Empathy

Humans and Fire

So I’ve read a few humans are weird posts and it got me thinking, what if humans are the only species to evolve to use fire. Like, most intelligent species will instinctively flee in panic the moment they catch sight of an open flame, yet show a human infant a fire and if they don’t know better, they will try to grab it.

Humans will burn everything. Most of us won’t eat anything unless it has been “Cooked” first. (A human word meaning to heat food until it has begun to denature but not yet started to carbonize.)

Start a small fire and instead of fleeing, humans will gather around it and start socializing.

We get intoxicated by setting specific plants on fire and inhaling the smoke, often with the burning embers mere inches from our sensitive face.

We use it to clear land for agriculture and hunting. We use it to punish criminals. We even use it for purely aesthetic purposes. (Think fireworks.)

Heck, we we discovered hydrocarbons, the first thing we did was burn them. In fact, humans were burning so much hydrocarbons they were literally altering the atmosphere of their planet.

Heck, humans have died because they literally did not have enough materials to burn.

Now imagine hostile aliens want to invade earth. They don’t use fire except for carefully controlled and heavily guarded industrial purposes. They also don’t know much about earth other than it is definitely inhabited and the people haven’t developed intergalactic travel.

They’re expecting to face primitive forces armed with the local equivalent of clubs and bows. What they get is, to them, a strange anachronistic jumble of expected primative technologies and highly advanced technologies that they definitely shouldn’t have.

They’re not expecting guns. (Projectile weapons that consist of a narrow tube with projectile and a chemical propellent stuffed into one end. Instead of an electromagnetic pulse, the propellant is ignited and the expanding gases shoot the projectile out of the tube.)

They’re not expecting powered vehicles. Instead of electric motors, humans have what they call the internal combustion engine. (A motor that works by sucking flammable gas into an enclosed chamber, igniting the gas under pressure, and using the resulting force from the detonation to move a piston. Because of that, humans have heavy machinery, self-propelled vehicles, and powered air-craft before they even really understood bio electricity.

They’re not expecting bombs, or incendiary weapons. (It was also how it was discovered that their bio-polymer armor, while excellent against projectiles, can actually burn at surprisingly low temperatures.

They’re not even expecting smelted metal. Steel to them is a high tech material that can only be produced under specialized conditions of extreme heat, and requires very specialized facilities to produce. They are shocked to discover that humans have been smelting copper before they developed writing.

And they are definitely not expecting nuclear weapons. (Which are basically “bombs” that instead of using combustable chemicals use an uncontrolled nuclear fission reaction. They are also aghast to discover that not only was this apparently the first thing we thought to do when we discovered fission, but that competing human faction have “how many of these weapons stockpiled!?”

After retreating in disgrace, the task force sent to monitor the plant is horrified to report that humans are rapidly expanding into space. They aren’t using gravitic lifters or electromagnetic mass drivers. They are apparently simply loading equipment and personnel into special “missiles” and using a shit ton of highly combustable fuel to simply launch themselves into space.

I absolutely love all the space australia/ humans are weird/space orcs things going around, so I haven’t been able to stop thinking about stuff like metaphors and idioms and figurative speech. Like, what if those had been purely human concepts?

Human: “He really broke Omar’s heart”

Alien: “What?? Is Omar still alive? Can he be healed? Is it culturally appropriate to seek out revenge?”

Human: “No, no, like… He hurt him badly.”

Alien: “Yes I understand that your cardiovascular system is important.”

- - -

Human: “She’s a real wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Alien: “What is a wolf?”

Human: “It’s a predator - you know, the one dogs descent from?”

Alien: “… She looks human. How do you know the value of her clothes?”

- - -

Human: “That dickhead stabbed me in the back”

Alien: “MEDIC!!!!”

- - -

Human 1: “Wish me luck!”

Human 2: “Break a leg!”

*Horrified aliens in the background*

Humans are Space Orcs

Yet another addition…Teething. Babies, specifically.

“Human Veronica, your offspring is attempting to eat his toys.”

“Hm, oh, nah. He’s fine. He’s just teething. It’s normal.”

“Tee-thing? I do not understand.”

“Oh, well,” show baby’s mouth, “we aren’t born with teeth. They grow in when we’re babies. Babies like to chew on things when they teeth.”

“To sharpen them?”

“Uh, no. Not exactly. It’s just…something they do? The teeth have to cut through the mouth tissue after all.”

“Your bodies cut through themselves?” Horrified alien.

“Pfft, you think that’s bad? Our skulls aren’t fully formed when we’re babies. They fuse together .”

Walking Through a Memory

You know that prank where you move everything in the house two inches to the left and it’s so subtle no one notices but they keep bumping into stuff?

This is a peculiar consequence of kinesthetic awareness trumphing spacial awareness, I think. We don’t need to look at where we are going because our bodies know how to move there and don’t need to double-check. Hence why we don’t look at our feet to walk.

So imagine that aliens don’t have this to the same degree humans do. The furniture moves and they move around it and are confused as to why the human crewmates keep bumping into things.

Then one day, after all the humans ajusted to the prank, the lights go off and the aliens can’t move around.

But the humans are just navigating the spaceship by muscle memory. And that is amazing, that it is possible for them to *walk through a memory* to compensate for being temporarily blinded.

my new years resolution is to own one of these

I can assure you that I do not have a magnetic crystal in my brain. I also have yet to hear this "music".

What if there was an alien species who didn’t ‘get’ music? They have no sense of rhythm or anything like that, so from their perspective humans occasionally just randomly change the pitch of their voices while talking about random things. They find it insane that there’s a whole human industry devoted to making instruments and other humans fluctuate the pitch and speed of their voices into a recording device.

Eventually the humans explain music to them and they learn to just put up with it as another 'crazy human thing’.

Now imagine a ship where half the crew is human and half is this other species. There’s a bit of a friendly rivalry between the two species and they often play pranks on each other. So one week the humans hide magnets all around the ship, knowing that this messes with the magnetic crystals in the aliens’ brains that help them find their way around. The humans have great fun watching their crew mates keep bumping into things and the aliens swear revenge.

The next week some music is played over the ship’s intercom. But it’s not just any music. Every song that the aliens have ever heard referred to as “annoying” or “catchy” is played over and over. To the aliens it’s just white noise, to the humans it’s torture. It gets worse, however. For days after the incident, the aliens dilate their breathing flaps in amusement whenever they hear humans complain about “that stupid song!” They’d heard about the human concept of 'songs getting stuck in heads’ but didn’t think it would work so well…

Humans Are Weird

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 be fair, humans are some bullshit from a balance perspective.

“I’ll just outrun that human…any day now… any… day… jesus christ it’s the terminator.”

“Maybe I can outsmart it and hide. What’s that you say, its brain takes up 20% of it’s caloric intake? FML.”

“It doesn’t have any natural weapons. I’ll just turn around and kill it. OH GOD IT’S GOT STONE CLAWS THAT ARE UNHOLY SHARP!”

“Okay, fight number two. It’s squishy so if I’m careful and find the right time when it’s weak I can - IT HAS PROJECTILE SHARP THINGS!”

“I’ll try crossing the river. It’s too gangly to be buoya - IT CAN SWIM?!?”

“Okay nothing can swim and run and climb. I’ll just go up this tree… FML it descended from apes.”

“It doesn’t even have fur, I can run to a colder climate and escape. Welp, it’s wearing the fur of my loved ones to keep warm.”

“If the whole herd bands together and protects each other, we can trample it… it can CONTROL FIRE.”

“Fuck it. Might as well just follow them around and get domesticated.”

Prettymuch everything we did to animals comes out of a horror movie.

but what if,,, what if humans aren’t the only Hold My Beer species.

We are one of two.

The Adt’harra people look kind of like a cross between a bat and an elf. Big ole radar dish ears, slender bipedal bodies, all that. Their planet is heavily forested with gargantuan mangrove swamps, and they lurk under the roots to hunt fish and birds. More importantly, they lurk under the roots to prank the shit out of any and all intergalactic visitors. 

The Adt’harran love of pranks was at first a non-starter for joining the Intergalactic Alliance, but then they realized that these creatures were absolute geniuses for rigging complex mechanics in a matter of minutes, and also were simply too enthusiastic to refuse.

At around the same time, the Human people were discovered. They were rather flimsy compared to many other members of the Alliance, but further interaction proved them to be loyal crewmembers willing and able to risk life and limb for their cause and teammates. Further interaction also proved them to be reckless bastards who think it’s great fun to glue six warp cores together and try to poke a tunnel through a sun.

It was very quickly decided by the high-ups that Humans and Adt’harrans should never be allowed to interact, they would surely blow up at least three ships and cause a half dozen interplanetary incidents with their scheming.

When the Humans and Adt’harrans eventually meet anyway because neither species is really into ‘rules’, they are fast friends and the collective universe tears its hair out.

I have fallen down the "humans are space orcs/earth is space Australia" hole

I see a lot about humans being scary durable and cute and they bond readily to other creatures type of posts. But like what if the aliens don’t understand that we can bond with other creatures sometimes MORE than other humans….

——————————

Zůrłtg is “best friends” with human-trixie, their crew first got their human 7 cycles ago and it has been a fast friendship, humans are infamous for their bonding ability, but Zůrłtg didn’t know that they sometime bond more with one person then others. Zůrłtg was honored when human-trixie bestowed upon zem the title “best-friend”. Human-trixie joined the crew as there botanist, which might be part of there friendship as Zůrłtg is made mostly out of cellulose. She has been a true asset to the crew, as she has saved many a fellow crew member from harm with her bravery and courage. Zůrłtg remembers unwillingly the time she pushed Captain Cul out the way of a carnivorous plant only to be devoured herself, and when all thought she had perished bust out of the bloom with the plants brain stem in hand. Human-trixie is also adorable, she is small and kind and smart. So if this is what humans are like it no wonder everyone was so excited to be meeting with Space Crew Valen as they also has a human aboard. Maybe they will be lucky and their humans will mate and they can have baby humans! Unfortunately for Zůrłtg the Valen crew human was not like human-trixie. He was not as small as human-trixie or having pleasing brown “hair” from his head, in fact he seemed to always be making the face human-trixie makes when she is displeased, though not nearly as adorable. But ze tried not to judge a book by its cover as human-trixie would say and was extatic to meet him. Even more unfortunate, the human did not choose to bond with zem as human-trixie did, in fact quite the opposite, this human, human-dave, did not like zem at all, calling zem a (swear word) jolly green giant and that he should (swear word) off. OH NO this is terrible!!! Human-Dave will tell human-trixie not to like zem anymore and he will lose his “best-friend”. If ze had tearducts he would be crying like human-trixie when her pet-hamster-walnut died. Human-trixie must never know this or she will surely not like zem anymore! To zes dismay human-trixie knew something was wrong the second that she saw his drooping mumds. Zůrłtg ended up telling her everything as ze is not as adept at the act of deception as her. Zůrłtg watched with horor as human-trixie got really really still, “he said what?” she spoke with a stone voice so unlike her normal happy squeaky tones. She got up. This is it. She is abandoning zem. She told zem to follow him as she walked calmly to the common room where the visiting crew was. There must be a ceremony to leave a “best-friend” that another human must witness Zůrłtg thought. Or maybe she wanted say hurtful things with human-dave at him. Zůrłtgs mumds were dragging on the floor at this point. Much to Zůrłtgs surprised as he watched human-trixie mall human-dave screaming swears words with a violence that none of either crews thought possible for such a small adorable being. Zůrłtg was still disappointed about not getting any human babies but ze was releaved that ze was the “best-friend” of such a fierce creature.