[YeGoblynQueenne]

Interesting take :)

You should read (if you haven't) The State of the Art by Iain M. Banks, particularly the eponymous novella. Summary from the wikipedia page:

"The State of the Art"

At 100 pages long, the title novella makes up the bulk of the book. The novella chronicles a Culture mission to Earth in the late 1970s, and also serves as a prequel of sorts to Use of Weapons by featuring two of that novel's characters, Diziet Sma and the drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw. Here, Sma argues for contact with Earth, to try to fix the mess the human species has made of it; another Culture citizen, Linter, goes native, choosing to renounce his Culture body enhancements so as to be more like the locals; and Li, who is a Star Trek fan, argues that the whole "incontestably neurotic and clinically insane species" should be eradicated with a micro black hole. The ship Arbitrary has ideas, and a sense of humour, of its own.

  'Also while I'd been away, the ship had sent a request 
  on a postcard to the BBC's World Service, asking for 
  'Mr David Bowie's "Space Oddity" for the good ship 
  Arbitrary and all who sail in her.' (This from a machine 
  that could have swamped Earth's entire electro-magnetic
  spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere
  beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn't get the request played. The   
  ship thought this was hilarious.'[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_State_of_the_Art

[carapace]

It's just a thought that occurred to me one day and haunted me ever since.

I've read a couple of Iain Banks' books but he doesn't quite gel for me somehow. These days I don't read fiction because it can't compete with reality. ;-)