It’s early in the morning and nobody will probably read this but I just had the greatest ‘humans are space orcs’ idea
Imagine if humans are the only species that experiences impatience.
Think about it. Most prey animals are extremely patient. Ever meet a deer or a rabbit in the woods and hold still to try and out-wait the thing? I can guarantee your brain starts sending bored bored bored messages very quickly, and your instincts start telling you to give up and find something else to do. Humans can do the patience thing- as evidenced by our endurance hunting methods- but our instincts tell us not to. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this feels like a predator development. I have the idea that if aliens are mostly prey-based, and we’re predator-based, then the aliens will be very patient and we just aren’t.
As an evolutionary development, being impatient can be brilliant. It means that we didn’t sit around and wait for the ice caps to warm up, we knew we didn’t have the technology to survive that level of cold, but we did it anyways. We were trying to send people into the sky and then into space before we had fully figured it all out, simply because we didn’t want to wait and think it out, we wanted SPACE and we wanted it NOW. And personally, I tend to be extremely productive and inventive when I’m feeling impatient. Mechanic is booked for a few days? I’ll figure out how to change my oil and tires and tint my car’s windows myself. Strawberry season is still 4 months away? I’ll get a heat lamp setup and grow them myself. Friends can’t visit and help move furniture for a week? I’ll build a trolley out of some toy cars, tape, a chessboard, and do all the lifting myself.
This impatience is what made us design faster cars, faster computers, faster internet, faster communication, methods of growing food faster, of processing food faster, we’re always looking for the quickest and most efficient thing simply because we are not patient.
Impatience leads to a type of creativity and persistence that patience just doesn’t have.
Imagine aliens starting to realize this.
“You got to your moon before you had developed LED screens??? You didn’t even have computers that could do basic math?!” “Well, what else were we gonna do, sit around and wait?”
“Your planes don’t have gravitational control? Don’t you experience discomfort from the acceleration and directional changes?” “Sure. But we needed to get on the other side of the planet in a decent amount of time.” “So… what you’re articulating is that you’d rather have physical distress than have to have a long journey?” “Yeah, pretty much.”
“Human____, our mechanical teams will be on site in several of your earth hours, so we won’t be going anywhere until then.” “Screw that. Where’s the manual for this thing? I bet I can fix it.” “But you don’t have any mechanical training.” “I also don’t feel like sitting around on this rock for ages.”
“You’re back already? I thought your medical representative told you to not be walking on that limb for another of your weeks.” “Ugh. I just can’t anymore. I’ve got to get up and move and do something, anything.” “But doesn’t that hurt to walk on?” “Absolutely.” “…You would choose pain over waiting?” “What can I say, I’m not a patient person.”
Like aliens just being baffled that humans would rather work hard or struggle with a problem or even experience pain and discomfort. They, as prey species, are used to just waiting it out. They don’t have the same impatience driving them to get up and go and to fight through things just because they can’t wait any longer.
Bonus: Human: Ain’t nobody got time for that! Alien: Why don’t you have time? Is something scheduled soon? Human: No, I just don’t feel like wasting time. Alien: But… it’s not wasted. It’s time well spent. And you do technically have the time to spare for that. If there’s nothing scheduled, then you do ‘got time for that’. Human: No. No, I don’t. It’s just… no.
I will not let my brood mother perish
I love my mom.
I am risking nothing
I AM SORRY FOLLOWERS, I LOVE MY MOMMY
Will not risk.
sorry followers :(
Another humans are weird space orcs idea because I really like thinking about it. What if aliens have no idea how to hide their emotions? Like, they suck at poker because they can never keep a straight face or anything. or, on a darker note, their ship is hijacked and they can’t keep the fear out of their faces, but all the humans look cold and emotionless to them. Other aliens hating having to bargain with humans becase we can bluff and keep our emotions in check so well, but when they get frustrated it’s all over. Pirates threaten the space ship and they send the human to do negotiations, and the pirate talking is super confused because no matter what threat he makes, the human just doesn’t seem to be fazed one bit.
Someone please, feel free to add to this, I love to see what else people come up with!
@space-australians
Do you think that, to aliens, we humans are like the supreme omnivores of the universe?
I mean, honestly, one of the greatest advantages we have as a species is our willingness to eat, or at least try to eat, just about anything.
Allergies, cultural differences, preferred diets, and intolerances, and general tastes for flavors aside, the average human is capable of finding a way to consume most anything we can get in our mouth.
Meat? Boom. Vegetables? Pretty good. Fruits? Love it. Bugs? Hey if we had to. Fish? Hell yeah. Eggs? Yeah man. Organs? Sure thing. Milk, honey, and food products made in other creatures? Classic.
Hell, if something isn’t immediately poisonous or just disgusting tasting, or even just flat undigestable, chances are a human can and will eat it.
Honestly, even if something is known to be poisonous (i.e. pufferfish), we’re not gonna rest until we find some part of it that’s not poisonous so we can eat that.
Some humans even will eat disgusting things, either to prove they can, or because they’ve found a way to make it palatable just so that they can actually eat it.
Especially consider that if other alien species we encounter are either flat herbivores or obligate carnivores. It might be to the concern of some newer crew members just how much the humans on board eat and what variety they will consume if given the chance; especially if they’re concerned about food rations being low. Or if they get to an unexplored world and the human is commenting about strange flora and fauna they find and comment how much it resembles foodstuffs on their home planet. Until they realize the humans are saying it about a LOT of the stuff on this unexplored world. To the point they’re worried that either the humans will eat something that would get them sick/poisoned, or they’ll end up just completely devouring anything and everything they see on the planet like a swarm of starved locusts.
of course there’s been lots of posts about how humans have pets
dangerous pets. that can kill. that are kept even having injured their human. ugly pets that humans still gush over.
but what if what really makes humans weird is the love we have for our pets? like, aliens can sort of understand pets because not only can they be used to hunt, but also because humans are known throughout the galaxy as a species that will aggressively pack bond and adopt even inanimate objects.
but humans love their pets. humans will cry over their pets. even humans who have been identified by other humans as criminals and dangerous have and love pets. humans that abuse their pets are looked at with disgust and considered criminal. humans will risk their lives for animals that aren’t even theirs. humans will make their pet toys. humans will groom their pet simply because their pet enjoys it.
imagine an alien experiencing a pet’s funeral. and every human crew member is crying. a couple even do a little speech for poor bobby. and the alien crew are just utterly confused? because isn’t this usually reserved for dead humans? not a non-sentient being?!?!
they ask Human-Bee after the funeral- why is your species upset. you ingest poison for fun. you evolved on the planet from hell. you can get another parasite- sorry- I mean pet, can’t you?
yes, crewman t’sk, of course we can get another pet, but we loved bobby
the humans are all noticeably upset for the next week, so the alien crew on the next shore leave sneak away and when they come back present their humans with a new dog called jeff
watching all the humans smile and coo over the new dog, the alien crew think that maybe the universal pamphlets advertising how to care for humans were wrong. maybe these humans and pets aren’t in a parasitical relationship, but a symbiotic one.
What he fuck even is this website
If there is one thing that can be said, humans are very good at changing their environment. Now regardless of your views on climate change or greenhouse gases, it cannot be denied that humans have left a big and very literally mark on our planet.
We’ve been doing it ever since our primeval ancestors figured out that fire can be used to clear forest, and that the grasslands created by such burning attracts grazing animals and gives us a clear line of sight for our throwing spears and nets. We have been doing it ever since the ancient humans figured out they could damn creeks to make ponds that lured in waterfowl. That if you repeatedly burned a clearing, the berry bushes would keep coming back ever year. That if you created stone walls along the low tide line, you could create sandy terraces that are perfect for clams. We managed our resources, only fishing at certain times, only hunting certain types of animals, or only cutting certain types of trees.
Then we invented agriculture and we wrought even more changes on the planet. We cleared forests to make room for our fields, pastures and cities. We terraced entire hillsides to allow us to grow crops. We drained swamps and cut the landscape with irrigation canals to provide our crops with water. Often we changed the very course of rivers and altered the soil we relied on, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Forests disappeared as our cities and emerging states needed timber for construction, ship-building, and fuel to make pottery, smelt metals, cook our food, and keep us warm.
But we didn’t just change the landscape, we also changed the plants we grew so that they suited our needs. We changed the animals we relied on. We turned wolves into dogs, auroch into cows, ibex into goats, jungle fowl into chickens, and wild boars into pigs. We called this process domestication, and soon quickly forgot that we had ever been without these domesticates.
We made artificial hills for our rituals, built mountains out of cut stone to mark the tombs of revered rulers, carved symbols into the landscape. Sliced into mountains to carve roads, mine metal ores, and quarry stone. We made monuments so astounding that people thousands of years later thought they must have been made by the gods, and buildings of the modern age that dwarf them.
We’ve also traveled. We’ve crossed all our oceans, bringing with us the animals and plants of our homelands, and returning home with the animals and plants of other lands. Some is intentional. New crops that offer new advantages. Animals from far away to awe visitors or remind us of home. Some is unintentional. Plant seeds lodged in the tread of our boots. Insect larva in the bilge of our ships. Rats that scurry and stay out of sight, and hitch a ride on our sailing ships and outrigger canoes. Some we regret bringing, intentionally or not, others have settled in and carved their own place in their new home.
And now we look to the stars and wonder if we could do the same to other planets. To bring our life and our world to the stars. To turn a red planet green and blue.
And what if we succeeded? What if a red planet turned green, and flushed with our success, we turned to other balls of rock orbiting distant stars.
And what if we encountered other life. Life that was like us, but also very different. What if they had never seen life like ours before, that spread to the stars turning red, grey, and brown planets blue and green.
What if some are fearful. What if they seen our domesticated animals, our sculpted landscapes, and our diverse nations and fear that we will assimilate and change them and their world like we did to our ancient animal enemies and our distant home planet.
But what is some our awed, and look at us and see a species that can not only adapt itself to new and challenges and environments, but that also changes the challenge and environment itself. Often changing and adapting to the changes they themselves wrought. For better and worse, humanity sailed the stars on the crest of a wave of change that they themselves have been creating since their distant ancestors set fire to the underbrush and realized they could use this.
“Humans are weird” post! What if all aliens actually hatch from eggs and our planet is the only one in the universe that has mammals on it. For an alien, the shell of their egg is a bit like their birth certificate because it’s the proof that they were born, so it’s extremely important for them. To study the development of certain species, they sometimes have to ask some specimen of that species to show them their shell. But then, they visit Earth and meet humans…
Alien: Good morning Human-Nate. I am Xers, an eggshell specialist. In order to study your species development, I need you to show me the shell of the egg that you hatched from. Don’t worry, I am a professional. I can guarantee that you will have it back in the same state as it was when you entrusted it to me. Human: hummmm, I’m sorry but I don’t have any eggshell to show you….. Alien: Could it be that you lost it? If so, please excuse me for my previous request. I am sorry if you thought that it was a rude of me. Human: Don’t apologize, it’s fine! *nervous hand gesture* I didn’t lose it or anything. It’s just that I never had one in the first place. Humans do not hatch from eggs. Alien: W-what? They don’t?! Then how? Human: Well, to put it short, the baby grows inside of the mother’s uterus for 9 months and then, when they are ready, they just…come out…by another part of the the mother’s reproductive system. Alien: Directly from the uterus? With no shell or protection?! Baby humans actually SURVIVE this?! Human: Yup, and I am the living proof! *laughs* Alien: …..what the hell is wrong with your species.
To learn more about what humans call “pregnancy”, Xers went to see a pregnant woman and asked her questions about the singular gestation process of “mammals”. After a few minutes, the woman chuckled softly and put a hand on her round belly.
Alien: *worried* Human-Kate, are you alright? Human: It’s nothing. I just felt a small kick from her. *chuckles* Alien:….Did your growing organism just ATTACK YOU?!
Good advice, filed and reported to command.
Ready? Humans are packbondy creatures. I mean, there’s just no arguing it. They packbond readily, and quickly, and unbelievably strongly. Once a human has packbonded with a thing, they will do anything to help and protect that thing.
There’s a downside to that, not often mentioned. It uses up a lot of their time and energy to build those packbonds, maintain those packbonds, and most especially to do the work of helping and protecting those with whom they have packbonded. It doesn’t leave them a lot of time and energy for helping other beings. If you want a human to help you – if you want to reliably get their best effort – you have to packbond with them first. “Yeah? So?” So you’re probably going to be working with humans for most, if not all, of your career. No matter how good or bad you are at your job, there will come a time when you need someone else in your workspace to help you with something, whether that’s manning the fry station for 2 minutes while you pee, sending over those numbers from marketing, or dropping everything to teach you how to do a thing that your boss told you to do or else you’d be fired. Not to mention the big things. They don’t give promotions to just their friends – at least not so much any more. Promotions go to the people who’ve completed big, visible, important projects. It seems fair until you consider,,,, who gets the big, important, visible projects assigned to them in the first place? Humans give boosts to the people they’ve packbonded with. They mention packbondee’s accomplishments to the boss (or the boss’ boss). They cover for the mistakes of people they’ve packbonded with.
“That’s not right! It shouldn’t be a popularity contest! It should be about who does the best –” Listen to me. Listen.
You may be right. You may be the most correct creature to have ever spoken since the beginning of galactic civilization. It does not matter Humans packbond. It’s what they do. I can’t stop it. You can’t stop it. No power in the ‘verse can stop it. This is how the human do. All you can do is work with it. If you want a human to help you – if you want to reliably get their best effort – you have to packbond with them first. “Look, I’m introverted and scared of people and I have social anxiety so I really don’t know how to –” Hey, my pal, I feel you. I, too, am introverted. And I have social anxiety. And I have PTSD that actually – and I recognize that this is bizarre – has ‘business networking’ as a trigger. For you, I have good news: Humans will packbond with anything. Like, you don’t really actually have to do anything. You kinda just have to… exist. In their presence. They kinda do the rest. If you can talk with them, that speeds things up. But it doesn’t have to be, like, good conversation. Like, it can totally go You: boy, sure is hot out! Human: Man oh man, can you believe it? You: Wow, yeah Human: Totally You: …. Human: ….
This conversation – as awkward and uncomfortable as it felt to you, has caused this human to packbond with you a little more. If you repeat it weekly, you will get good results.
THE TAKEAWAYS
You need to packbond with the humans you come in contact with
Taking time to do that is not only justifiable, it is an important part of your job, and should be treated as such
That is to say that, as much as you hate it (and believe me, I understand), you have to take time away from actual work and dedicate it to packbonding with your fellow workers
Tips
Plan out your packbonding time. It’s easier if you can initiate than if a human springs packbonding-time on you all unexpected. In an office job I like to use Friday afternoon, but adjust according to what makes sense to you and your situation.
Keep some packbonding-time questions handy. My go-to list is:
(If it’s Monday or Tuesday) How was your weekend?
(If it’s Wednesday) How’s your week been so far?
(If it’s Thursday or Friday) Any big plans for the weekend?
How’s your day been?
You don’t have to care about the answers to these questions. All you have to do is remember that if the human is answering questions, they are not asking you any questions. Therefore questions are your friend. If you ask follow-up questions, you may be able to get through the entire packbonding time without having to do any of the talking
Learn to disengage from packbonding. You can use basically the same sentence (or variants on it), but you’ll want to practice it so that you can make it sound natural. I use “Awesome! Well, I gotta get going. Have a good one!”
I know it feels overwhelming, but a few minutes of packbonding, once a week, is all you need. Once you build it into your habits it can be no more annoying than doing dishes or showering.
I’ve seen a lot of posts about humans pack-bonding with frankly everything, no matter how big, scary, threatening, lethal or oozy.
But you know what I haven’t seen?
Humans entrusting their young to their pack-bonded friends. Because that’s a thing we do. We entrust our children to our friends. We entrust our children to our dogs. We befriend the biggest, meanest, scariest shit, and then we dump our defenseless, hasn’t-even-got-a-fully-fused-skull-yet offspring on them. Half for shits-and-giggles, half because it’s cute, mostly because children are exhausting and we need a nanny.
Keep reading
The pack bond feature your race has aquired is vastly inconvenient to say the very least.
Okay, so I feel like contributing to the Humans Are Weird section and it’s just, humans and predators get along? Like, we have mutual beneficial relationships and companionship with animals that, in theory, we should be fighting with.
Like, we have cats and dogs as pets, some people have wolves, we see lions and tigers and think they’re cute, hell, zoologists have been raising Big Cats for years, not to mention the stories about people care taking bears.
And if Jurassic World became a thing, you can bet your ass someone would Chris Pratt a set of pack dinos
So like, imagine that theres a race of aliens who are, by genetic script, predatory, and vicious and every alien system are like “Theres no chance at establishing peace with them, it’s impossible.” But then humans come and we stumble across a wounded one like
“this species ?? Is adorable ?” And all the other aliens are like
“No, human Mike, it is a vicious predator! It’s bet to just avoid the quadrant where theyre from and destroy any that come too close.”
“You want to kill him, but he’s just a wittle cutie!”
“ … Human Mike, stand back!” And of course the humans rally around it and force the other aliens out and slowly feed/build up trust with the species and we form a bound with them and Aliens are like ????
Evetually humans teach the aliens how to respond to the species and while they’re still pretty dangerous if they’re hungry and you shouldn’t turn your back on them, there’s still like, relative trust between the species.
I am not an alien scout looking to learn all I can about humanity before the inevitable invasion.
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