It seems to always be the case that aliens have names that are “unpronounceable by the human tongue.” But, y’know, humans are actually really good mimics. We can do impressions of anything, and some of us are really good at it. What if that was a special skill of ours that was constantly surprising the aliens?
Alien talks about human like s/he’s not there, only to be shocked when its own language comes out of that strange little mouth.
Alien can’t figure out WHAT that noise onboard is, only to find human crewmate pranking it. (“As soon as he leaves, I’m gonna do the sound of a failing hover engine, okay? Just see where he looks first!”)
Alien hears a different noise and a thud, then “Sorry, I tripped.” (”But you squeaked.” “Yeah, didn’t mean to. Sounded kinda dumb.”)
Alien is alarmed to hear the sound of two Dangerous Animals coming from the containment room. Thinks the one has multiplied. Runs in, find human yowling back at it. (“It seemed lonely, so I was talking to it. Reminds me of a cat I had once.”)
The away team is threatened by a Large Animal protecting its young. Alien Captain knows what to do. Shoves the human up front and points. “Make the noises that the little ones are making. This is your time to shine.”
this is fucking brilliant I am so down for this
Yes Good now add Parrots and Corvids :> It’s the Mimic Apes from Mimic World with their teachable Mimic Birds :> :>
Tag: humans are weird
Space Australian Medicine
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 so much.
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 meta so much!
The other half to Space Australia, in my mind, is that it’s an exercise in looking at us – our culture, our environment, our habits, our very selves- and saying “hah, that’s so weird!”
And that’s not just an exercise in mockery or self-parody. That’s putting ourselves in incredibly different shoes, considering ourselves and the universe at large from the perspective of someone not at all like us. That’s empathy, which is kinda important.
We are weird, when you get down to it. Phage medicine is a thing that exists, and has since before we even knew about DNA or what a virus even was. Experimenting on ourselves is basically a tradition, and much to Ma-et’s dismay, we have celebrations in which we blow things up for the sake of blowing things up.
And being able to acknowledge that – to see what we’re about and why we’re weird, is so very important. The western white hegemonic culture I exist inside is so very hard to see sometimes, it’s so very easy to normalize it as “that’s just the way it is”, and it’s not. It is a culture, with all the trappings of every other culture out there.
This is what the anthropological side of Space Australia is about. Who are we? What do we look like to outsiders? Why do we do things the way we do? What should we maybe be thinking about fixing?
Science Fiction creates the future. Verne dreamed of going to the moon, Star Trek predicted flip phones and 3-D printers and tablet computers and arguably the cloud, Google happily borrowed the idea for Earth from Neal Stephenson. Our dreams of tomorrow shape tomorrow, in incredible and unknowable ways.
I dunno, I love that by telling these stories, we’re working to make humanity the sort of species that looks beyond its differences. I love that by telling these stories, we’re working to make humanity the sort of species that would look at a galaxy in pain and say “we are going to fix this.”
And, of course, we will totally see a galaxy full of fluffy puppies and we’re going to pet all of them.
absolutely. sci-fi doesn’t just predict technology, it predicts culture.
okay, so, I love all the posts that run off the assumption that humans are the most ridiculous sapient species in the galaxy
but what if it’s just the other way around
what if humans are notoriously straitlaced and obsessed with protocol. the bureaucrats of the stars.
which is obviously something we would constantly try to complain about and disprove only for some Alpha Centaurian to be like “Captain, your species formalized spirituality, repeatedly, and a recurring theme therein is that the heavens themselves are run as a bureaucracy. Even your rebellions and revolutions are meticulously planned.”
it’s not a bad thing, per se, to have a human on your team — analytical minds, good diplomats (if only because one human etiquette system can be more complex and even contradictory than the vastly varied customs of an entire species) — but be prepared for them to call attention to moral quandaries and loopholes that never would have occurred to you.
and speaking of loopholes, do be careful, because the only thing worse than a human armed with an ironclad system of rules is a human who’s found a gaping hole in them.
“You’re telling me there was a mass movement to name a boat something dumb as a joke?”
“First of all, it wasn’t a mass movement, and second of all, the boat was by no means the first time nor the last.”
“…Exactly how much of Earth comedy is based on incongruous branding?”
Hear me out here: Humans as both.
Like most sapient species assume the above; humans are straitlaced, meticulous, and methodical. They follow strict rules which dictate their social interactions and even a slight variation is considered taboo. They are the quintessential bureaucrats.
Except when they’re not.
We’ve talked about humans method of scientific exploration and advancement involving a ridiculous amount of danger for all parties involved. But, ya know, we write it all down in a very orderly manner and get published and peer reviewed. And then other humans copy the incredibly dangerous experiment to see what happens for themselves.
Humans survived the volatile early years of their species rise through community-bonding. They put the needs of a group of individuals over all else; hunting as a group, eating as a group, raising families as a group, and sometimes dying as a group. This tendency to form strong bonds means that while a human’s signed contract can always be trusted. It also means that a human cannot be trusted to not rip that contract up and say “Fuck it” if an individual with whom they have a community-bond is in danger. Other species are baffled to discover that the individual in question need not be human, or even sapient. Stories of humans who have defended what would normally be considered prey animals by other omnivorous species, of humans who have killed to defend their non-human crew mates, even one story (surely just a story, it can’t be true) of an entire crew of humans who elevated a simple non-sapient cleaning bot to officer’s rank and threatened rebellion if it was decommissioned.
So, sure, humans are logical and awfully organized for such a diverse species. They make phenomenal bureaucrats and politicians. They’re highly sought after as strategists and advisors to royalty the galaxy over.
But, they’re also appear to take great pleasure in looking the rules dead in the eyes and very deliberately thumbing their nose as those rules. Because, the rules (and logic) say you probably shouldn’t jump off a cliff into unknown waters and humans have made multiple sports based entirely off that concept.
as an individual: logical, organized
as a species: hold my beer
I love that Stabby the robot has become part of the Canon of “human interaction with aliens”.
Inspired by various tumblr posts.
Humans quickly get a reputation among the interplanetry alliance and the reputation is this: when going somewhere dangerous, take a human.
Humans are tough. Humans can last days without food. Humans heal so fast they pierce holes in themselves or inject ink for fun. Humans will walk for days on broken bones in order to make it to safety. Humans will literally cut off bits of themselves if trapped by a disaster.
You would be amazed what humans will do to survive. Or to ensure the survival of others they feel responsible for.
That’s the other thing. Humans pack-bond, and they spill their pack-bonding instincts everywhere. Sure it’s weird when they talk sympathetically to broken spaceships or try to pet every lifeform that scans as non-toxic. It’s even a little weird that just existing in the same place as them for long enough seems to make them care about you. But if you’re hurt, if you’re trapped, if you need someone to fetch help?
You really want a human.
Humans also get a reputation for being pants-shittingly insane:
Humans want to go everywhere, you see that black hole? They’re trying to go in that to ‘explore’
Humans jump out of flying vehicles at heights that would most certainly kill them with only a piece of cloth strapped to them to save them, they do this for FUN
Conversely humans, a species that cannot survive without air, plunge themselves into the depths of their planet’s horrifying oceans until their bodies can’t take the pressure then they created vehicles to go further
Humanity didn’t wait to develop a sensible propulsion system to escape their planet’s atmosphere they strapped a metal tube to bombs and shot themselves out into the vacuum of space
If a human says something will ‘be fun’ assume that it’s probably life threatening
Every version of this post is amazing.
Humans quickly become known as the “house cat race” of the universe. They’re comparatively small against the other races, they’re fuzzy, and they’re bizarre as shit (see above), but they also are staunchly loyal companions, once you earn it.
Part of the pack bond instinct is that they also claim EVERYTHING as “theirs”, simply because they live somewhere or like something. The deep space freighter they’ve been on for the last month? Theirs. The yellow cup with a ding on the side that has been on the ship longer than they have? Also theirs. The standard issue blanket that looks like every other blanket in the universe? Theirs. Ship captain? Theirs. And they’re territorial little shits. They’ve been known to fight over somebody taking a pen by mistake because that is The Human’s Pen.
It’s this combination of strangeness and territorialness that makes them so valuable in a jam. Attackers on board a ship or broken through a colony wall? Humans will go balls out crazy to repel any invader because this is THEIR home and THEIR things and THEIR people and you don’t belong.
Most confusing of all are the ‘introverts’.
This subtype of human looks identical to any other, but does not overtly show their bonding. Do. Not. Take this for a lack of bonding. They will be just as violent towards any threat that endangers you or your ship and it will seem all the more intense due to the complete and utter change in temperament.No, this is not just them defending the ship; This One has heard a human claim shipmates that they have literally done nothing more than greet in the hallways as ‘friend’ and tear apart an invader that has assaulted said crewmate. This One does not exaggerate when it says ‘tear apart’ as the Grrthnk that raised the human’s ire was missing several limbs and the vital fluids of both were sprayed across the combat zone by the end of the fight.
“Who’s the one beating the vxihgh with a stapler?”
“Mauren. Without her, we’d have never stopped the intruders on time.”
“I thought Mauren was the quieter one! Are you sure the same human that suggested our literary-recording-sharing clan is telling a vxihgh in xir prime to, ‘F*cking try it again, you oversized cabbage’? Some species can assume another’s appearance, you know.”
“I am sure. I’ve been here since the fight started. She was working at a table next to Targhd and the others when they were attacked. One of the intruders knocked Targhd out from behind. Xe was the first to go.”
“And the stapler?”
“It is a much more effective weapon than previously assumed.”
Just once in a movie when the villain starts ranting about evolution through “survival of the fittest” I want someone who actually knows something about biology to call them on it.
“You know what? No. Just. Fucking. No. We are the top species on the planet for a reason and if it was strength then you wouldn’t be a furless lil squish with useless claws and teeth that can barely handle steak. For someone who can’t seem to shut up about how you alone know the great destiny of mankind you don’t know jackshit about how we got here. We cooperated, jackass. We evolved as together and we’re still evolving together. We worked together and supported each other, even the elderly and disabled who you’d deem meaningless. If anyone’s to blame for stagnating our evolution, it’s the people who disproportionately share resources and hold back the majority of our population over largely arbitrary differences…..you know, like you’re doing right now. You aren’t the next stage. You’re barely even the current stage. You’re a genetic throwback trying to drag us all with you and that light you’re guiding us towards is just the view out your mouth from how far you shoved your head up your own ass. Nature doesn’t give a crap about your ideals, just who survives. And we survive together.”
So one of my favorite themes on this site is the “Humans Are Weird To Aliens” thing. Most people realize that we could be considered unusually friendly or unusually tough to an extraterrestrial species.
Yet people don’t realize just how alien we might really be to them.
There are moons in our own solar system that will never see liquid water in normal circumstances. To aliens that evolved in this frigid climate of liquid methane oceans, we’d be exotic lifeforms that melt mountains down for a drink hailing from an infernal planet that would boil away they methane-soluble bodies within seconds of arrival.
Imagine an interaction with a creature that considers steel impossible simply because steel’s melting point would kill everyone that tried to reach that temperature.
Life in other planets could be so alien, that we’d never recognize it as life.
It occurs to me that as much as “humans are the scary ones” fits sometimes, if you look at it another way, humans might seem like the absurdly friendly or curious ones.
I mean, who looked at an elephant, gigantic creature thoroughly capable of killing someone if it has to, and thought “I’m gonna ride on that thing!”?
And put a human near any canine predator and there’s a strong chance of said human yelling “PUPPY!” and initiating playful interaction with it.
And what about the people who look at whales, bigger than basically everything else, and decide “I’m gonna swim with our splashy danger friends!”
Heck, for all we know, humans might run into the scariest, toughest aliens out there and say “Heck with it. I’m gonna hug ‘em.”
“Why?!”
“I dunno. I gotta hug ‘em.”
And it’s like the first friendly interaction the species has had in forever so suddenly humanity has a bunch of big scary friends.
“Commander, we must update the code of conduct to include the humans.”
“Why? Are they more aggressive than we anticipated?”
“It seems to be the opposite Commander. Just this morning a crewman nearly lost their hand when attempting to stroke an unidentified feline on an unknown world. Their reaction to the attack was to call the creature a “mean kitty” and vow to win it over. Upon inquiry it seems they bond so readily with creatures outside their species that they have the capacity to feel sympathy for an alien creature they have never seen before simply because it appears distressed. I hate to say this commander but we must install a rule to prevent them from endangering their own lives when interacting with the galaxy’s fauna.”
“I see what you mean. So be it, from now on no crewman is allowed to touch unknown animals without permission from a superior officer. And send a message to supplies about acquiring one of these “puppies” so that their desire to touch furred predators can be safely sated.
Ehehehe I love this! Every time someone adds a short story to my post it gets like 90% cuter and more epic
Lets be honest, the humans would ignore the hell outta that rule whenever alone.
“So I hear that you’ve just recruited a human for your ship.”
“Yes, it’s the first time that I’ve worked with these species,
but they come highly recommended. Say, you’ve worked with a few, what tips can
you give me? I’d hate to have some kind of cultural misunderstanding if it’s
avoidable.”“The
first rule of working with humans is never leave them unsupervised.”“Wait, what?”
“I’m serious. Don’t do it. Things. Happen.”
“But wait, I thought that I heard you highly recommended that
every crew should have at least one on board?”“Absolutely, and I stand by that. Humans are excellent
innovators, and are psychologically very resilient. If you have a crisis, then
a human that has bonded wth your crew properly can be invaluable. Treat your
human well and you should get the best out of them as a crew member. Their
ability to get on with almost any species is legendary.”“But Toks, didn’t you just say…”
“The
trouble is that they will potentially try to bond with anything. If you leave them
unsupervised, you have no idea what kind of trouble they can get themselves into. It was
sheer luck that the Fanzorians thought that it was funny that the human picked
up the Crown Prince to coo at him.”“Crown Prince Horram, Scourge of Pixia?”
“The
very same. Surprisingly good sense of humour. But don’t even get me started on
that one time with the Dunlip. Al-Human wanted to know if they could keep it.
As a pet.”“A Dunlip? You
mean the 3 metre tall apex predators from Jowun?”“Yup. Don’t
leave your humans unsupervised.”“I’ll uh, take that under advisement.”
“Seriously. Get a supply of safe animals for the humans to bond with or they will make their own. I mean, they will try to befriend anything they come across anyway, but without any permanent pets they can get… creative. Don’t even get me started on the time one of them taped a knife to one of our auto-cleaners and named it Stabby.
Three weeks in and when we finally caught the wretched thing, half the humans on crew tried to revolt about us “killing” Stabby by removing the knife.
“How… how did you resolve that sir?”
“Glaxcol made a toy knife out of insulation rubber and strapped that on instead. Quite a creative solution, I suppose.”
“And that sated the humans?
“Worse.”
“Worse?”
“They thought it was so funny they made a second one, strapped false eyes on springs to both and held mock battles. Then decided Stabby and Knifey were in love and now none of them will allow the others to stage fights between them any more.”
Stabby is an omniversal constant.
Oh my gods, we’re the Steve Irwins of the universe.
this is my fave thing.
it can’t even be safe to assume humans would only attach themselves to only fuzzy, furry things.
reptilian and even insectoid creatures are just as likely to be randomly selected as “this is a thing i love” by a human.“Excuse me, captain? Human-Rob requests that we … bring aboard … a Kilarn.”
“A Kilarn? The giant poisonous and highly aggressive insectoid predator? Am I hearing you correctly?”
“…. Yes ser.”
“For the love of- WHY?”
“I asked the same thing, to which they replied “he’s trying his best” in a distressed tone of voice.“
*captain sighs and holds head in hands*
“WHAT’S GOING ON THIS TIME?!” The ship’s captain screamed over the shrill security breach alarm.
“HUMAN-ELLIOT AND HUMAN-JAIME MANAGED TO SMUGGLE A BORAKASH ONTO THE SHIP, SIR.” The first lieutenant shouted in response, her face turning a sickly shade of yellow that conveyed her fear and panic.
“HOW DID THEY MANAGE THAT??? BORAKASH ARE SIX METERS LONG, WEIGH A LITERAL TONNE, AND THE TOXINS THAT COAT THEIR REPTILIAN SCALES WILL KILL MOST LIFE FORMS ON CONTACT!!! THEY ARE THE MOST DEADLY SNAKES IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE!!!!!” The captain screeched. He, too, was turning yellow.
“ACCORDING TO PRIVATE MILAK, THEY WERE WEARING THEIR FULL BODY SUITS, SO THEY AVOIDED CONTACT WITH THE TOXINS. APPARENTLY THEY FOUND IT ASLEEP, ROLLED IT ONTO BOTH OF THEIR HOVERBIKES, AND FLOATED IT INTO THE CARGO BAY USING THEIR ID LANYARDS AS A LEASH.”
“WHY WOULD THEY DO THAT WITHOUT PERMISSION FROM THEIR SUPERVISOR?!?!?”
“THEY SAID IT WAS, AND I QUOTE, ‘SHAPED LIKE A FRIEND!’, SIR”
Space Australian Medicine
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 so much.
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.
Soo,, Humans are Weird,,
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.))
Humans Are Weird
insane-male-alphabeticalsymbol:
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?
just moving along like everyone else 