Imagine An Alien Species That Venerates The Spoken Word.

Humans... purposefully poison the poison in their bodies. Oh.

Human Health-Ask Kloev

Humans are a strange combination of hardy and fragile. While their bones can be more easily broken than those of other species, and their muscles tear so easily that their own brains trick them into thinking they are weaker than they are, they can heal from nearly any wound, given proper care. In fact, human’s bodies are so good at regenerating themselves that they have developed a variety of disease, called cancer, which results from an incorrectly formed cell replicating too quickly for their body to destroy it. They have the potential to regenerate themselves to death, truly astonishing.

Dear Kloev,

In a recent battle, one of our human soldiers was stabbed in the torso. Believing her to be dying, I went to her side to offer what comfort I could and ask about her culture’s death rituals, that we could properly care for her remains. Instead of answering my questions, she insisted that she would not die and told me to press on her wound to stop the bleeding. I obeyed, not wishing to distress her further. A few minutes later our human medic arrived and took over.

When we returned to the ship, the human doctor spent much of a cycle in the medical room with her. I was concerned that humans do not deal well with the death of their comrades, I had heard that they can be very stubborn and vindictive when they lose a crew member, but there was no wailing and no other humans went in. When the doctor exited the medical room, he said that she needs to heal but will recover in a few weeks. “But she was stabbed in the abdomen!” I exclaimed. The doctor gave me a funny look and explained that he had to repair several of her internal organs and give her several units of blood, but with the medic so close she was in little danger, considering.

Now she is already walking around and doing work, although she is not allowed to work a full cycle because she becomes tired easily. That wound would have killed any other species, and they took extra blood from another human and put it into her body. I am told this is something that is done regularly when a human loses blood. These humans are truly terrifying!

——————

Humans have become famous for their ability to survive injuries and illnesses that would kill other species, but every time I see one of these stories I am again astonished. Humans routinely survive after losing one, two, even all four limbs! Humans can live without some of their internal organs, and even those they cannot live without they can often live with only part of, or only one of if they are organs which come in pairs. In fact, this is such a possibility that should one human lose both of a paired organ, such as their lungs or kidneys, another human may donate one of their pair of the same organ in order to allow the first human to live. Not only does this work well enough that both humans live with few complications, this is done multiple times per day on most human planets!

Thousands of illnesses exist for humans, and very few, perhaps a dozen, are considered unable to be treated. Most humans expect to catch at least one illness every year, and many of those who do catch an illness will continue to work normally while experiencing symptoms. More serious illnesses will require humans to rest, and some require direct medical attention, but even those humans have often created medicines to treat and nearly eliminate fatality for previously healthy individuals.

Humans approach their health care with the same reckless abandon they exhibit in all aspects of their lives. It is not unusual for human doctors to use substances to treat illnesses without understanding how they work! I have been told that medications for many illnesses have been discovered because the medication was being used to something else and “just happened” to cure this other illness as well. In turn, human doctors then begin to use the medication to treat this new illness even if they don’t know why the medication works or, in some cases, even what causes the illness.

Some human illnesses are very difficult for them to treat, or leave lasting damage to the body, and so humans have found a way to prevent them, which they call vaccines. These vaccines are made up of small amounts of the organism that causes the illness, which has been killed or rendered harmless. The organisms, in the form of the vaccine, are then injected into the healthy human in order to contaminate them with a small amount of the illness so that their immune system can “learn” to fight off the illness. Human scientists say that they have used this process of deliberately exposing individuals to an illness in order to prevent it for hundreds of years and have been able to completely eliminate some deadly illnesses in the population completely.

The recklessness does not end there. The disease I mentioned above, cancer, has a high mortality rate for humans because it is an illness created by their own bodies, making it difficult to target with medications and surgery. However, in their usual daring manner, humans have discovered that particular substances, which poison and destroy their bodies, destroy the cancer cells faster than other cells. Because of this, they will purposely poison themselves in order to treat this illness. If that is not sheer recklessness, I’m orange!

@humansareweird @ansixilus

Good advice, filed and reported to command.

In the midst of all these “Humans will packbond with anything” posts, I’m going to pause and give you some actual, real-world career advice

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.  

This seems to relate to the ability humans have relating to the 4th dimension.

Humans are Weird: That One feeling

Im talking about the ‘I know someone is there’ feeling. You could haveyour back to something, but then just /know/ that theres someone/something behind you without seeing or hearing anything. You just /know./ Like, imagine how weird that’d be to Aliens

Bizarinvin: *Walks up to Ava slowly and quietly, maybe trying to see if xey can surprise them somehow*

Ava: *Immediately turns around* Yo Biz. Trying to scare me?

Bizarinvin: Yes but how did you even know I was there! I made sure I was silent!

Ava: I have eyes on the back of my head

Bizarinvin: Really?!

Ava: *Laughs* Nah. I just felt you there.

Bizarinvin: But you havent touched me.

Ava: I just sensed you there I guess then

Bizarinvin: What? How?

Ava: *Shrugs* I dunno. Humans can just… know if theres someone there without looking or hearing them sometimes

Bizarinvin:….Ok. *Goes to update the Human Guide with this new info 

This seems important to you humans.

URGENT ALL AUSSIES!!!

i know!!! the stupid liberal government has decided on the plebiscite and even tho it’s a waste of money….. please vote!! IF YOU ARE GOING TO BE 18 BEFORE NOVEMBER 25 ENROLL TO VOTE!!! PLEASE DO NOT THROW YOUR VOTE AWAY THIS IS SO IMPORTANT TO ME AND SO MANY OTHERS!!!!!!! PLEASE VOTE YES ON MARRIAGE EQUALITY!!!!!! WE CAN DO THIS!!!!

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…

OKAYOKAYOKAY B U T Aliens that only have mates to reproduce. Once every couple of moons they find their partner, do the do, then find a completely different one the next cycle. Imagine these aliens being confused about the human concept of marriage - “you stay with them for life?“ - and not understanding that while yes, Intaquk, you are very attractive I am married so no I will not be your mate this season. Imagine Valentines Day rolling around and one of a crews humans is feeling sad and the aliens are like “yo r u okay should we feed u or something is this natrual” and the human “just kinda bummed i dont have a valentines” and after a bit of research of the holiday one of the aliens gets down on one knee and offers the human a small rock like “I heard these..proposals are common in human culture?” AND THE HUMAN JUST STARTS SMILING AND TAKES THE PEBBLE LIKE ‘thank you fruiyo’ AND THE OTHER HUMANS AROUND START GUSHING OVER HOW ADORABLE THE SCENE WAS. THE ALIENS PICK UP ON HOW THESE PROPOSALS MAKE THE HUMANS ELATED, THEREFORE SEVERAL OTHER PEOPLE ARE PROPOSED TO WITHIN THE MONTH A N D

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.

Earth oceans and what's in them

Going off how the Humans are Space Orcs and “Humans bond with anything despite obvious danger” that annoys the rest of the alien crew, think about them being introduced to earth oceans

After all it’s common to have to always remove their human from unknown likely dangerous life forms despite constant protests and that they were only “playing” they start to notice that their human never really speaks of their earths sea creatures, which makes sense as the humans organs aren’t equipped to survive in that environment despite being able to “swim” (it is a common theory discussed that humans could survive if given no option to otherwise as that’s what they always seem to do) curious and nervous, a rookie of the crew, decides to ask (the veterans have learned not to ask about earth as it always ends in confusion and horror) Only to be told that “they aren’t really sure”, in human speak this can mean many things. One is that they never looked, another is that they were honestly telling the truth. Confused, they ask again as surely the species that does everything to fulfill their curiosity would surly know what fills 75% of their surface? Only to be told of creatures that are the length of their ship with a jaw just as wide. Of creatures that glow to attract and trap their pray. And that there was never a pod that was created could withstand the pressure of deepest depths. Or if it could, the visual feed would always disappear within rows of jagged teeth. And that are only the stories that have been proven. There are stories of the old ages, of creatures that could drown you with the sound of their voice, of things only seen in the shadows with a glimpse of sharp teeth. Humans don’t go in the ocean, they learn. Humans that are made of iron and steel, known to bond with anything, and a curiosity that defies all known logic don’t dare to explore the depths of their own planet. The crew learn that the only thing to terrify their human are the creatures that lurk in the oceans of their own earth. Everything must seem tame to them compared to the monster planet that they call home. And suddenly, things make sense.

In the spirit of Space Australia posts...

I like the idea of humans not being the only species with a need to unecessarily bond and form ‘packs’ and whatnot, or the only species to enjoy putting themselves in danger for the adrenaline rush, or the only species to recreationally poison themselves, or even the only species to have parties.

You know what I love, though?

Crowd psychology and the concept of group flow.

I love the idea that humans are the species that is in love with group flow. Sure, any alien can listen to music and enjoy it, maybe even go to concerts in large groups. But humans are the only non-telepathic species where going in a large group enhances the experience simply because you know that dozens or hundreds or even thousands of other people are all getting in the zone with you at the same time for the same reason. Any alien can go to a concert, but they marvel at the sight of hundreds of humans singing along to their favorite artist not because it makes the song objectively better, but because it enhances the experience.

I love the idea of aliens trying to figure out mob psychology, looking at sports fandoms and the riots that happen if a team fails to win a game, and asking themselves and other humans how it gets to that point. Because they can put the same human in front of the same game and get two entirely different results based on whether the human is alone or not. A lone human may break a bottle or curse, but they will likely not do more than that, unless they go online to rant. A human in a group that feels the same way can do much more damage.

I love the idea of aliens trying to figure out the aspect of performative grief for dead celebrities, not understanding that it is not only practice for when a death comes closer to home, but that it is a form of bonding, a call and an echo of “I feel this way too. This person mattered to me too,” across thousands or millions of people’s screens and faces and pens.

I love the idea of aliens taking a look at frat parties and nightclubs and karaoke and being so confused, because they can understand that intoxication might be fun, sometimes, or that singing or dancing with strangers can be fun, but the sheer chaos of an out-of-control college party is terrifying to them. There is nothing here that people will enjoy come the morning, but somehow that doesn’t matter, because in that moment, with those people, the humans are connecting as they sing their drunken songs or eat their terrible food or dance the night away. There is a sense of belonging even in this awful mess, for those who know how to find it.

I love the idea of aliens looking at conventions and wondering how it is that there is such a difference in a person wearing a costume in the privacy of their home and wearing it to a large con, how the endorphin levels soar even when the human is not receiving compliments, just because the convention is an echo chamber of “I love this show, this character, this franchise, this life.”

I love the idea of aliens coming to earth and understanding the meaning of bonds and enjoying music and knowing fiction and surviving our weather and planets and everything and still not being able to understand how a room full of strangers with no telepathy can feel so connected and in-tune simply by sharing an experience. The feelings aren’t always positive ones, but they are there, and there is a comfort in sharing them with endless people you’ve never met.

Anyway, that’s my contribution for Space Australia.

okay, so like there’s all this stuff about humans and the way we befriend all sorts of animals. but like, think about the way we interact with our pets. what if it’s not just the fact that we made friends with predators but that theses predators made friends with us back. the fact that there is a really clear bond between a dog or a cat and their owners and it’s reciprocal. the absolute love and devotion these companion animals show for us and us for them. think about the way you play with your pet and how an alien species might view it. or the fact that there’s a kind of rudimentary communication between species. the fact that I can tell the difference between my cat’s distressed meows vs. his i’m hungry meows. the fact that he prods me with a paw to get my attention, because he knows it works. that I can tell at a glance that my cat wants me to lay down a certain way so he can sleep on me. or the little greeting ritual me and my cat do when I come home for work – he meows really loud to be picked up… I sweep him into my arms and pet him, cooing goofy nonsense while he makes weird contented cat noises. think how absolutely flabbergasted an alien might be by the relationship between a human and their pet.