– nico is 20 and jason is 22 and they split time between the camps and maybe jason tried university but found it wasn’t for him so he teaches sword fighting and leadership and builds shrines in his spare time, and nico goes to class when he feels like it and runs errands for his dad
– but they have a free month of summer and jason has an itch he can’t quite scratch and nico has learned to read jason’s quirks like a mythomagic play so they pack up too many blue brownies (courtesy of percy) and not enough pairs of underwear and set out on a roadtrip
– and it starts off okay. they drive across mountains and fight some griffons and grumble about being followed around by monsters everywhere they go but fighting for their lives has always kept things interesting
– until nico slows a little and leans forward on the wheel and turns deep-brown eyes on jason and asks “where are we going”
– and jason pauses his fiddling with an upside-down roadmap and thinks for a long moment while evergreen trees flash by their windows and then he says “i want to visit my mom”
– and nico just nods and noses the car west and doesn’t ask why because he knows jason has his own healing to do, jason has a lot of things he hasn’t faced yet
– nico makes snide ‘are we there yet’ remarks whenever jason takes a turn driving and they stop at cramped diners along route 70 and all the middle-aged waitresses with bad perms flirt with jason while nico glowers into his coffee cup
– nico takes naps in the backseat wrapped up in jason’s too-big hoodies and jason hums along to quiet radio stations and avoids the bumps in the road as best he can
– they get a flat in the desert just far away from las vegas to avoid the lights and jason offers to fly to get a new tire and nico argues that it’s much faster to shadow travel but jason reminds him that they agreed no shadow traveling because roadtrips are an experience and to enjoy the journey and nico rolls his eyes
– they end up spending the night lying under the stars on the hood of jason’s beat-up second-hand american muscle car (b/c maybe leo has rubbed off on him and maybe jason loves how flooring the gas and hearing the v8 roar is almost as freeing as flying)
– and they talk about their sisters and their parents and expectations and the camps and old loves and new experiences and how people change but ultimately it’s hard to run from your demons and it’s better to face them head on (jason makes a corny imagine dragons joke and nico huffs out a laugh and that’s enough)
– and maybe jason rolls on his elbow and looks at nico in profile and admires nico’s lashes lying across his cheeks and how starlight makes nico softer
– and maybe nico quirks his lips without opening his eyes and says “you’re staring, grace”
– and jason goes a little pink but doesn’t back down because he’s jason grace and he never runs from a challenge, and he says “yeah, i am”
– and then, maybe, in the dark on the cool metal of his car hood with nothing around them for miles and miles save for cacti and stars, jason takes a breath and says “you would be, too, if you could see what i see”
Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, something truly nasty escaped Earth. They call it giardia, a microscopic organism that their Planetary Protection Officer called “pretty dumb” and “not too bad, really, a week of digestive upset and then it’s over.”
Yes, Earth has a Planetary Protection Officer. They have a Planetary Protection Office, and have had one since they were sending probes around their own solar system. Doctor Ma-et had found it a bit silly, like a child concerned about the cleanliness of their toys, until she learned that the job of the Planetary Protection Office had always been protecting other worlds from Earth.
i love this individual piece of writing, and i also love the narrative tumblr has been developing around Crazy Primates From The Death Planet Just Want To Love You. it feels so real and so US. it feels like maybe if genuine contact happens, this is how it’ll go down.
we’re too young, as a species, to do any galactic business of our own. we’re barbaric and awkward, still fighting amongst ourselves for resources. we’d probably make the galactic powers very nervous. but the thing is, there is nothing more dangerous to a human than another human, and hasn’t been for centuries, and this is on a world where half the ‘habitable’ environments regularly kill people and the rest only kill people on occasion with floods and stuff. we make buddies with our predators, we make our diseases brew us chemicals and fuel. we turn everything to our own use, and would bloom through the universe like a horrible all-consuming plague – except that we already sorta did that a little bit on our own planet, we were THAT powerful, and we learned not to.
we are the infant titans who, having seen our siblings eaten, swore to protect instead of consume. we police each other – and ourselves – at the deepest levels, down to the bones of our spirituality. even the most vicious warmonger knows, KNOWS, in their heart of hearts, that what they do is not right, and will not be allowed to go on.
more advanced species didn’t have to learn this lesson, because they weren’t violent to begin with, or learned it a long slow way under the tutelage of older powers. and here we are already, these holy fools, who hold death itself in our hands, and have the hunger for infinity in our eyes, and they ask us what we plan to do with this power, and we say: “where can we help?”
“and also, can we pet your dog?”
I love this so very much, both the fic and the commentary. As much as I love Star Trek and always will, its utopian vision of humanity as a distinguished part of the galactic UN, everybody-just-learning-to-get-along seems a little impossible at times like these. This picture of reckless, a little bumbling, ultimately good-hearted and good-doing humanity seems somehow more plausible, and gives me some real flickers of long-term hope.
a further thought on my previous thought:
if humans are the one species so toxic we learned by experience not to be a hegemonizing swarm before we developed space travel, and survived it… that means anyone who starts trying evil empire shenanigans now is NEW AT IT.
imagine a relatively little-known species suddenly gets to acting real hincty, breaking treaties and taking stuff and breaking stuff. the galactic council is horrified. the humans are like “oh they’re just being little shits, smack ‘em on the snoot.” the galactic council respectfully suggests the humans volunteer to be the ones doing the smacking. the humans point out that yeah, that is what they were doing.
the first ones to show up are, as always, the helpers. maybe this change in behavior is due to some disease or disaster. but nope, it turns out to be a nasty ideological vector, and the humans know from long experience that this one does not go away on its own, but fighting it from the outside makes it last so much longer.
so the next ones to show up are a different kind of helper: military advisors.
galactics: what are you doing??? you’re making it worse!
humans: worse? or BETTER???
under clearly delined circumstances and non-allegiances, so as not to break any interplanetary laws on behalf of humanity, these vicious masters of war teach the upstarts how it’s done. from the warp-tech version of village-burnings to mutually assured destruction, with defcon settings and terror alerts in all the spaceports, in under a generation. the upstarts have gotten much better at war, but only in their own space, and they are learning how it is that a whole species can be tired.
galactics: ok, we think we kinda see what you’re up to, but it’s awful and we wish you would’ve just made them stop fighting.
humans: you can only do that to forces that understand they’re in trouble. when we first got there, they were still having fun.
galactics: we don’t understand.
humans: right. the sick thing is, war is fun. that’s the disease. you can’t fight fun with bigger, better fun. you have to run ‘em around their own back yard until they work off the rush. only then can they look at their own mess and wonder what cleanup’s gonna be like.
galactics: it makes a weird kind of sense. so is that it, now? are they done? are they… cured?
humans: hahahahahahaha no. they’re just finally starting their treatment. now we send in the economists.
I’ve read alot of the “Humans are weird/space orcs” “Earth is space Australia” posts, And one thing I havent seen addressed yet is Mental Illnesses. How would aliens react to their crewmate having something about their brain that makes it difficult to accomplish certain tasks?
Our brain is very complicated, and maybe alien species just don’t have them? Imagine there being a new human crewmate onboard the ship, and after awhile the aliens notice the human talking to themselves as if they’re talking to another person, or staring at a wall or a corner of a room, or getting scared or nervous for no apparent reason.
Imagine a new human crew member having something like Deppression, Anxiety, Bipolar disorder, Autism, scitzophrenia, psycosis, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Dissasociative Identity Disorder (DID), etc and having to explain what that is to the aliens on the ship. Lot’s of people don’t really want help, and believe they are just fine without the professional assistance. And then there are other people who believe they need the help very badly.
On a similar topic, triggers are quite odd as well. Some people will have a panic attack over certain objects or words, alien species may not have to deal with that, and their mind may be structured to completely avoid mental illnesses alltogether-
Someone please write about this I’m terrible at writing stories hah a
I’ve actually got a short about that here, and another one about intrusive thoughts coming up shortly (like tomorrow, I think?)
Xlipnor spent months preparing the ship for the arrival of their human crewmate. The Galatic Council had, in xir great wisdom, deemed that every fleet ship should house at least once human. Even the frigates with small crews. Xir captain had to choose which of xir crew to let go in order to make room for the new human.
In short, Xlipnor was not happy about this new addition. Not only had xe lost a crewmate xe liked, but xe and the rest of the crew had to do research on humans to ensure xe were prepared for it’s arrival.
The human arrived with no fanfare. Xlipnor – having done the most research, being the medical officer – was in charge of ensuring the human was comfortable and well-integrated with the rest of the crew.
*What is your designation?* xe asked, allowing the translator to do the work. It was an invention of humans, ironically enough.
“Second Lieutenant Erica Hayes, sir!” the human replied. The translator gave Xlipnor everything xe needed to know – usename of Erica, from clan of Hayes, of the military caste. The human’s mouth stretched, but did not bare her teeth. “What can I call you?”
“I am Xlipnor of Clan Kl’Zep, from the medical caste.”
The human paused as xir words were translated, then smiled again without baring her teeth – a trick Xlipnor was glad she has learned. She turned and retrieved a small file chip and gave it to xir.
“Doctor, right? I’m supposed to give this to you.”
Xlipnor accepted it, and began rest of the introductions and tour. At the end, Xlipnor showed the human her quarters and let her know the ship would be setting off in fifty-two hours. The human nodded – a gesture that meant affirmative or as an acknowledgement of information received – and Xlipnor went to prep the rest of xir things for the journey.
It had been some time since they left the station with the human in tow. Xlipnor had no problems with the human, nor had any of xir other crewmates. She did her job as security officer (the captain’s decision, that, based on research of humans and their capacity for pack bonds, endurance, and ability to not only survive, but to ensure the survivability of those they pack bonded with). There were no incidents that required the human to perform at capacity.
Xlipnor was inspecting a newest sample from a potential life-sustaining planet when the human walked in.
“Hey, um, so were you able to take a look at that chip I gave you?” she asked, hesitantly. For Xlipor, some of her words translated as something akin to mandible clicks used to indicate anxiety.
“I have not yet, Lieutenant,” xe replied, but turned to look at the human. Her face underwent several fascinating changes. Her forehead wrinkled slightly and the corners of her mouth turned down. Then the distortions cleared and her lips pressed together. There was no translation for them – body language was still beyond the translator – and so Xlipnor waited to see if the human would speak again.
“It’s just… I need my medication,” she said finally.
Xlipnor looked her over, but saw no injury or evidence of illness. “Are you ill, Lieutenant?”
“Sorta,” she admitted. Her forehead wrinkled again as the fur above her eyes drew together. Her lips were thin once more. Xlipnor had seen such an expression on her face before, or one similar, when she was working on upgrading the security systems to her preferences. “It’s to help regulate my brain chemistry.”
“Explain.”
“Humans sometimes have an imbalance in the ways their brains work,” she said, “or so my doctor told me. Something doesn’t quite work right, and we don’t know exactly why. So some of us take medication so we can… function.”
“And you need this medication for your brain to function?” Xlipnor asked, making sure xe understood the situation.
“Yes,” she replied, sounding relieved. “If you could take a second to look through my file, it has everything you need to manufacture my meds.”
Xlipnor was thankful the translator they had not only directly translated human speech, but also translated the idioms and word shortenings humans seemed obsessed with. Xe said xe would, and the human seemed happy enough with that and left.
It took Xlipnor some time to find the chip, but started to review it almost immediately. Xir mandibles clicked irritably. The human might have made mention she had a medical condition xe would need to care for. And what were the human leaders thinking, sending their people out that were in less than perfect health?
When Xlipnor saw the compounds necessary the create the human’s medication, xe called the human to their medical bay immediately.
“What’s the problem?” she asked, breathing heavily. Given how quickly she arrived, she must have ran.
“Have you seen what is suggested?” Xlipnor demanded, showing the human what xe found. She looked at it for a long moment, before furrowing her brow and looking at xir in confusion.
“That… looks normal,” she said slowly. “What’s wrong?”
“According to your own species’s medical publications, some of these chemicals and substances are toxic to your system,” Xlipnor told her, mandibles clicking angrily. “It would be poisoning you to give you this so-called medication!”
She blinked at xir for a moment. “Well, yeah, the side-effects suck, but that’s why you give me the other stuff, right below it. It helps negate some of the side effects – I guess some of the toxins – and keeps me from, you know…”
“Dying?”
“Well, no. I’ve been taking this stuff for a while, long before they had the supplement. It’s not so bad.”
Xlipnor’s mandibles clicked once, and were still in utter shock. This human had just admitted to taking highly toxic substances for the sake of bringing balance to her brain chemistry. Such a thing was so completely foreign that Xlipnor needed a second to process this information.
“And… what is the alternative?” Xlipnor asked, not sure if xe wanted to know.
The human jerked her shoulders in what was known as a shrug – a common human gesture for uncertainty or negation. “Well, I have some hallucinations. Usually auditory, but some visual as well. Most of the time, I can tell they aren’t, you know, real, but sometimes… And there’s other things, but that’s the major one.”
Xlipnor felt xir antenna still as well, and xe stared at the human for a long, long moment.
“You are saying that your people have deemed you healthy enough for space travel, despite suffering from an illness which causes hallucinations?” xe asked weakly. “And to avoid such, you must take highly toxic substances?”
“I AM healthy enough for space travel,” she shot back angrily. “I have schizophrenia, is all. Lots of people have it, and are perfectly fine! And some of them don’t take any kind of medication for it at all!” Her expression was dangerous, and Xlipnor felt xir mandibles twitch. “I just have it in such a way that I need the medicine. Are you going to be a dick about this?”
The subtle threat and overt insult spurred Xlipnor into responding, and xe drew xirself up to xir full height – towering over the human. She continued to glare at xir, showing no signs of backing down.
“I am of the medical caste,” xe told her. “It is my duty to see to the health of everyone on board, including you.”
“Then you’ll make my medication?” she demanded.
“If it was deemed necessary by your human doctors, then yes,” xe replied, mandibles clicking.
Her entire posture relaxed, and she smiled. “Good. When will they be ready?”
“Within twelve hours,” Xlipnor said, somewhat confused. Xe had known humans to be mercurial in their moods, but had never seen such a change in body language – from anger to happiness. It would have been fascinating under other circumstances.
“I’ll be back in twelve hours!” she said, and walked out.
Xlipnor did make the medication the human insisted she needed, but also spent much of that time researching the medical condition known as “schizophrenia” – as well as many other human conditions of the brain. Xlipnor made a note to write into the Galactic Library to add to the human files, and that being that such conditions were considered so common that they were not deemed as basis for excluding humans from serving in their military – probably right alongside with the addendum that loss of limb was not basis for being unfit to serve.
((Not everyone with mental illness needs medication, and are perfectly fine without it. I hope it was able to come across as more alien reaction to human mental illness and the treatments we have, and less mentally ill people need medication to function.))
So there has been a bit of “what if humans were the weird ones?” going around tumblr at the moment and Earth Day got me thinking. Earth is a wonky place, the axis tilts, the orbit wobbles, and the ground spews molten rock for goodness sakes. What if what makes humans weird is just our capacity to survive? What if all the other life bearing planets are these mild, Mediterranean climates with no seasons, no tectonic plates, and no intense weather?
What if several species (including humans) land on a world and the humans are all “SCORE! Earth like world! Let’s get exploring before we get out competed!” And the planet starts offing the other aliens right and left, electric storms, hypothermia, tornadoes and the humans are just … there… counting seconds between flashes, having snowball fights, and just surviving.
To paraphrase one of my favorite bits of a ‘humans are awesome’ fiction megapost: “you don’t know you’re from a Death World until you leave it.” For a ton of reasons, I really like the idea of Earth being Space Australia.
Earth being Space Australia
Words cannot express how much I love these posts
Alien: “I’m sorry, what did you just say your comfortable temperature range is?”
Human: “Honestly we can tolerate anywhere from -40 to 50 Celcius, but we prefer the 0 to 30 range.”
Alien: “……. I’m sorry, did you just list temperatures below freezing?”
Human: “Yeah, but most of us prefer to throw on scarves or jackets at those temperatures it can be a bit nippy.”
Other human: “Nah mate, I knew this guy in college who refused to wear anything past his knees and elbows until it was -20 at least.”
Human: “Heh. Yeah everybody knows someone like that.”
Alien: “……. And did you also say 50 Celcius? As in, half way to boiling?”
Human: “Eugh. Yes. It sucks, we sweat everywhere, and god help you if you touch a seatbelt buckle, but yes.”
Alien: “……. We’ve got like 50 uninhabitable planets we think you might enjoy.”
“You’re telling me that you have… settlements. On islands with active volcanism?”
“Well, yeah. I’m not about to tell Iceland and Hawaii how to live their lives. Actually, it’s kind of a tourist attraction.”
“What, the molten rock?”
“Well, yeah! It’s not every day you see a mountain spew out liquid rocks! The best one is Yellowstone, though. All these hot springs and geysers from the supervolcano–”
“You ACTIVELY SEEK OUT ACTIVE SUPERVOLCANOES?”
“Shit, man, we swim in the groundwater near them.”
Sounds like the “Damned” trilogy by Alan Dean Foster.
“And you say the poles of your world would get as low as negative one hundred with wind chill?”
“Yup, with blizzards you cant see through every other day just about.”
“Amazing! when did you manage to send drones that could survive such temperatures?”
“… well, actually…”
“… what?”
“…we kinda……. sent……….. people…..”
“…”
“…”
“…what?”
“we sent-”
“no yeah I heard you I just- what? You sent… HUMANS… to a place one hundred degrees below freezing?”
“y-yeah”
“and they didn’t… die?”
“Well the first few did”
“PEOPLE DIED OF THE COLD AND YOUR SOLUTION WAS TO SEND MORE PEOPLE???!?!?!?”
My new favorite Humans are Weird quote
“PEOPLE DIED OF THE COLD AND YOUR SOLUTION WAS TO SEND MORE PEOPLE?”
aka The History of Russia
aka Arctic Exploration
aka The History of Alaska
Being from Alaska, this was sort of how I felt going to college in the lower 48′s and learned that no one else had been put through a literal survival camp as a regular part of their school curriculum, including but not limited to:
1. Learning to recognize all forms of animal tracks in the wild so you can avoid bears and moose and search out rabbits and other small animals to eat.
2. Extensive swimming and climbing on glacial pieces with competitions to see who could last the longest, followed by a group sit in the sauna so we wouldn’t get hypothermia (no, not kidding, I really did this many times as a kid!)
3. How to navigate using the stars to get back to civilization.
4. How to select the right type of moss from the trees to start a fire with damp wood (because, y’know, you’re in a field of snow. Nothing is dry.)
5. How to carve out a small igloo-like space to sleep in the snow to preserve body heat and reduce the windchill so you won’t freeze to death in the arctic.
“I’m telling you, I don’t think we need to worry about territory conflicts with the humans. You know all those deathtrap hell-worlds in the Argoth Cluster?” “Those worthless rocks? Yeah.” “80% of them are considered ‘resort destinations’ by those freaky little primates.”
This would be an interesting read if this was a book.
Like, an alien invasion is about to start and the book is a chronicle of how the aliens couldn’t handle both humans in general and the range of environments and ended up being destroyed through the eyes of one of the aliens.
Like a caption from the book would be something like
“So we sent a recon team to this place called Russia, but all we’ve heard back thus far is about the temperatures, giant monsters with fur the humans call “Bears”, and that once again, we have been reminded of how heavily well armed almost ever human settlement is.
Thus far we have lost more than a good chunk of our forces through experiments gone wrong, unsuccessful fire fights, and above all else, the humans seem to be more worried about these strange variation of their species calling themselves “Clowns”.
I don’t know what a Clown is, but sounds as if it is the dominant faction of this planet, and considering we only just found out humans practically poison themselves with this thing called beer and only get stronger and more violent, I don’t ever want to encounter such a being.
I believe this invasion was a mistake.“
I’ve been reading a bunch of these and all I can think about now is aliens finding out about our insane ability to walk away from accidents.
“Human Colony SDO435**, this is Gxanimi survey vessel 3489. We regret that we must inform you that the wreckage of your ship ‘Gecko Flyer’ has just been detected on planet F56=K=. We offer expressions of sympathy for this catastrophe.”
“Shit, thanks for telling us, we’ll be right there.”
“Why?”
“To find our people, of course.”
“… you wish to retrieve the corpses for your traditional death rituals, of course, we understand. We have sent the coordinates.”
“What do you mean, bodies? No survivors at all? There must be some.”
“Official mouthpiece of Human Colony SDO435**, the ship has crashed. It has impacted the planet’s surface at speed. Moreover, this might have happened as much as five vek ago. We do not understand why you speak of ‘survivors’.”
“Oh, there’ll be survivors. There always are.”
“(closes hyperspace voicelink) How sad that they are unable to accept the reality of their loss.”
*
“Hey, Gxanimi survey vessel 3489, thanks for letting us know about the Gecko Flyer. More than half the crew made it!”
“Made what?”
“They survived! A couple of lost limbs and so on, but they’ll be fine.”
“… but that vessel was destroyed! Images have been examined!”
“Oh, well, everyone in the fore-below compartment was crushed, obviously, but the others made it out.”
“… but the crash was vek ago! Excuse we… at least eighty of your ‘days’! How could they survive without a ship? Without shelter and supplies?”
“Well, the wreckage gave them some shelter, and of course the emergency supplies kept them going until they could start growing stuff. It’s actually a nice little planet, they said. Quite a lot of edible flora and fauna. T-shirt weather, in summer, too.”
“What is… t-shirt weather?”
“Oh, you know, when it’s comfortable to go around with only modesty covering over the epidermis. Exposed limbs.”
“That planet is so cold that even water solidifies in its atmosphere!”
“Well, in winter, obviously. But we like that. Listen, our people have been raising crops down there, and that’s usually how we rule a planet as ‘colonized’…. is anyone else using it, or can we call it?”
“Er… we have claimed the warmer planets in the system, but we believe we could come to some arrangement.”
*
It was really nice, the humans thought, how carefully most of the aliens kept an eye out for downed ships after that, once they found out that humans tended to survive anything less than explosive decompression or… well, explosions generally. They’d immediately inform the nearest outpost of a wreck’s location, or even ship survivors back themselves. It was very thoughtful.
They didn’t find out until a long time later that the Gxanimi had put out the word to every species they were in contact with. It was vital that everyone knew the things they had learned about humans after that first encounter.
1. Humans can literally walk away from an impact that renders a space-worthy hull so much scrap and would have actually liquefied a Gxanimi.
2. Humans will eat just about anything not immediately fatal to them – including, in extremis, the corpses of their dead crewmates. In fact, most human vessels keep a list of those willing to be eaten and those whose socio-religious scruples forbid it. They have a ridiculously high tolerance for dangerous substances, and if they can breathe on a planet they can probably eat something on it too. They also have something they call the ‘Watney Protocol’, which requires them to carry live soil samples, seeds, and simple tools that will allow them to start farming their own native foodstuffs on any remotely habitable planet immediately in the event of an accident.
3. Once they’ve farmed a planet, they bond with it. They’ll be polite, but it’ll take significant effort to get rid of them even so.
Conclusion: If a human ship crashes on a planet you like and want to keep, get other humans to come and get them immediately. Remove them yourself if you have to. Even the worst crash can result in a thriving colony in a few vek.
And don’t, for the love of gravitational regularity, try to solve that problem by killing off the survivors. Just don’t. It won’t work and it just makes all the rest of them mad.
This got me thinking about disaster and emergency planning and design, and attitudes about experimental failures. We learn how to do something by doing it first and finding out all the ways things can go wrong through actual experience. We expect this of our kids–it’s considered normal to fall down a lot when learning to walk, ride a bike (or a horse), roller skate, etc. We enshrine it in maxims–”when at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”, “get back on the horse and ride it”, “you haven’t failed until you stop trying’. Consider what our technological history would look like to a species with less tolerance for risk/stubbornness/inability to discern the difference between “risky” and “almost certainly fatal”.
1. The first steam-powered locomotives had a tendency to explode–their boilers weren’t strong enough to hold the pressure and the safety valves and such weren’t invented until after the failures.
2. The ancient Egyptians worked out how to build pyramids by having a few collapse–and they changed the slope of one mid-construction to avoid another collapse. The pattern of “figure out how to build large structures by building larger and larger until one fails” has continued ever since.
3. The development of gliders and eventually powered airplanes involved a LOT of crashes and not a few deaths. The Wright brothers had their share of crashes, and they were persistent/crazy enough to fix or build their aircraft and heal up their injuries and then try again. Which is bizarre but could be excused by aliens as the behavior of mutant lunatics…but there were lots of other people doing the same crazy thing at around the same time. They did it using a plane made of wood and fabric with a primitive gasoline-fired engine at a time when horses were still the norm as motive power on the roads. The early engines couldn’t provide enough power to get a plane in the air unassisted, so they rigged up a weight and pulley system to throw a manned aircraft into the air. Members of a sane species would have sensibly concluded that materials science and engine design needed a few more decades of development to provide for safe heavier-than-air flight, and worked on developing zeppelins and blimps. Humanity said “we have bicycle chains, tree parts, engines that run on explosions, and plenty of crazy to go around–we’re good!”
4. Then we did the same thing to go to space. A normal intelligent species would not develop explosives, then think, “Hey, I wonder if I could strap myself into a tiny metal closet on top of a GIGANTIC tube of this explodey stuff and blast myself into orbit?” Nor would it assemble a roomful of engineers, give them pencils, paper, and slide rules, and announce, “We’re gonna send people to the moon!” The Apollo astronauts had to dump their flight computer’s memory and get the landing program via transmission from Earth because the computer’s memory couldn’t hold the entire flight program. We’ve continued to strap people into closets on top of big tubes of explosives despite a significant number of deaths. This is not the behavior of a sane species.
Then again, we evolved on the Death Planet. On Earth, if you give up, you die out. We are a predatory species. Predators tend to fail a lot when hunting–I don’t recall the exact numbers, but I do remember from the nature documentaries that cheetahs, lions, wolves, etc., all lose their prey fairly often and have to try again or starve. Hunting isn’t exactly a safe activity either, at least not when you’re doing it without ranged weapons. As a wild predator, you have to risk major injury or death to eat. So maybe that’s where we get the “pass the wood glue and the ibuprofen, would you?” attitude.
Another thought–Humans might be galaxy’s Skunkworks of Safety Design, not because we’re naturally cautious but because we insist on doing life-threatening things beyond those necessary to just survive on our Death Planet.
Consider internal-combustion engines. We get around in vehicles powered by mostly-controlled explosions–we’re only just figuring out how to use processes other than explosions happening within a few feet of the passengers to make our vehicles go. We drive these explosionmobiles at speeds that guarantee serious injuries or death if we make a mistake and collide with another large solid object. We expect a certain number of such collisions–a very large number, to alien sensory systems and sensibilities–and design in things like “crumple zones”, “safety glass”, “seat belts”, “air bags”, various braking systems, and whatever else comes to our bizarre, fertile Space Orc minds, all the while ignoring the obvious solution of not driving our explosionmobiles so fast in the first place.
Humans, faced with the problem of an airplane damaged in flight, did not focus on ways to identify the bodies and determine why the aircraft crashed. Instead we designed…yet another system powered by explosions. Explosions and parachutes plus the space orc toughness and recuperation powers make it possible for a human to survive an aircraft failure and go on to live what is for a human a normal life. Humanity has taken this as a sign that it’s entirely reasonable to build manned aircraft that break the sound barrier.
Since we tend to try to do a thing before we really have the technology to make it remotely safe to do, we expect things to go wrong. Because we’re space orcs, we expect to be able to make it possible to survive those mishaps. Our cars break down, and it’s a nuisance but not especially surprising–cars just do that. We’ve developed a whole networked industry of towing companies, parts manufacturers, repair shops, new and used car dealerships, wrecker yards–because we’re not especially fazed by failure. Our current spacecraft have lots of failsafes, backups, spare parts, emergency evacuation systems, etc., because we’re not really technologically there yet when it comes to safe spaceflight. If we ever get around to going insterstellar, our vessels will no doubt have crumple zones, escape pods loaded with survival gear and convertible to colony transports once on-planet, emergency beacons capable of deafening most of a sector, and helpful manuals to help us figure out how to survive and extricate ourselves from whatever trouble our overeager blundering with primitive technology has gotten us into this time.
We could be very helpful consulting lunatics for ship designers.
Human: Hey, what happens if your warp bubble collapses and you drop into realspace inside planetary core?
Alien: The odds of that occurring are extremely remote.
Human: Yeah, but weird stuff happens, especially when the traffic around Hargos II gets heavy, so–what would happen?
Alien: …funerary rites, I suppose.
Human: What? No, hey, we can work this out! There’s all that energy there, there’s gotta be a way to use it instead of letting it blow up the ship!
Alien: …what is it with your kind and explosions?
Human: We like making big things happen. How cool would it be if you could set it up so you could surf on a solar flare?
Alien: …You’re actually thinking of trying it, aren’t you?
Human: Well, I’m at least going to run some tests and see if I could catch a ride. What are you doing after lunch?
Consider fuel–we humans are pretty cavalier about our food supply over the
long haul. We have famines because of distribution problems, soil damage/loss,
and crop failures, but the idea that there will come a time when we won’t be
able to find or produce any food at all doesn’t cross our
minds…because we live on renewable resources. We do not need advanced
machinery to find/raise fuel for ourselves. A farming community parked on
reasonably fertile land with some fairly simple tools (”fairly simple” meaning
“possible to make without using electricity, gasoline engines, or synthetic
chemicals”) and a few wagonloads of seeds can sustain itself indefinitely in
the same spot–and even produce enough extra to feed other communities,
depending on soil fertility and farming techniques. (Some draft animals make
the potential surplus MUCH higher.) One handful of seed can, if handled
properly, eventually produce quite a bit more than another handful of seed–crop
plants are astonishingly prolific.
It just occurred to me that sometime after first contact, as humanity learned just how weird we are among intelligent species, someone would start printing T-shirts with pictures of all the weird stuff humans do–bond to everything, throw things, eat capsaicin, make things that shouldn’t work work, breathe oxygen, live in places no alien would dream of even visiting, pursuit predation/endurance running, artificial limbs, body art, extreme sports, (whatever I’m forgetting)–with the words, “It’s a human thing. You wouldn’t understand.”
I guarantee that it would be super popular with humans
We revel in the things that make us different, which is weird for a hyper social species like us. Those shirts would sell better than any other design ever
We like being different in groups,
really. We’re gregarious to a fault–even our introverts eventually want to at least see another of our own kind. (It just takes longer for us to get lonely.) What might confuse/bemuse aliens is that humans aren’t content to belong to
just one or two groups. We identify ourselves (or are identified by others) as
members of all manners of group. We’re members of immediate and extended
families. We identify as members of an occupational group. We’re fans of _____.
We belong to this culture, that religion, this social class. Race, gender,
introvert/extrovert, allergies and medical conditions, life experiences good
and bad, hobbies, parent/grandparent status, generation, political affiliation,
food preferences, hometown–all that stuff large and small, trivial and
not-so-trivial, we easily pile one group membership on top of another and
another and another, without confusion.
What if the Humans in Space are most known for being suckers. Like, if you have some junk but don’t know how to get rid of it, just find a human to sell it to. Some humans may refuse to buy it, but you’ll find a human willing to buy it before you find anyone else who will.
And yeah, aliens get a bit of a bad rep among humans for that. Like, “Why in the world are they always trying to sell me junk?!?! I came out here to find exotic commodities, and this is what I get?! Screw space, I’m going home.”
But the clever humans encourage this reputation, and manage to get a lot of junk for really cheap prices because at least then the seller will get something out of the deal. And then the clever humans take the junk and reduce, reuse, and recycle the dickens out of it.
Aliens begin to take notice of how these humans seem happy buying junk and yet always find a way to use it, and the aliens find this to be quite puzzling.
“Why do you not buy new parts, Fred? Surely you can afford to do so by now.”
“Well, sure I can, John – is it okay if I nickname you John? – but then where would all this junk go? I’d rather make it usable than clutter up the galaxy. Have you never heard of pollution? Better to Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle junk than have it clogging up your home environment. Humans have been doing it for generations back on Earth.”
*Blank stare*
“Besides, why spend money when I don’t have to?”
And humans begin to be known as resourceful penny-pinchers as well.
Humans don’t always reuse things for the purposes for which they were designed, either. Aside from art installations (”Friend Reggie, why is there half an escape pod with a–is that a bird…?” “I think it’s supposed to be some kind of alien chicken thing hatching out of the pod. Don’t ask me about the daisies and polka dots. All I can tell you is what my dad told me–if it’s large, ugly, in a public place and you don’t understand it, it’s probably art.”), humans have that MacGyver crazy-genius for making whatever they have do suit whatever purpose there may be. We applaud and admire those who come up with particularly creative ways to use old things. We’ll make jewelry and hair ornaments out of pretty much anything that isn’t toxic to the touch. Musical instruments out of anything that can be coaxed into making a sound that doesn’t cause permanent hearing damage in under five seconds. Toys out of anything we’re pretty sure won’t hurt the kids. (”You use transportation parts to entertain your young?” “Sure, my kids love the tire swing!”) Costumes out of anything we can lift. (”What is that supposed to be?” “I’m a space station traffic transceiver with a pigeon problem! I made the pigeons’ steampunk gear out of a couple old type-translator machines I got on Elria-2. Cool, huh?”)
just moving along like everyone else 