I Can Assure You That I Do Not Have A Magnetic Crystal In My Brain. I Also Have Yet To Hear This "music".

another ‘Humans are Weird’ post

so, sorry if someone has mentioned this before, but i saw a post about how humans were apex predators a little while ago, and one of the points it mentioned was that it’s cause humans have such a wide diet you don’t find in a lot of other animals.  plus, we’re pretty poison resistant to things that would hurt/kill most other animals (we’re the only species that is lactose tolerant as the norm, chocolate isn’t poison to us, plus other things that surprised me and i wish i had kept the post :c)

what if most aliens have limited things they can eat?  the Susutians can only eat plant matter of a specific color, or Luttans can only eat certain meats from certain types of insects on their planet.  so, when they come to earth they’re all like ‘on so what do you eat?’ and they’re thrown through a loop at what choices we have!  and they find out that a LOT of the food we eat on the regular is super poisonous to a majority of the known universe!

like, “oh hey, human-steve, thank you for visiting my planet.  we’re about to eat the meal of the tirid sun, will you join us?”

“o yeah cool what’s the apple looking thing on that tree?”

“apple….. oh, you mean the highly poison and deadly Punnadix Fruit? those are a scourge of my peopl- WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!”

“uh….. eating it?  it’s delicious?”

cue an alien having a heart attack, or whatever the equivalent is.  on top of all the other weird shit they’re known for, this makes then rise higher in the list of ‘creatures we are REALLY glad are on our side’.

Please invade the earth. You’ll take better care of it than humans.

Is this an order to attack? My team and I are on a scouting mission, we are not prepared for combat. Recent data suggests humans are more dangerous than we previously believed. What is your ranking? Who approved this?

K so some of my favorite posts here are the “humans are weirder than aliens” ones, and I just thought of something tremendous

Background Music

Aliens have managed to advance because they hyper focus on everything they do, but are completely baffled by our ability to multitask. They are stunned that we listen to music when working, cause they would hyper focus on the music and nothing else. Or humans work on stuff while having on conversation and still know what the conversation is about even while half listening.

Imagine aliens not understanding the concept of short attention spans

Emphasis

Imagine aliens coming to Earth and having translators that work perfectly. Except they don’t pick up on tone.

Tone has a HUGE impact on a message. Consider the following sentence:

“You look nice today.”

Now repeat it stressing each word one by one.

“YOU look nice today”, implying someone else that you are probably indicating with your body or to whom you’d previously referred does not.

“You LOOK nice today”, implying that you don’t smell/sound it.

“You look NICE today”, thus turning what would otherwise have been a casual remark into a compliment. You don’t just look nice. You look damn fine.

“You look nice, TODAY”, which is clearly an insult purpoiting that you usually look like crap. Damning by faint praise, as they say.

And all of these are possible - and wildly differing - meanings to a simple four word sentence.

In this scenario, super secret plans could be discussed in front of the aliens with them being none the wiser simply by saying it à la Mean Girls. Should war between the two factions emerge, humans would win by the power of passive-aggressive bitching

Alien: You’re telling me that in times of great distress humans have been known to suddenly gain the strength necessary to lift objects more than a dozen times their own weight?!

Human: Yeah, it’s called “hysterical strength” and it usually happens in life-or-death situations, like when someone gets stuck under a car or something and someone lifts the car to get them out. We can’t really test it though, ‘cause it only happens spontaneously.

Alien: Humans have the ability to tap into untold strength and power and you don’t even know how you do it?

Human: Pretty much, yeah. We think it has something to do with temporary analgesia, so we just don’t feel the pain we should when we pick up a 3000-pound car.

Alien: YOUR PAIN RESPONSE JUST SHUTS OFF?

Human: Yeah, it’s like an adrenaline thing? Do you not have that?

Alien: Fuck you and your entire species of tiny juggernauts.

Humans are crazy

So I was hanging with friends today and it dawned on me…that human beings are insane. What we do for “fun” is insane.

We jump out of planes, jump off cliffs, climb sheer cliff walls hundreds of thousands of feet up. We have games for CHILDREN that involve pressing a button and getting shocked with electricity, and one of the most popular sports, in america at least, is full of humans bashing against each other and causes brain damage. Or humans trying to hang on to dear life on a bucking angry bull, and risk getting gored. Or just pummeling each other bloody in a ring. And we love it.

I mean, Just today, my friends and I used an electric charge machine (for flexing muscles and helping blood flow I think?) And spent an hour shocking each other and seeing how long we could last on the highest charge despite pain and spasms.

Then there are carnivals (which we also visited). Look around a carnival and nearly every ride is meant to be “fun” but also cause discomfort. Heights, spinning, sudden drops, high speeds, often combinations of all of these. They’re like giant colorful torture machines, and we LOVE them. We have whole parks dedicated to bigger, more complicated versions of carnival rides and roller coasters.

We actively seek out things that cause us discomfort…for FUN. Life risking or painful things for FUN.

Can you imagine what aliens would think about that? Imagine a poor aliens reaction upon coming to earth to research human passtimes and just being confronted with all these crazy hunans doing crazy, uncomfortable, sometimes painful things….for fun. Like,“Oh my gosh they torture themselves for fun why why why? How do we fight something that gets a kick out of hurting itself??” Imagine taking an alien visitor to a carnival or amusement park and them just being horrified.

Alien- What in the stars… Why have you taken me to a torture camp?? I thought we were friends! Human- what do you mean? It’s a carnival! It’s fun! Alien- but there are instruments of torture and interrogation everywhere! And…did you decorate them in colorful, pleasing lights?? What sick joke is this?!?

Or inversly, can you imagine a more serious situation wherein a human is captured and taken to be interrogated and are just…terrified. imagining what this warlike alien species has uo their sleeves, how they would torture them for information they sought. The master interrogator is this scarred, gruff alien who’s made it his life work to torture and rip that information away.

And then the human is taken into the torture room and just stops and stares at the whirl a twirl ride in the middle of the room. And they see this carnival ride and the interrogator and everyone else seem wary or scared of it, but the human just gets excited. And the whole time it’s running, the aliens are just flabbergasted because the human who’s being tortured is just laughing and grinning and even after puking is still yelling “again, again!”

No other race tortures themselves for fun. Human beings are just the craziest things.

My contribution to the humans are space orcs, it’s probably been seen before but oh well.

So, You guys know about pursuit/persistence hunting right? Where we just follow the prey without stopping until it slows down or drops dead from fear and exhaustion? 

What if when aliens first discover earth, the thoughts of these bipedal predatory omnivores are bad enough but we seem pretty obsessed with farming our food so maybe we aren’t much of a threat.

Once humans are zipping about in space, that’s when they realise that these harmless bipedal omnivorous farmers are actually hunters who just never give up.

If someone hurts their crew, they just follow it for days before killing it. These soft fleshy things are terrifying. These soft fleshy things may not be the strongest or fastest but we are some of the hardest damn things to kill because we just won’t die and if we survive we won’t stop until we get you. 

We farm things because we can and because it’s easy. Not because we have to in order to survive.

We farm things because we’re too busy fighting each other to hunt for everything.

We stake out areas, we mimic its noises, we stalk it, we put ourselves in danger to kill a food source for fun. 

Interstellar Cultural Exchange

A problem that we might have is the importance of food. There are certain things that I’m quite certain will be constant from culture to culture, and, barring the possibility of aliens taking control of  their evolution in such a way that they no longer need to eat, I think food would be one of them.

People would be careful in the beginning, but eventually some people would break more and more quarantine and contraband laws, resulting in unusual fusion which we might not be able to predict.

“What’s this apple-looking thing I’m eating?” 

“It’s actually an animal that sucks sap out of trees. Think of it as a vegetarian tick.”

“What is that?”

“It’s called chocolate, want some?”

***Two Hours Later***

“I see colors!”

“Chocolate is space cocaine. Got it.”

“Human, I have made gumbo using ingredients from my planet. Would you like some?”

“Isn’t your biome arsenic-based?”

“Your point?”

“Want some chips?”

“Are you insane human!? That has SALT in it! Are you trying to kill me!?”

Somebody said Humans would be the Mad Scientist species to aliens- like, aliens watch Back To The Future, and they see Doc Brown, and they think yes this is a human scientist, they’re all that crazy, these humans do such insane things with science.

I would like to offer an alternative.

Humans are tough. We can shrug off plenty of injuries, and we recover pretty fast from most others. Hell, we find minor injuries amusing (Don’t tell me you’ve never laughed at someone getting hit in the balls).

Humans have a skewed sense of danger. We think baby anything is cute- tigers, lions, alligators, whatever, no matter how scary they grow up to be- and even then there’s people that would happily cuddle up to a grizzly. Even less adventurous humans keep vermin as pets, or snakes, or dogs, that apex predator sub-species we made.

We are fascinated by morbid and scary stuff. We have a whole genre designed to terrify people. Tons of fantasy revolves around deadly monsters, plenty of which involve romance with said monsters. Lots of grim dystopias in sci-fi. Even children’s stories involve grandmothers getting eaten or witches getting cooked in their own oven.

And if you’re on this site, you know all the jokes we make about depression or social anxiety, or joking about wanting to die.

We aren’t the Doc Brown species.

We’re the Addams Family Species.

Imagine aliens reacting to human eating habits.

For instance, taste. Like, one day an alien notices the human crew member dumping something bright orange on their midday ration.

Alien: Does your supplement not have the right nutrients/? Human: No, it just tastes bad. Alien: ???? Human: Well, not precisely bad, but bland. It’s boring. So I thought I’d spice it up a bit. *waves bottle of bright orange substance* Alien: You add items to your food that provide no necessary sustenance??? Human: Oh, just wait ‘til you hear about junk food.

‘Cause humans eat stuff that is not good just for the sensation. Like really spicy foods, chewing gum, and all these spices. And the aliens don’t get it. You put that in your body? Doesn’t that mess up your digestive system? What purpose does it serve?

Or human eating rituals. If you eat with one group of humans there are all of these utensils, some of which look extremely similar, but each with it’s own unique purpose. And if you don’t use the right one at the right time it’s a social faux pas. Then another group mostly uses their hands and lick their fingers. Does this not introduce pathogens? And you’ll see the same human doing both behaviors.

And there’s the whole concept of a meal as a social endeavor. Humans will have a meal with those they are close with as a sign of affection. Humans don’t even spend the entire meal eating, no they use it to talk. Business is done, friends catch up, families share news. All over a meal.

Aliens considering food a necessity not to be discussed in public. Yet here are these humans, who post pictures of their food to social media, share recipes, use food as a social catalyst, and as comfort. Hell, comfort food as a completely human idea that aliens don’t understand.

Anyway, humans are weird.