[Sorry, this was supposed to be a response to the link to "They're Made out of Meat"...] This is great! I had somehow never encountered it before. It reminds

[Sorry, this was supposed to be a response to the link to "They're Made out of Meat"...] This is great! I had somehow never encountered it before. It reminds me in tone of "D.R. and Quinch Have Fun On Earth", an anarchic and hilarious story written by Alan Moore in 1983 for the British comic 2000 AD. In that, the titular alien antiheroes time-travel across our planet (an uninteresting backwater) in order to set up an elaborate practical joke on their college dean. For the prank to reach its fruition, humanity has to make contact with galactic civilization. "The next step", explains Quinch, jumping forward to the 1950s, "was to give these feebs the idea of getting into space. We'd stop a car or something and then D.R. would walk up and down with the water-cooler on his head and talk about the interstellar brotherhood." "By the time we got back to our own era, 3017 by the chimps' reckoning, they were out in space and had encountered their first real, actual people. It was embarrassing. They went on holovision and looked all awestruck and recited D.R.'s Interstellar Brotherhood speech. Nobody knew where to look." I won't spoil the ending.