I wonder how aliens will react to our communal grooming instinct? Like when you see something stuck to your homie’s clothes/skin/hair and it’s driving you nuts and you just gotta be like “hold still, lemme get that for you real quick.”
One time when I was a kid, I had a science teacher with a snake as a class pet, and said snake was almost done shedding. There was one little bit of dried skin stuck to its face and I was like, “would it hurt him if I pulled that off?” And the teacher said, “yes it actually could, it’s probably still attached to living skin if it hasn’t come off yet” and I was like “oh, sorry,” and he said, “that’s okay, you were just wanting to do the primate thing.” And damn, that’s such an accurate descriptor.
Anyways I hope aliens don’t mind me/my descendants having the urge to pluck stuff off of them. If they ask, we’ll have to tell them it’s a trait we evolved to survive ticks.
Sometimes you might feel the urge to help someone in a certain way, and sometimes they really don't want to be helped in that way, either because it would not help them (or even hurt them) or because they would rather do it themselves (for various reasons).
It's important to realize that sometimes you're going to be a primate and they're going to be a snake, and it needs to be okay if they do not want their skin pulled off at this time.
