Humans are feared in the intergalactic community. A research vessel from a space faring species crashes at Disney World in Florida.
Tag: humans are weird
Space Australia
you know that post that goes around talking about how alien life would be afraid of earth and its crazy oxygen breathing lifeforms?
I need to write a one-shot about Hal Jordan explaining to a young Superman that earth is actually an extremely gross hella toxic hell world for alot of other alien life forms out there. Sure,alien invasions are happening all the time, but no one wants this pathogenic shit hole. Nah.
“Okay,” Supes would say, “but if we’re such a lousy planet, why do we have like two Green Lanterns? How come so many threats end up out here?”
And Hal gets all cagey like “Look, man, don’t be mad but 99% of the reason bad dudes come to this planet is because its like space Australia. Lanterns think it’s funny to like… trick bad guys into coming out here so they either get wiped out by some mutated super virus or a tropical storm or something.”
Supes just like, “Lobo doesn’t seem like he’d be bothered by a storm.”
“Right, well, if the storms don’t get them, then the statistically improbable Kryptonian roided out on yellow sunlight certainly will…”
“Do not send dangerous criminals to Earth to fight me! And I am not ‘roided out’. Is that what you’re telling people?!”
“They never see it coming. It’s like intergalactic Thunder Dome.”
“Hal!”
Thought about “Humans are space orcs/space fae”. There was a line talking about how theres a human working on a ship but no-ones entirely sure if they’re meant to be there, but they didn’t want to like offend the terrifying space orc.
What if the “drifter” archetype continues into space? Like maybe we negotiated for free travel with one of our allies, but because humans come from a death world and are terrfiying, and because humans can be oblivious, we just assume we can board on any ship going anywhere, nbd?
like not as stowaways. we’re not hiding. Like those wolves and wild dogs in russia that use the railways. Are YOU going to tell a wolf they shouldn’t be riding the train?!? Thought not.
Captain Diii did not become aware of the… problem until her ship was a full half-cycle out from the resupply station. She was halfway through a standard sweep of the ship, to be sure it was all in good order, when she came across a sort of cocoon constructed of light, sturdy fabric strung up in the end of service corridor alpha. It was not blocking access to anything of even minor importance, it simply was not meant to be there. It had no use she could discern, but it had no place aboard Captain Diii’s ship.
“What is the purpose of this?” Captain Diii asked the young technician assigned to the sector.
Their mood-spots cycled to anxiety-orange as their feet shuffled in discomfort. “The human called it her ‘hammock’ and said it would be out of the way there?”
A human. On Captain Diii’s ship. Her spots flashed from fear to anger to consternation and settled on worry. This had never before happened to her. She’d only been captain for two annuals, and she operated so far from any of the major travel hubs she had hoped she would not have to deal with this.
The problem had started after the war. The terrifying human ‘marines’ had been key to repelling the Kkoin invaders, with their wild recklessness and near-indestructibility. They had put an end to the war very quickly, and the terms of alliance in exchange for this service had been seen as extremely generous. They asked for transportation, mainly, since human FTL drives still lagged behind galactic standard. It had been assumed that by this they meant transporting goods and perhaps colonists by arrangement, but the wording had been ambiguous in translation.
That did happen, but in addition humans would simply… step onto ships going where they wanted to go. And stay. Who would dare contradict a human? Any one of them could turn deadly at a moment’s notice. Their hardiness and ferocity was legend. As of yet, no way of repelling them had been 100% effective. Their comfort range was massive, so keeping a ship hot or cold did not help. Scents designed to be maximally unpleasant to the human sensory array dissuaded some, but others would simply laugh and joke about them as they boarded anyway. It seemed they could acclimate to even the most noxious of scents within a few cycles.
Some humans would uproot their entire families and head for another planet, seemingly on a whim. Other humans would then go visit these families, and go back home, or not. Some humans traveled from planet to planet and station to station to satisfy their near-endless curiosity. Some traveled because to travel and see new things gave them pleasure, and then returned to their homes seemingly refreshed.
Such a strange species.
Captain Diii had been certain she had assigned someone to guard the ship and tell any hopeful humans that there was no space for them if they tried to board. Captain Diii did not have any facilities for humans aboard her ship. She hurried to the nearest communication pod and signaled for her second in command, Taa, to join her.
Taa already had anxiety flashing on her mood spots when she arrived.
“Taa, were you not assigned to inform humans that there was no space?” Captain Diii asked.
“I did, Captain!” Taa protested. “But she answered that she did not need much and walked right past me! What could I do?”
“And where is she now?” Diii asked.
“The kitchens. She… she said she wanted to be added to the duty roster, and that she enjoyed food preparation?”
That was another thing about the humans. They almost all wanted to work on the ships they boarded. Often they threw duty schedules into disarray by simply volunteering themselves to do tasks. At least this one seemed to know to ask the officer in charge of duties.
Diii found the human in the kitchens, as expected. She was very tall and thin for her type, of the morph ‘all bones’, if Diii was remembering the mandatory human-culture lessons that had been recently been added to ships-captain certification classes. She seemed to lack the jiggling bits that were so disconcerting on some humans. She did not reek of artificial fragrances as some humans did, instead scented pleasantly of human natural musk. Her head-covering stands, ‘hair’, was a friendly violet. Diii was certain this was not a natural coloration for the species. Her loose cloth coverings were earthy browns and creams, reminiscent of a child’s camouflage.
The human turned to look at Captain Diii, and showed her white-bone teeth in the body language ‘smile’, a gesture of friendliness and pleasure. Now that she was turned, Diii could see that half of the human’s head was shaved, and an array of electronics were installed directly in her skull. It was testament to their extraordinary healing powers that augmenting themselves with inorganic parts was commonplace in human culture. The humans had the technology to make their implants invisible, but some chose to make them visible because it looked ‘bad posterior’, which was somehow a good thing and aesthetically pleasing to them?
The human’s implants lit up, showing the exact blue of happiness, as she straightened up to give the human ‘salute’–a greeting to a superior. “Captain Diii? It’s good to meet you. I’m Elizabeth, but you can call me Zizi.”
Captain Diii could not help but be somewhat charmed. She must have the latest language-translation chip, Zizi’s speech was near perfect, and that she had something that functioned nearly like mood-spots was comforting. Her chosen name, as well, was easy to pronounce and nonthreateningly low-status.
“A greeting, Zizi,” Captain Diii answered carefully. “May I inquire your purpose aboard my ship?”
“Oh, I’m just a drifter,” Zizi said. “I just love traveling, you know? I heard the moons of Sigma7 were gorgeous, so I’m working my way that-a-ways.” Zizi’s pseudo-mood spot lights switched to anticipation before cycling back to happiness. “I’ll be off your ship at the next supply depot, if I can find someone heading more that direction.”
Ah, the ‘drifter’ type. Captain Diii had heard of them. ‘ship-hoppers’. An entire sub-class of humans who wandered the galaxy simply because they did not want to do anything else. They were famously the most difficult to dissuade from boarding a ship, and most likely to board from strange ports and going strange directions. Clearly it was not Taa’s fault she had been unable to keep Zizi out, and Diii signaled brief apology toward her.
“I won’t be any trouble,” Zizi continued. “I can set my hammock up anywhere to sleep, if it’s in your way?”
“The location you have chosen is… acceptable,” Captain Diii allowed. Zizi’s hair’s constant show of friendly had her own spots heading toward that color in automatic prosocial response. It was somewhat disconcerting. “I will leave you to your work,” Captain Diii said, retreating, and Zizi smiled and threw another quick salute before turning back to the food on the stove. Her implants showed concentration and curiosity, and then Captain Diii was outside the room with her again.
She turned toward Taa, who was still concerned. “I have heard that ships with a human listed on their crew roster have a 30% lower chance of being targeted by pirates?” Taa volunteered.
“Yes, yes,” Captain Diii mused. The risk was very low to begin with, especially for a ship like hers that did not haul valuable cargo, but anything that lowered it further could not be all bad. “It is not your fault in any case, Taa. Nothing could have prevented this human from boarding.”
Taa relaxed some, and Captain Diii returned to her inspection of the ship. Then she went to the helm and transmitted her updated crew roster to the main control base, encrypted only very lightly.
It certainly would not be bad to be known to have a human aboard.
Using ‘survival of the fittest’ to justify being selfish is so off the mark. The only reason we humans have survived as long as we have is because we work together better than any other species on the planet.
a dumb question, maybe, but: what’s one of your favorite parts about studying classics?
probably the constant reminders that throughout time and regardless of time, place, language, religion, ideology, system of governance or dominant school of thought, people remain fundamentally people
like i know that sounds really glib but it’s like – when i was doing this after alexander course last year, right, we looked at this thing called the zenon papyri, a huge stash of administrative documents from greek-ruled egypt addressed to an official called zenon, which was preserved because the winds changed and the building they were kept in was buried under a massive sand dune. and there’s one which we called the krotos papyri, which is a letter from a native egyptian writing to zenon telling him how he had been mistreated by greeks, who laugh at him because he doesn’t know how to “act like a greek” and call him a barbarian and refuse to pay him his proper wages. which is very familiar. and when you look at the actual papyrus fragment, the writing at the top is big and clear and spaced-out, but as it gets towards the bottom of the page it gets smaller and more cramped and the lines are all squint, because this nameless egyptian guy who does something with camels in the 250s BC hadn’t worked out how long his letter was going to be and he’s realised halfway through that he’s going to run out of space
and in first year i went on this trip to hadrian’s wall, and it started snowing while we were standing on it and the wind was blowing a gale right into our faces, and afterwards we heard a lecture about the vindolanda tablets, and there’s one, tablet 346, a letter to a soldier stationed there – and the soldiers stationed there could come from anywhere in the empire, rome or egypt or north africa, hot places, basically, and the wall is fucking cold – which is maybe from his wife or mother or sister, which reads as follows:
“… I have sent (?) you … pairs of socks from Sattua, two pairs of sandals and two pairs of underpants, two pairs of sandals … Greet …ndes, Elpis, Iu…, …enus, Tetricus and all your messmates with whom I pray that you live in the greatest good fortune.“
and that’s not some kind of “people don’t change” idea. people do change, have changed. you read the stuff these civilisations produced and some of it is so, so alien to us, so hard to understand, so strange. but then in amongst it you find things like people running out of space on their last bit of paper, or sending their son more socks because he’s got a job somewhere cold. and we remember it, these weird small human things, by total random chance! no-one sat down and thought ‘let’s keep this’ – the wind changes and an entire archive of papyri is preserved under a sand dune for 2000 years. the excavators who found the vindolanda tablets thought they were wood shavings. there’s a pot of roman face cream in the museum of london which still has fingerprints in the cream, which was found hidden in a ditch outside a temple. and in the meantime, we have no firsthand accounts of the campaigns of alexander, one of the most influential series of events in western history, because… we just don’t. they existed, but they’re lost. for some reason, somehow, presumably though some kind of enormous cosmic joke, we have a fragmentary letter from an anonymous person sent to an anonymous soldier telling him his pants are in the post and to say hello to his friends, but we don’t have callisthene’s deeds of alexander or ptolemy’s memoirs. isn’t that infuriating? isn’t that great?
i thin k i could be bros with an alien. the alien would keep pointing at things and going “this is so fucking weird” and i could just be like, yeah, i know buddy, i feel you
Tag yourself!
Okay so there’s always the argument about whether or not aliens exist and recently I’ve been contemplating existence so I was thinking about what would happen if we suddenly discovered aliens but then something occurred to me
What if aliens don’t exist? Like, in the millions of planets and systems we don’t find any other life. Nothing. We find out that we are the only living thing in this giant and never-ending galaxy
We are the only thing alive.
This one small planet.
We find out that we are all alone.
not to make one of those ‘uwu imagine disabled mermaids’ kind of posts, but pls consider a Humans Are Baffling Space Orcs scenario where autistic people are highly sought after because they can actually EXPLAIN what the other humans are up to in ways that aren’t an opaque, frustrating ‘that’s normal for us!’ they’re used to studying and codifying the abstruse and irrational nuances of human social systems in order to reproduce those behaviors effectively, and there’s a lot more of them than the much more expensive professionally educated humanthropologists.
captain: human liaison phil, when humans attempt to distress one another intentionally with coded gestures and remarks, is that actually important? should we be doing that?
phil: it’s just social status bullshit. don’t indulge it.
captain: gotcha. human brent said it was vital to his mental health to be allowed to ‘joke around’ in such a matter with his subordinates. he seemed serious.
phil: human brent is a dick.
captain: ….ah.
we do it on earth, i see no reason we wouldn’t continue to do it in space 😀
All life on Earth uses oxygen, iron, and phosphorous – very reactive elements by galactic standards. It turns out we are the “acid blooded aliens” from the standpoint of another intelligent life form. Write about this from an aliens perspective.
just moving along like everyone else 