that first visit to Mount Royal Palace, or a subsequent one, where he leaped from the shoulder of Honor and terrrorized a chipmunk just to keep his hunting skills sharpened.
This promises to be a new breed of treecat for certain, but I wonder if the treecats aren't giving up too much.
That is definitely an interesting question. It's a question any culture must ask when it begins to become dependant on or adopt parts of another culture.
The treecats have definitely considered the question. It is unfortunately tied into the greater question of species survival. As long as the treecats are limited to their hunter-gatherer culture on Sphinx, they are vulnerable to extinction from both natural and unnatural disasters. If they simply transplant small colonies into human communities on other worlds, they improve their chances of survival greatly, but the offworld colonies are completely dependent on humans and technologies which they cannot understand or control. To reduce their dependency, they would have to adopt even more human culture and learn to control the technology.
Where is the balance? How much are they willing to give up? How much of the old culture is worth saving? Treecats are highly practical creatures, and may have a very different opinion on the value of the old ways. Each of the volunteers had to consider the fact that they were not only leaving their friends and family, but were entering an environment they would have difficulty understanding. Memory singers, fortunately, would help help a lot, by giving the volunteers a taste of what it was like elsewhere in the galaxy. One could still question whether they truly understood what they are giving up, as individuals and as a culture. I'm not willing to underestimate the intelligence of treecats, but it is a huge change.
All we can say for sure is that treecats as a whole, and presumably the volunteers as individuals, have tried to think about it, and have decided to work toward species survival in the face of change.
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Give us one of those infamous but rarely, if ever, seen inventive Beowulf menage a OMGWTFs that have been alluded to.