Explaining Cats to Aliens

Imagine explaining this to someone from the 1950’s: we carry around, in our pockets, devices capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge.  Everyone over about twelve has such a device, although many begin to carry them much younger.  And what do we use them for?

Gazing at pictures of cats.

Now imagine explaining that to an alien.  Or, better yet, imagine if you will how said hypothetical alien would explain that to itself.  Or don’t, because I’m here to tell you.  Clearly, any reasonable being would conclude, we as a species worship cats.  To support that theory, let’s review the facts:

We bring our compact knowledge devices everywhere, but gaze at them most longingly when in the presence of famous natural features, or other (often highly expensive and difficult to access) tourism destinations.  The Grand Canyon, any number of national forests, go there and you’ll see it.  Any rational being, seeing observing this phenomenon, would naturally conclude that we’ve brought our cat-accessing devices to these places as an act of worship.  Where some might build and enter beautiful temples, in order to feel closer to their gods, we’ve chosen to drive, trek, and in some cases fly halfway around the world just to immerse ourselves in our gods’ natural habitats while continuing to learn all we can about them.
We do this as a family activity.  Often, one will observe families making pilgrimage to these great places, studying cats all the while.  During their journey and, of course, especially on arrival.  Clearly cats play an important role in family life.
We, as a species, have always worshipped cats.  A pocket-sized device, capable of accessing as many different aspects of The Great Cat as there are individual felids, would seem to be the natural outgrowth of a bronze statue.  As technology has advanced, so have our forms of worship.  No alien would automatically assume–and a few would utterly reject the possibility–that technology, in fact, meaningless to the average human being’s religious consciousness and that advances in our understanding of our world, and of our place within it, have affected no major world religion in the slightest.  So, clearly…cats.
Cats and their human devotees are remarkably similar.  Both kill for fun.  Both teach their offspring to hunt, in order to acquire life skills but also as a vital aspect of parent-child bonding, at a very young age.  Cats, who are not pack animals but solitary hunters and who socialize with others only to the extent that they are not competing for food or resources, are the perfect metaphor for capitalism.  Our embracing of the idea that only the strongest of hunters deserve to survive is surely reflective of our devotion to our feline overlords.
The (as of this writing) 2 million or so cat videos on YouTube have collectively been watched over 25 billion times.  According to recent studies, 60% of respondents identified as cat lovers.  By contrast, only about 21% identify as Catholic.  And while the percentage of those who identify with any traditional organized religion is dropping, pet ownership is at its highest level ever.  Thirty percent or so of all American households own at least one cat: well over 36 million, well over twice the number (and according to some studies more like seven times the number) of Mormons worldwide.

So there you have it.

Did I miss anything?