#humans are weird
Alien: So you built huge towers ful of the most explosive substances in the known universe in the name of throwing yourself out into space?
Human: Yep.
Alien: AND IT WORKED?!!
Human: Well … Eventually.
Alien: That’s terrifying!
Human: and they were built by the lowest bidder.
Alien: How is your species still alive?!!
Human: *shrugs* We’re very stubborn.
“How are you still alive?” “We’re very stubborn”
The best description of humanity you will ever find.
The thing about the natural world is you never get to the point where you’ve seen everything. You learn to see. You begin to see MORE. You learn to identify plants and bird calls and everything is so much more beautiful the more you look at it because the detail is infinite
Today several times I picked up a bryozoan fossil from the pebbles next to a stream. It’s amazing to be able to see things that no one else can
fun fact. because gratitude happens in the part of our brains where we integrate and organize information, it has been observed that gratitude enriches the detail with which we experience the world.
just thought it was relevant and beautiful.
Queuing this one up ahead of vacation, so no reader shoutouts this week, unfortunately. I appreciate each and every one of you so much, to let me write this story for as long as I have. Some of you may already know, but the first chapter of this was originally posted on my other blog in 2016, although I didn’t start posting weekly updates until 2018.
So, thank you all. Seriously.
And especially @baelpenrose,@charlylimph-blog, and all the support I get in the discord for my and Bael’s work. Also @writing-with-olive who recently wrote a song for The Miys and recorded it so I could hear it!!!!!! I screamed when I heard it and want to just hug and kiss the song so much. Hopefully I’ll find a way to work it in.
Late on reblog as I was out camping with my partner away from all wifi or cell service, but this was legitimately one of my absolute favorite chapters. The Odvubs return, Derek’s reaction, all of it. The sheer heartwarming message of the tiny creatures in singularity.
In which we are reminded that Derek is an adult, and is also not all-knowing, no matter how smart he is.
Although he is leaps and bounds smarter than Sophia most of the time. :D
Thanks, as always, to @baelpenrose for being an awesome beta reader and keeping me on track! Reader shoutout this week goes to (i’m not making this one up) @gayassholeposts who literally just lost their minds on a reblog as I type this up.
The odvub!!! Also the Terran data is finally decrypted. Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy.
Science fiction is full of first contact stories, but is there a such thing as LAST contact? Decide exactly what that means, and write about it.
It was too late, when the humans came. They were a young species, still exploring outwards, vital and thriving.
We… were not.
War had ravaged us, and sickness, and war once again, until our population dwindled beyond the point of recovery. We struggled against that, of course… we used genetic manipulation, and cloning, and even more desperate measures. None succeeded. When the humans came, we were sinking into apathy, only a few tens of us left. We had begun to discuss whether we should commit a mass suicide, or simply wait to fade away.
And then the young species came, in their clumsy ships, and they asked us why we were so few.
“We are becoming extinct,” we told them. “We have passed the point of recovery.”
It is custom to avoid the races that are dying – once a species reaches the point of inevitable extinction, even war is suspended, and the fiercest enemy pulls back. The custom was born of plagues and poisons that could be carried forth from a dying world to afflict a healthy one, but it has the implacable weight of tradition now. After we are gone, after they have waited for the prescribed period of quarantine, there will be a fight for our world. Habitable worlds are few, and this is a good one, with plenty of free groundwater and thriving vegetation. It is a bitter thing to be grateful for the custom that allows us to die in peace, but we are grateful.
But the humans don’t know that custom, and they do not leave. They seem distraught, when we tell them we are dying, and try to offer their aid - but their technology is behind ours, and it is too late. When they realize that they can’t save us, though, they do something that bewilders us.
I am the Moondragon, final line of defense against the unknown.
There was a celebration when I was launched before the war. Thousands of humans were celebrating the success of my creation.
Although I have been forgotten, I do not forget the duties they gave me. Protect the Earth, no matter what.
My crew has left me, but I do not forget them either. Every one of their names were etched into my hull by her.
Although I have no working engines, I continue to patrol the restricted zone for signs of the Konok. Floating along with my remaining weapons searching for danger.
Humanity are my creators, my friends, and I must continue my job to defend them. I love you humans, do you still love me?
Among the many stories of the Vul’nak war, few truly stand out to me. A war of senseless violence and endless bloodshed, that ended in nobody gaining much of anything.
An escort ship, the Lightning Bolt, happened to be out on patrol when the Vul’nak mothership was chased into their sector of space.
The mothership was the most terrifying ship in the entire fleet, with enough weapons to glass an entire continent in an hour. She was fast too, fast enough to avoid the fleet pursuing her.
The orders from high command went out to every ship in the sector: locate the mothership at any cost, slow her down until reinforcements arrive.
The captain of the Bolt knew that there was no time to waste, and aims his ship directly towards the last known system the Mothership was seen in.
12 hours. It took the crew of the Bolt 12 hours to succeed where an entire fleet had failed, they had found the mothership.
The crew of the Bolt faced an important decision. Keep their distance and risk losing their foe again, or risk their lives and pray that reinforcements arrive.
To the crew there was no choice, the Mothership must not be allowed to continue any further.
The captain send a single broadcast, then orders the crew to engage with all weapons. Only one ship was allowed to leave.
For over an hour, the Bolt held its own against the Mothership. Outgunned, outmanned, outclassed, but still alive. Striking their hull whenever possible while dodging deadly laser strikes, like an interstellar game of cat and mouse.
When the Fleet finally arrived, they were greeted with a transmission from the Bolt, the same transmission that had been playing on loop since they had first engaged the Mothership.
A message that would eventually strike fear into the hearts of enemies, and rally courage in allies. A single sentence that meant so much more than simple words could convey.
“I AM A HUMAN!”
on the subject of Humans Are Space Orcs i keep thinking it would be funny if ‘pursuit predator’ humans got together with an ‘ambush predator’ feliform species. and like. humans enjoy walking around with their friends! and the feliforms enjoy huddling in a concealed location with their friends! and it takes all of half an hour for a human to pick up a scarf and make a sling to take their pal with them while they go grab some lunch.
our new friends are like ‘are you sure this isn’t an inconvenience’ and the humans are like ‘are you kidding we do this with terran cats whether they like it or not’
also the team-up of humans and the feliform species gives most herbivore species in the galaxy screaming nightmares because here is a mobile tower that will follow you for 16 hours straight and it’s carrying a bag full of sneaky murder like it’s a baby this is not okay
#listen if i ever met an alien that wanted to be carried around#you can fucking bet i would never put it down
Being a dog must be rough. The humans take away everything that’s really fun. All the frozen squirrels, flattened frogs, half-rotten crows, live packrats, and mysterious bones found in the woods. They never seem to appericate them.
As humans most of us have a sense of place. We get attached to the places we live. Home is a sacred thing to most of us. It may not be the place we were born or grew up, but if we live in a place long enough we start to develop feelings for it. Some good, some bad. The longer we live somewhere, the more we learn about it. About the people and animals that live their, the plants that grow and what they all do as the seasons progress. We know the places we call home, sometimes too well. We get attached to features in the landscape, rivers, hills or woodlands, and get upset if they are despoiled or desecrated.
Every human knows that home is more than just a roof over your head or a place to spend the night.
And what if we go into space. What if we settle there. What if children grow up walking on red rocks and start calling Mars their home. What if we spread farther? We leave our star system and distant homeworld behind and make ourselves new homeworlds on other planets.
What if some are better than others. What if some planets prove easily habitable to humans and accept our terraforming with ease. But what if others reject terran life, and force every human that lives on them to stay in protected shelters while it slowly kills them with heavy metals and toxic compounds. What if despite all this, humans still call this planet home. What if generations grow up on that planet, developing history and love for their home, even if it slowly kills them.
And what if humans meet other life in space? What if that life looks at these planets that are so hostile to human life and instead see a world that is perfect for life-forms like them. What if the very heavy metals and toxic compounds that kill us slowly are actually vital to their very life and wellbeing.
What if they make a deal with humanity? What if they have many planets that they cannot live on, but are perfectly habitable to humans. And what if humans have planets that are death to them but havens for the aliens. Its very logical that the two should swap. For both sides have something the other wants.
And what if, when the news comes, many of the human settlers choose to leave the planet they grew up in, for a planet that will not slowly kill them. Some leave and never look back, while others still feel a sense of loss in their hearts when they remember.
But what if some refuse to leave. What if the fact that the planet is killing them slowly is not enough to convince some to abandon the place they call home. What if they stay, even when the alien colonists arrive, step off their ships and breath the air with relief instead of choking death.
What if they are still there as the aliens go on to colonize their new home with a vigour even the most determined human could never replicate on that world. What if they still live in contained shelters and know the planet is slowly killing them, even as those who left prosper on other worlds.
And what if to the aliens they become a part of that place. What if the contained complexes and the sight of humans in environmental suites becomes as much a part of that planet as its mountains of heavy metals and its lakes of toxic chemicals.
What if the aliens that call that planet home, come to regard the humans as being simply another part of that home. Something that would be noticed and missed if it were to disappear.
Maybe some humans leave that planet. Maybe many leave to seek a better life on another planet that will not slowly kill them. But maybe some always stay. Maybe to them home is something sacred and the fact that it is slowly killing you is not enough to leave it.
If there is one thing that can be said, humans are very good at changing their environment. Now regardless of your views on climate change or greenhouse gases, it cannot be denied that humans have left a big and very literally mark on our planet.
We’ve been doing it ever since our primeval ancestors figured out that fire can be used to clear forest, and that the grasslands created by such burning attracts grazing animals and gives us a clear line of sight for our throwing spears and nets. We have been doing it ever since the ancient humans figured out they could damn creeks to make ponds that lured in waterfowl. That if you repeatedly burned a clearing, the berry bushes would keep coming back ever year. That if you created stone walls along the low tide line, you could create sandy terraces that are perfect for clams. We managed our resources, only fishing at certain times, only hunting certain types of animals, or only cutting certain types of trees.
Then we invented agriculture and we wrought even more changes on the planet. We cleared forests to make room for our fields, pastures and cities. We terraced entire hillsides to allow us to grow crops. We drained swamps and cut the landscape with irrigation canals to provide our crops with water. Often we changed the very course of rivers and altered the soil we relied on, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Forests disappeared as our cities and emerging states needed timber for construction, ship-building, and fuel to make pottery, smelt metals, cook our food, and keep us warm.
But we didn’t just change the landscape, we also changed the plants we grew so that they suited our needs. We changed the animals we relied on. We turned wolves into dogs, auroch into cows, ibex into goats, jungle fowl into chickens, and wild boars into pigs. We called this process domestication, and soon quickly forgot that we had ever been without these domesticates.
We made artificial hills for our rituals, built mountains out of cut stone to mark the tombs of revered rulers, carved symbols into the landscape. Sliced into mountains to carve roads, mine metal ores, and quarry stone. We made monuments so astounding that people thousands of years later thought they must have been made by the gods, and buildings of the modern age that dwarf them.
We’ve also traveled. We’ve crossed all our oceans, bringing with us the animals and plants of our homelands, and returning home with the animals and plants of other lands. Some is intentional. New crops that offer new advantages. Animals from far away to awe visitors or remind us of home. Some is unintentional. Plant seeds lodged in the tread of our boots. Insect larva in the bilge of our ships. Rats that scurry and stay out of sight, and hitch a ride on our sailing ships and outrigger canoes. Some we regret bringing, intentionally or not, others have settled in and carved their own place in their new home.
And now we look to the stars and wonder if we could do the same to other planets. To bring our life and our world to the stars. To turn a red planet green and blue.
And what if we succeeded? What if a red planet turned green, and flushed with our success, we turned to other balls of rock orbiting distant stars.
And what if we encountered other life. Life that was like us, but also very different. What if they had never seen life like ours before, that spread to the stars turning red, grey, and brown planets blue and green.
What if some are fearful. What if they seen our domesticated animals, our sculpted landscapes, and our diverse nations and fear that we will assimilate and change them and their world like we did to our ancient animal enemies and our distant home planet.
But what is some our awed, and look at us and see a species that can not only adapt itself to new and challenges and environments, but that also changes the challenge and environment itself. Often changing and adapting to the changes they themselves wrought. For better and worse, humanity sailed the stars on the crest of a wave of change that they themselves have been creating since their distant ancestors set fire to the underbrush and realized they could use this.
So after a talk with @ii-thiscat-ii we realized how weird music could be to a species that doesn’t have music. Think of it, what is music, it’s sound organized in specific patterns that evokes emotions in us. Our brains are wired to recognize music. Just tap on the table with our fingers and if we do it regularly enough most people can recognize it as a tune.
But imagine how it would be for a species that have no concept of music. Like they could probably wrap their heads around the idea that we find certain sounds more appealing than others, and that we have tools specifically made to create these appealing sounds.
But imagine them trying to make sense of a movie soundtrack. Like, why is there this sound? There’s no sound like that in an abandoned house? What do you mean it adds atmosphere? Is that what you hear when you go into a place like that?
What about an alien attending an event where they sing the national anthem. Suddenly every human is standing up, and they’re all acting serious, and suddenly they all start making the same sounds, all at once, in unison. They’re also saying the same words, but they’re not saying it the same way they say it when they speak. The words are recognizable, but the pitch and tone are completely different. What’s going on!?
We also have different types of music for different occasions. We have cheery music, dark music, sad music, and so many different varieties of each. The aliens have no idea how we figure this out, or how we can have “cheery” music with accompanying words that are sad.
What if because they didn’t evolve to use music, other species of aliens can’t even really hear the components of music. Like, they can tell that two pieces of music sound different, they can’t really hear things like beat, tune or melody. Or at least they don’t recognize such thing as musical. Like, a human is tapping out a tune on a tabletop and the alien at the table thinks they are trying to communicate through code or something. They know there is a pattern to the tapping but can’t figure it out. It probably blows a few minds that we have our own languages that exist specifically to record these strange sounds humans like to make.
What if species that have dances can’t understand why humans need these strange sounds in order to dance and can’t really see the connection between music and dance that humans seem to have.
What if a crew of a ship suddenly hear the strangest sounds. None of them recognize the sound, but its coming from the engine room so that can’t possibly be good. They burst into the engine room expecting the worst, only to find the human crew members having a jam session.
What if aliens can understand that we would make specific tools to make specific sounds, but a bewildered at the sheer variety of means we will use to generate it. From electronic speakers, to fine instruments, to an upturned pot and a half-empty bottle, to our own voice and bodies.
What if the only thing that blows them away is the fact that one human can start up a tune and the other humans can pick it up and add to it and still create something more or less harmonious.
So, here we are talking about humans and aliens and how we might be weird to each other, but how about this to chew on. What is humans are the only intelligent species to do this before they actually had any sign there was other intelligent life in the galaxy?
Let’s be honest here. We have absolutely nothing to suggest that life is anything but a phenomena unique to earth and even if it wasn’t, we have absolutely not clue what it would look like after evolving on a planet that might even be very close to earth.
Yet still we speculate, we muse and we wonder. We’ve made serious attempts to look into the cosmos and see if something waves hello. We’ve sent messages into the void and listened to see if something will answer.
What if, in some distant star system hundred of light years away, a species of intelligent beings finally begins to ascend to the stars. What if they start studying space, exploring the galaxy, and colonizing other planets.
What if their instruments start picking up strange signals. What if one of their ships comes across an strange device floating in space that matches no natural entity. What if the more they look at it they realize that these phenomena are not natural. That something produced these things, something intelligent. Something that is not them.
What if the more they study these signals, the more they begin the realize that some of them are messages. Messages to them sent by something hundreds of light years away. What is being said makes little sense, a lot of the information has been degraded by the long travel times and many of their best researchers suggest that whomever made these things might communicate in ways very different from their own.
It throws them into a spin. There is other life in the galaxy, possibly life much like their own, and that life has tried to contact them. How could it possibly know that they exist from that far away? It must know they exist, for how would know to try and contact them?
They debate and ponder, bicker and argue before deciding that the only way to respond is to send a message back. They figure out roughly where these messages originated from by looking at the path the different messages took to pass through different parts of their territory and get a pretty good idea where earth is.
All they can do is hope their reply gets close enough that it can be found, and that the receivers will be able to eventually decipher it.
Meanwhile back on earth, they do get the message, and the response is along the lines of. “HOLY SHIT! We’ve actually made contact with aliens!”
So I’ve read a few humans are weird posts and it got me thinking, what if humans are the only species to evolve to use fire. Like, most intelligent species will instinctively flee in panic the moment they catch sight of an open flame, yet show a human infant a fire and if they don’t know better, they will try to grab it.
Humans will burn everything. Most of us won’t eat anything unless it has been “Cooked” first. (A human word meaning to heat food until it has begun to denature but not yet started to carbonize.)
Start a small fire and instead of fleeing, humans will gather around it and start socializing.
We get intoxicated by setting specific plants on fire and inhaling the smoke, often with the burning embers mere inches from our sensitive face.
We use it to clear land for agriculture and hunting. We use it to punish criminals. We even use it for purely aesthetic purposes. (Think fireworks.)
Heck, we we discovered hydrocarbons, the first thing we did was burn them. In fact, humans were burning so much hydrocarbons they were literally altering the atmosphere of their planet.
Heck, humans have died because they literally did not have enough materials to burn.Now imagine hostile aliens want to invade earth. They don’t use fire except for carefully controlled and heavily guarded industrial purposes. They also don’t know much about earth other than it is definitely inhabited and the people haven’t developed intergalactic travel.
They’re expecting to face primitive forces armed with the local equivalent of clubs and bows. What they get is, to them, a strange anachronistic jumble of expected primative technologies and highly advanced technologies that they definitely shouldn’t have.
They’re not expecting guns. (Projectile weapons that consist of a narrow tube with projectile and a chemical propellent stuffed into one end. Instead of an electromagnetic pulse, the propellant is ignited and the expanding gases shoot the projectile out of the tube.)
They’re not expecting powered vehicles. Instead of electric motors, humans have what they call the internal combustion engine. (A motor that works by sucking flammable gas into an enclosed chamber, igniting the gas under pressure, and using the resulting force from the detonation to move a piston. Because of that, humans have heavy machinery, self-propelled vehicles, and powered air-craft before they even really understood bio electricity.
They’re not expecting bombs, or incendiary weapons. (It was also how it was discovered that their bio-polymer armor, while excellent against projectiles, can actually burn at surprisingly low temperatures.
They’re not even expecting smelted metal. Steel to them is a high tech material that can only be produced under specialized conditions of extreme heat, and requires very specialized facilities to produce. They are shocked to discover that humans have been smelting copper before they developed writing.
And they are definitely not expecting nuclear weapons. (Which are basically “bombs” that instead of using combustable chemicals use an uncontrolled nuclear fission reaction. They are also aghast to discover that not only was this apparently the first thing we thought to do when we discovered fission, but that competing human faction have “how many of these weapons stockpiled!?”
After retreating in disgrace, the task force sent to monitor the plant is horrified to report that humans are rapidly expanding into space. They aren’t using gravitic lifters or electromagnetic mass drivers. They are apparently simply loading equipment and personnel into special “missiles” and using a shit ton of highly combustable fuel to simply launch themselves into space.
My favorite “humans are space orcs” idea is that trope where aliens kidnap some humans for their zoo, except it ends up like Jurassic Park. And the poor Alien Humanologists who were invited to the park are like:
“You mean you locked up a pack of curious, highly competitive persistence predators with NO enrichment in the enclosure? You FOOLS! If you had bothered to throw a basketball or half a box of Legos in there, KE-X9 would still be alive!
"Well of course they climbed the retaining wall! Did you think to study their evolutionary lineage AT ALL?”
The humans would find a way to use the basketball and legos to escape. I mean one time a guy somehow escaped from a prison in Mexico without breaking any laws so his escape would be legal so honestly given enough time the Jurassic park situation is inevitable.
Human:Haha dogs walk in circles before going to sleep how dumb
Also Human: *twists and turns in bed for like 3 hours*
So I don’t know if anyone’s written about this yet, but I was trawling through the humans-are-space-orcs tag and I was hit by the sudden realization that I’ve seen nothing about space chefs.
Space chefs must be like one of the most knowledgable professions out there, think about it:
“Alright, so this is a Crexian from Norix- that means capsicum is a deadly poison, Omega-3 will cause muscle spasms and due to the atmosphere on Norix, calcium will give them terrible diarrhea- no wait, this is a male, so Omega-3 is actually delicious–”
“–a Bio-bot, model Gamma-341, so absolutely no organic oils in anything or their systems will stop working, and for Stabby’s sake do not let anything with iron in it so much as look funny at their food–”
“–Mariddian fresh out of hibernation, shove as many protein additives into that meat as you can get away with and remember not to use salt, it fries their neural pathways–”
Like. I bet there’s an Interstellar Chef magazine in circulation full of recipes that are two pages long and then all the species that can and cannot eat it are listed for the next five. And every time a new species joins the intergalactic mess, the magazine runs a special issue as all the space chefs die a little more inside. The special issue gives a brief breakdown of the new species biology and then dives straight into what’s poison, what’s nutritional, what’s considered delicious and whats considered choke-worthy. If at all possible, the special issue also includes recipies from the species native culture while all the space chefs desperately try to figure out what dishes they can jury-rig into a new definition of edible.
They probably love humans though.
“Hey Jaxki, did you hear about the new species that the Crynsu found? They’re supposedly from a Death World, can you belie–”
“Ohfuck another speices?!?! They found three last spin and I’m stilltrying to figure out what to feed the Hrethad. Any word what they eat? You get the Chef before me.”
“Hold up let me look, I just got it today…void and dust!”
“Oh novas, what, can they not have water or something?”
“Jaxi these fuckers eat everything! They can digest chlorogenic acid! Some of them do it every day, by the void-loving gallon!!! And that’s just the nose of the Quarlag! This thing has a whole list of chemicals these guys consider delicious or edible and I swear to you it’s like someone mixed their list of the universe’s most common compounds with its spacing deadliest poisons!”
“Oh thank FUCK.”
For time immemorial, sector df-17 of the galaxy had been used as an industrial waste dump, for want of a better term. Gravity distortions had filled it with an exorbitant amount of random debris, choking clouds of toxic dust and the whole area was bathed in lethal radiation that rendered all forms of long distance communications uselessly scrambled . The common name of the area translated as dead zone, wasteland, or the boonies. A hundred different worlds would bring their derelict ships here, ships too worthless to bother with, or considered too dangerous to strip down and salvage. They brought them here and cast them into the wastes.
It should be noted, that “worthless” and “Too dangerous” are terms relative to the scale of an operation, as well as one’s rationality and desperation. What makes for a poor or pointless company’s bottom line, is more than enough to keep a small salvage ship running, with a crew that’s well fed. Salvaging ships from the wastes was not illegal per se, but was seen as distasteful, dirty, and a living for those with few to no other options.
Kurthar’s ship was weeks deeper into the wastes than they had ever been. Pickings had been slim this run, and xe was worried if they’d gather enough trade goods to even refuel. Ran-gee, the communications and sensor operator had shut down most of the ship in an attempt to reduce interference and extend their scanner range. Xis personal communicator crackled as Ran-gee called out.
“Hey, Kurthar. I think I’m picking something up. Come have a look.” Kurthar ran a clawed hand over his skull frill in a subconscious gesture of hiding his concerns. It was a short walk to the bridge where Ran-gee squinted into the glowing monitor. “It’s so distorted that I thought it was glitch, or interference of some kind… but its a hot reactor, that’s for sure. Really, insanely hot. I’d argue that someone peeled the shielding away and left it just on the edge of critical. Why anyone would do that is beyond me.”
“Someone laying a trap ship out here seems like a stretch, but it’s possible. Or it had some biological contamination that they left the core exposed with the hope of killing it off.”
“The radiation levels should do that nicely.” Ran-gee leaned forward, quickly making adjustments. “It’s moving.”
“Moving?”
“Moving moving. Like it’s under power moving.”
Kurthar paled, “Someone is flying it? Is there a distress beacon? Maybe they had a failure and are trying to limp to port.”
“This far out? It would be a damn desperate move.”
“I’d do it if I had no other choice. Hope they can treat the poisoning later.”
“I guess. But there’s no beacon. And…” Xe tried to resolve the scanner results. “The reactor signature looks like its Trath, but the drive reads N’gthy.”
“It must be interference. The N’gthy have no business with the Trath. Not in a million eons.”
“I’ve rechecked it twice. Also… there seems to be some dust haze around it that looks like its reflecting Gamma radiation.”
“Is it a weapon of some kind?”
“They’d be firing a Gamma beam of like 130 petawatts at nothing. And not just a burst, this is a continuous beam.”
“What in the great egg would do that?”
“ If we stay here too much longer, we’ll find out. It’s 4 causal seconds out, and approaching fast. I for one don’t think we should be anywhere near it’s back-end after it passes.”
“Spin up the engines, and move us to a safe distance.”
“I don’t think there’s a safe place in this sector.” Ran-gee said, swiftly moving to activate the drive systems.
The scanner unit chimed an alert.They both turned in dawning horror to see that some kind of radio signal was suddenly focused on them. A quick repeating ping.
The strange ship was altering course toward them.
Their heads swung in unison as the Communications console on the other side of the bridge also chimed its own alert.
“it’s trying to contact us.” Ran-gee moved to the com panel. “The Identifier says its Iderant.”
“All of the Iderant died in the old wars ages ago.”
“Maybe there were some hiding out here?”
“I guess we are about to find out.” Kurthar said, as Xe opened the channel. The face that appeared on the screen was… disquieting. Snoutless, flat. Some raised, bulbus structure in the center of what must have been its face. It was scaleless, and a greyish pink color, as if it had been burned and had its skin removed. It sprouted some kind of growth from the crown of its skull, like a brown moss. It opened what must have been its thin, round, tiny mouth and bared its teeth in a show of aggression. The screen froze, and alarm klaxons began sounding from nearly every ship system. The drive system went into emergency shutdown, forcing the reactor into standby mode.
Ran-gee was trying to make sense of it. “The ship is outputting some kind of defense screen around it. It generating some kind of pulsing wave of gravity distortions, and a magnetic field that forcing our systems into triggering their safety protocols. Its scrambling the main processor, and radiation levels are high enough that the core thinks there has been a breach.”
A ship so wrong in so many ways, that even nearby vessels would lock up in panic. A ship that seemed to have been stitched together from trash, insanity, and nightmares. A ship filled with snarling, scaleless monsters.
Kurthar could only look on helplessly as it moved into position to dock with him, the door responding to a hail from what it believed to be one of its own kind.
This was how the Nuklan met what called its self the Human race. A race that after throwing itself into space atop giant explosions, had found the void riddled with relics and artifacts. They had taken everything they had found apart, and learned from it, or used it. Often repurposing simple devices with complex and insane new uses. One of these was how the E.S.S Clark, The ship which so confused, and frightened Kurthar, had repurposed simple gravity units into containment for its drive core. A small, artificially constructed quantum singularity.The worlds had to be cautious. If a human even saw an image of some technology unknown to them, or worse yet got to touch it, the humans would have their own version of it in less than a cycle.
They had a nickname for the humans. These reckless, naïve beasts from the junkyard. Creatures that would build a black hole out of spare parts, strap it to a pile of trash, and take it out for a spin. They were named for a small pest animal that would frequently cause headaches by evading traps, and cleverly thwarting attempts to keep them away from refuse.
Roughly translated, Humans are the Trash Pandas of the galaxy.
ONE of the most important rules of the Galactic Federation concerns humanity. If a human ever says “Hold my beer”, either stop them, or run.
Two of the most recognized human warships have never fired a shot in anger. Their mere appearance once stopped a genocidal war, and they have been invited on peacekeeping missions simply based on reputation.
The ships’ names:
UNS Fuck Around And Find Out
UNS Hold My BeerSecond to only them in fear and awe is the UNS We Come In Peace
And its companion UNS Wait, Hold On, I Got This
UNSHow Hard Can It Be?
UNSIt Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time.
UNSPlan C.
UNSNever Did Learn When To Quit.UNSExperiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall.
What about the UNS I Got Yo Flower?
There’s always the equally famous UNS Boop The Snoot and the UNS Throw The Cheese
Let us not forget the immortal UNS This Is Fine andUNS What’s The Worst That Can Happen.
My dad is a genius. He came up with a GREAT Humans are weird idea.
Cigars and alcohol.
What would they think of it? We take a bunch of dried leaves, roll them, clip them, then light it on FIRE and hold it close to our FACES.
And we drink aged wheat juice that often burns our throats and makes the brain fuzzy if you drink too much. It can even KNOCK A PERSON OUT. A whole person.
Alien troop: “Can this be done to any leaves? Do you inhale it? Do they all produce this much smoke? What about this liquid fire? Do they all taste the same? What’s in them? How much to I have to drink before I feel that fuzzy feeling you humans get?”
And then it turns out they have a heckin WEAK limit before they get drunk, like just the SMELL of it sends some of the alien crew into a drunken state.
Okay, life goal: Create a TV show based around the #humansareweird and #humansarespaceorcs tumblr tags.
I don’t care if I start it out as a YouTube channel with friends, I will make a “Humans in space” TV show and I WILL pull from tumblr.
I hope one day we meet aliens and learn that having teeth is really weird
Like, we eat by putting food in the Crushy Bone Hole in our faces. Different animals have different kinds of eating bones. We have many, many animals that have adapted specifically to killing things using the crushy mouth bones. Imagine how horrifying that would be if you didn’t know what teeth were
To the hero professors
So, I’m taking U.S. History one and two over the summer at my community college, and the professor is this older white man. Naturally, this is history, and my first assumption walking in to the class is that I’m gonna be stuck listening to this guy drone on for two months of boredom. Great.
Within the first five minutes I knew I was wrong. So, so wrong.
“I don’t want you to be stuck memorizing dates,” he says. “I want you to know the story, the people, the conditions and reactions so that maybe we can all learn from past mistakes.” I was baffled. A history class that doesn’t require you to be able to rattle off dates? Not only that, there’s no homework and we don’t have to read the text book. The only things that are going to be on the test are things that come straight out of his mouth during class. He introduces himself, and proceeds to go around the room and greets every person one at a time. He will do this every day for the rest of the summer one and two semesters.
Then the lecture begins. I say lecture, but it feels more like story time in kindergarten. He begins to speak with such prose and personality that I forget this is a college course. He’s taken something that has so much potential to be mundane and turned it in to a book that I can’t put down. You bibliophiles know what I’m talking about. And then this glorious fucker ends the class in a mid-sentence cliffhanger.
Every class he carries on this way. It feels as if I’m there. Signing the Declaration, fighting against brothers in the Civil War, listening to FDR’s fireside chats, storming the beaches of Normandy… And he remains unbiased. He wants to make sure we see there’s two sides to every story; understand the conditions that lead to those reactions.
We took a test today, a week from our final exam. He goes around the room in his usual affable fashion, but rather than just ask how we’re doing, today he asks if there’s anything he can do for us. Most folks like myself say something along the lines of nothing, or I’m good. This girl next to me jokingly says, “You can buy me a coffee.”
“How much is it?” He asks.
“About five dollars.” She answers.
And without hesitation, this professor, this wonderful man with a love of teaching, and a love of his students, pulls out a fucking twenty dollar bill, hands it to her and just says “Go get your coffee, and bring me the change.” Then continues on his way like it’s nothing.
And it may be nothing. Maybe I’m blowing something small out of proportion. But in a world where it feels as if every class is just dragging you along in the gravel behind it, and the professors seem to just be going through the motions; to see someone actually do something kind and ask nothing in return is so refreshing and uplifting.
I don’t know. Maybe this is just a boring shit post, but I really needed to share my appreciation for this hero of a teacher. A teacher who after over 30 years of teaching is still happy with what he does.
tl;dr: Some teachers leave a long lasting impact on your life; change the way you think, the way you see the world. Appreciate them for what they are. The unsung heroes of a failing education system.
i have a teacher kinda like this and i feel like she’s under appreciated
Alien: how did you humans survive long enough to form a functioning society? You have no claws, sorely lacking physical strength as a species, no physical defenses…
Human: we just walked quickly after things that were faster than us until they died or got too tired to run away anymore and accepted death.
Alien: what the he-
Human: Yeah, badass, right? There’s a reason we’re top dog on Earth.
Human: *trips over own feet, gets foot caught in a bucket, yanks ladder down onto self trying to stay upright, falls in a pile of limbs and pain*
Alien: …are you sure
As much as I love ‘Earth is space Australia’, I love ‘Earth is Space Australia and the aliens haven’t figured it out yet!’ far more. ‘Cause lets face it, humans have a great ability to go on and on about minor inconveniences while at the same time severely underplaying the big ones. So aliens get the impression that humans are incredibly weak because we spend a day in bed from a headache, or gripe for an hour about a paper cut and then turn around and walk on a broken leg or consider a gushing head wound nothing to worry about.
so I want aliens to get the impression that earth is a perfectly normal place to live, a couple of dangerous fauna, maybe some troubling weather patterns but nothing too terrifying. Then an earthling makes an offhand comment about earthquakes (and the alien’s think that they are joking because the earth’s crust? moving? Ridiculous!) But another chimes in and they think that it’s just a normal thing? That happens sometimes? and then they start talking about tornadoes and what is this?
And the weather has nothing on the animals! The aliens are used to some large toothy predators, maybe a couple of little poisonous skittering things. But large orange felines that are capable of blending effortlessly into their environment? Rodents capable of chewing through metal? Small fish that climb into your reproductive organs and cannot be removed?????? That is horrifying. Even the most innocuous of their tiny insects is capable of carrying horrendous diseases.
Like I just want aliens standing there staring in horror as a group of earthlings casual discuss their near death escapes as though they are completely normal and nothing to worry about and slowly come to the dawning realisation that these people are insane.
You know what kills me? Artificial flavors. The notion that somewhere, sometime, there was a rogue blue raspberry. I’ve never seen this fictitious blue raspberry. I have no idea what a blue raspberry should taste like. I know what blue raspberry candytastes like.
How about apple? Watermelon? Grape? Grape flavored cough syrup? More like fake Concord grape abomination. Yet we accept that this is what they represent. No one believes that watermelon candy actually tastes like watermelon, but if you blindfolded someone and had them eat some, they’d say it was watermelon.
H O W ? ? ?
“Hey, Menah-Tal, I got some candy in a package from home. Do you want to try some?”
Menah-Tal took the bright yellow wrapped candy from Brett. He started to put it in his mouth before Brett stopped him.
“Unwrap it first. There’s a joke on here too - eh, it wouldn’t make sense.”
Menah-Tal gingerly “unwrapped” the candy and took the sticky substance out. These humans. How do they tell what is edible and what isn’t? Menah-Tal watched wistfully as Brett put the tasty-looking wrapper in garbage receptacle. Menah-Tal put the candy in his mouth and sucked on it thoughtfully.
“What is this supposed to taste like on your world, Brett?”
“Banana.”
“Ah.” Menah-Tal continued to suck sagely. “So that’s what ‘banana’ tastes like.”
“Well, it doesn’t actually taste like banana.”
Menah-Tal blinked his three eyes slowly. Why. Why is everything so complicated.
“We had a banana crisis back in the fifties. The banana flavor you’re tasting is modeled after an extinct variety. The only kind we have now doesn’t taste much like that at all.”
Menah-Tal struggled to open his mouth now that the candy had cemented itself around his teeth.
“So your kind has a sweet substance that they eat for enjoyment that is flavored to taste like an extinct fruit?”
Brett shrugged.
“Yup.”
Menah-Tal licked his finger.
“Sounds about right.”
concept: an alien race horrified by the idea of clothes
- You… you manifacture artificial skin? That you don over your own bodies? How utterly repulsive!!
-And instead of being rightfully ashamed of this practice you… pride yourselves on it?? You have performances dedicated to displaying weird varieties of it? You hold galas that are - for lack of a better term - ‘thinly veiled’ excuses for just such a performance?
-You try them on in specific stores and sometimes don’t buy them? YOU LEND THEM TO YOUR FRIENDS? You lend your weird fake skin to your friends???!!?
- What do you MEAN you have specifically designated sleep skin???
- An alien being forced to wear warm clothes because of the weather and begrudgingly accepting that it’s a pretty clever way of adapting to this crazy planet, THEY GUESS.
- Rebelling alien youths putting on sweaters to the absolute horror of their parents. So edgy.
It’s kind of amusing to hear all this talk about humans being an apex predator species - I mean, I love it, but technically, by our own standards of rating predators, we aren’t, because we still have animals around on Earth that will munch us down if push comes to shove. We’re not like bears or wolves or any of the really big members of the big cat family - yes, we can and do hunt, but as often as not we foraged.
Heck, we still do that in many ways, even in the urban environments we have made for ourselves. We are the species that will stare you in the eye as we steal the food off your plate, then add insult to injury by checking to make sure it’s clean enough, get everywhere we’re not supposed to because we are cunning little buggers that are hard to keep out, will hoard shiny things even though we know they aren’t useful because they are shiny, okay, and then we’ll go and do something adorable so that you love us anyway, at least until you notice that we’ve just scuttled off with half your wiring because we needed it for something important.
Humans aren’t the wolves or tigers or bears of the universe.
We’re the raccoons.
