The Bird
tEM IS GUD...RITER!
- Location
- In that den of villains and scum, OKLAHOMA
The problem is it wouldn't erode their culture, it would, if you fucked up, destroy their culture, potentially by causing some of the very things you listed!
First, you need to remember again that the entire industrial output of a pre-space flight species is likely, depending on how developed they are, to be a *rounding error* to your economy: even IRL, without such extreme disparities, poorly planned humanitarian and material aid can wind up crashing economies even worse. See how shoe donations to poverty stricken countries winds up destroying native shoe-manufacturing. I want you to imaging that for every job, every industry, or hell, even just, say, 20% of all major industries: that's vast swathes of society whose job you just deleted. Now, sure, if they have UBI or other robust safety nets the end result wouldn't be so bad, but A: part of the idea behind economic aid is that it's targeted at less developed nations, typically ones in crisis, which probably means they probably don't have the social or economic conditions for that to be possible, B: all of this requires not fucking it up, which brings us to reason number two!
Second, while the idea of teaching people better technology and providing material to improve their lives sound noble, there runs incredible risk of you pulling an oopsie. Like, to use another example, imagine aliens come down to Earth, look at the state of things, and decide to improve the situation on earth by giving advanced technology to humanity. The big question is, who do they give it to: who do they trust to use that technology ethically? How do they give it: how do you introduce it without upending their way of life or accidentally indoctrinating them? Hell, what do they give, because every technology has the potential to redefine how people live in substantial ways. Sure, they could hand the tech over to the USA, but speaking as a native american, I sure as hell wouldn't trust the US Government to use alien technology responsibly or in a way that benefitted everyone equally, not without a great deal of social development and political changes. More likely, they'd use the technology to increase American hegemony over the world, and that's assuming a moderate is in office: I don't think anyone wants to imagine what a particularly *bad* administration with access to alien technology would be like. And that's assuming the aliens pick the USA: it could just as easily decide China or Britain or some other state should have it, or they could really screw the pooch and give it to EVERY state power and accidentally start another arms race, and I really hope I don't need to explain why that's double-plus-ungood. And that's just the surface level (seriously, I want you to imagine every way your tech could be abused by less moral state actors: there is a great deal of potential for bad things) danger of technology specifically: we're not even getting into how politically destabilizing post-scarcity aliens deliberately trying to influence politics could potentially be. And that's assuming this is all done with 100% pure intentions to help people, something that cannot be guaranteed.
Third, and this is mostly a point of correction: you seem to be conflating material aid (you providing resources and technology) with what the God Machines did during the Destroyer War (preventing you from being rendered violently extinct, something the Directorate would step in to prevent should they come across it regardless of specific policy chosen): these are actually pretty substantially different things! To be clear, the God-Machines didn't really hand you tech: they traded some technology with you way after (see the Sphere deal) in exchange for very substanial resources, and may have nudged development slightly here and there, but they didn't hand you their techbase, all they did was roflstomp the destroyers and go back to sleep for the most part. (Also you probably shouldn't treat the C'tan as a role model, even the nice ones.)
