gremist:

gilmoure:

therobotmonster:

moniquill:

siderealsandman:

friendlytroll:

astrakiseki:

prokopetz:

mikhailvladimirovich:

bogleech:

It’s funny how science fiction universes so often treat humans as a boring, default everyman species or even the weakest and dumbest.

I want to see a sci fi universe where we’re actually considered one of the more hideous and terrifying species.

How do we know our saliva and skin oils wouldn’t be ultra-corrosive to most other sapient races? What if we actually have the strongest vocal chords and can paralyze or kill the inhabitants of other worlds just by screaming at them? What if most sentient life in the universe turns out to be vegetable-like and lives in fear of us rare “animal” races who can move so quickly and chew shit up with our teeth?

Like that old story “they’re made of meat,” only we’re scarier.

HOLY SHIT THEY EAT CAPSAICIN FOR FUN

YOU GUYS I HEARD A HUMAN ONCE ATE AN AIRPLANE.

A HUMAN CAN KEEP FIGHTING FOR HOURS EVEN AFTER YOU SHOOT IT

humans are a proud warrior race with a pantheon of bloody gods: Ram-Bo, Schwarzenegger, etc.

REMOVING A LIMB WILL NOT FATALLY INCAPACITATE HUMANS: ALWAYS DESTROY THE HEAD.

WARNING: HUMANS CAN DETECT YOU EVEN AT NIGHT BY TRACKING VIBRATIONS THROUGH THE ATMOSPHERE

WARNING: HUMANS CAN REPRODUCE AT A RATE OF 1 PER SPACEYEAR. DESTROY INFESTATIONS IMMEDIATELY

THE HUMAN MOUTH HAS OVER THIRTY OUTCROPS OF BONE AND POWERFUL JAW MUSCLES.

HUMAN BITES CAN BE FATALLY INFECTIOUS EVEN TO OTHER HUMANS

WARNING: HUMANS CAN AND WILL USE IMPROVISED WEAPONS. SEE CLASSIFIED DATA LABELED J. CHAN.

HUMANS CAN PROJECT BIOWEAPONS FROM ALMOST EVERY ORIFICE ON THEIR BODY. DO NOT INHALE

OH GOD THE HUMANS FIGURED OUT DOOR HANDLES OH GOD OH GOD

More seriously, humans do have a number of advantages even among Terrestrial life. Our endurance, shock resistance, and ability to recover from injury is absurdly high compared to almost any other animal. We often use the phrase “healthy as a horse” to connote heartiness – but compared to a human, a horse is as fragile as spun glass. There’s mounting evidence that our primitive ancestors would hunt large prey simply by following it at a walking pace, without sleep or rest, until it died of exhaustion; it’s called pursuit predation. Basically, we’re the Terminator.

(The only other animal that can sort of keep up with us? Dogs. That’s why we use them for hunting. And even then, it’s only “sort of”.)

Now extrapolate that to a galaxy in which most sapient life did not evolve from hyper-specialised pursuit predators:

• Our strength and speed is nothing to write home about, but we don’t need to overpower or outrun you. We just need to outlast you – and by any other species’ standards, we just plain don’t get tired.
• Where a simple broken leg will cause most species to go into shock and die, we can recover from virtually any injury that’s not immediately fatal. Even traumatic dismemberment isn’t necessarily a career-ending injury for a human.
• We heal from injuries with extreme rapidity, recovering in weeks from wounds that would take others months or years to heal. The results aren’t pretty – humans have hyperactive scar tissue, among our other survival-oriented traits – but they’re highly functional.
• Speaking of scarring, look at our medical science. We developed surgery centuries before developing even the most rudimentary anesthetics or life support. In extermis, humans have been known to perform surgery on themselves – and survive. Thanks to our extreme heartiness, we regard as routine medical procedures what most other species would regard as inventive forms of murder. We even perform radical surgery on ourselves for purely cosmetic reasons.

In essence, we’d be Space Orcs.

I do hope you realize I’m going to be picking up this stuff and running with it right? 

Our jaws have too many TEETH in them, so we developed a way to WELD METAL TO OUR TEETH and FORCE THE BONES IN OUR JAW to restructure over the course of years to fit them back into shape, and then we continue to wear metal in out mouths to keep them in place. 

We formed cohabitative relationships with tiny mammals and insects we keep at bay from bothering us by death, often using little analouge traps. 

And by god, we will eat anything. 

• We use borderline toxic peppers to season our food. 
• We expose ourselves to potentially lethal solar radiation in the pursuit of darkening our skin. 
• We risk hearing loss for the opportunity to see our favorite musicians live. 
• We have a game where two people get into an enclosed area and hit each other until time runs out/one of them pass out
• We willingly jump out of planes with only a flimsy piece of cloth to prevent us from splattering against the ground. 
• Our response to natural disasters is to just rebuild our buildings in the exact same places. 
• We climb mountains and risk freezing to death for bragging rights
• We invented dogs. We took our one time predators and completely domesticated them. 
• On a planet full of lions, tigers and bears, we managed to advance further and faster than any other species on the planet. 

Klingons and Krogan and Orcs ain’t got shit on us

We drink ethanol (in concentrations high enough to be used as an effective as microbicide or a solvent!) for the express purpose of achieving blood toxicity and disrupting normal brain function… AS A RECREATIONAL ACTIVITY!

On the same subject, we also deliberately incinerate assorted substances and then inhale the particulate-heavy smoke and vapor resulting for the same effect. EVEN IN THE FACE OF SAID SUBSTANCES BEING CARCINOGENIC, BECAUSE WE JUST DON’T GIVE A FUCK.

Humans do not have biological castes. Kill their commander and another will take its place. Soldiers left alone on a planet will start farming and manufacturing to survive. Farmers and manufacturers will take up arms and kill you if pressed. Just because two humans look different doesn’t mean they cannot do each other’s jobs.

Breeding does not kill them. A single human can mate dozens or hundreds of times in a lifetime. They often do so as recreation. Xenobiology team six believes they do not have a mating season but this is too strange to be true.

Their appendages are not designed for hitting, so they developed special training to make them very good at hitting anyhow. 

The proteins making up their bodies are toxic and cause prion disease. Do not touch anything humans have touched. Do not consume earth foods. Fire does not adequately remove this contamination.

Humans perceive sixteen times the colors we do. Do not hide in bushes or vines from humans. They can distinguish your pelt from the foliage with ease.

We tried venting waste gas into the tunnels to kill the humans when they attacked. Turns out they breathe it. 

Everything on their planet came from a single biological strain. They developed comprehensive genetics BEFORE they developed space travel. 

They lack radio receptors and cannot be brought into compliance with right-thought simply by broadcasting to them. Even after we learned how to translate it into sound-waves one of their hatchlings drove the Great Authority mad by responding to every demand with a single question: “Why?” 

Humans are not born with dedicated skills and knowledge but are designed for open ended learning and assimilation. They can even assume the characteristics of other species, when the young is raised by non-humans.

Humans seems to have developed a skill based on recognizing patterns. Meaning they will often see through most of our sound-coded military transmissions because they WILL find what is the same and what is not and they WILL decode it eventually, turning this knowledge against us in a potential war.

Turns out humans are also well versed in the art of encryption and keeping what they want secret. Have you studied some human encryption? They do not have only one, they have a lot and by that I mean A LOT of ways they can keep the information they want secret. Numbers turned into words, words turned into shapes, shapes meaning coordinates, numbers meaning words, numbers meaning numbers that, if you have the right “key”, you can then turn into another set of numbers that actually are words. 

AND THEY WERE USING THOSE AGAINST THEMSELVES, AGAINST OTHER FACTIONS OF THE SAME SPECIES. FOR CENTURIES. CAN YOU IMAGINE THEIR PROFICIENCY IN THE ART OF KEEPING THINGS SECRETS AND SECURED?

Si’il’nda, one of the member of the Yul’garn Expedition has been able to obtain something humans call a “Crosswords”. Basically the point is to find words based on the number of frames, hints and how each word is crossing with other possible words in order to complete the grid. You’ve read it clear alright, what we would believe is a weekly training for highly competent members of the Communication Cast, they’re doing it. But it’s not a mental training for them. Actually, a lot of humans can do crosswords. And they find it ENTERTAINING. It’s a RECREATION TO THEM.

A lot of my fellow members of the War Across The Stars Cast asked me and others of the High Knowledge Cast if we couldn’t simply wipe them out by killing their king, queen, or anything that is at the top of their hierarchy and is keeping everything organized via Mind-Wave Suggestions.

First of all, humans do not have Mind-Wave receptors. It does not seems so, but there is a state of sleep where humans seems to be really active…albeit in something they call “Dreams”. More specifically what humans seems to be calling “REM stage”. In this state, they “Dream” and they produce an insane amount of waves that could be similar to mind-waves used by our All-Mighty Queen. I think you all know about the first “Wave Incident” where fourteen members of the High Risk Studies cast ended up believing they were, and I quote : “ “Pink” “Albatrosses” in “tuxedos” having a dance party at a chocolate factory”, ending up making a mess of several laboratories and perturbing other important experiments. Let that sink in for a moment. A human suggested to a handful of highly intelligent members of our species that they were animals in clothing dancing…and they were ASLEEP. 

Now back to the subject. Humans are not helped or suggested or directed by any Mind-Wave. They do not have any Emperor, they do not have any Queen or King at least not in the way us Kiu’l’kians mean. One of a fellow researcher from another species in our Galactic Federation already said that they do not have biological cast and that when a commander is killed, another will take it’s place.

Humans do not have any vital Individual in their species. Of course, some humans are believed more important than other for skills, knowledge or that sort of things. But there is no “High-Conscious” or something that would means they would be disorganize and waste away. They are something that is very rare in this galaxy and has only been observed in primitive proto-sentient tribes on far away planets. Humans are multi-purpose. Each human could very well be a commander, given circumstances. Each human could very well be a fighter even though they never fought before.

No, they can’t be destroyed simply by killing the “Head of the Species”, they do not have one. Every human could be “the head” and even so they do not have only one. It is believed the social system of humans is even scarier still. There is no casts yet there is still some “types” but those “types” do not fit every humans yet every human could do things other humans do and it is also based on wealth, reputation and…well it’s really a mess. But it works for them, we’re still trying to find how. So, to all of our fellow brothers and sisters from the Warrior Casts, humans are technically a threat as long as there is still humans, do not try to find a commander or any other officer, it could indeed disorganize them for a moment and hit their spirit, but they will reorganize, find a new commander, new officers and go back at it again. They are persistent.

Anyway, a human alone is still a threat. A group of humans, even if they did not know each other, even if they’re not of the same brood, can organize themselves given the circumstances. An army of humans is a force not to underestimate. Because even though human soldiers are trained, it’s not their training that do everything. Even during a fight, humans think for themselves, they can take actions even if they’re not in contact with the center of commands. They can take opportunities whereas our warriors follow the set of orders without deviating from it. They can see how to achieve their goal even by doing things that progressively closes the gap between them and their goal. They are strategical.

I was speaking about Humans Strategies with a fellow scholar of the Hiulndir. What he said to me was horrifying. They’ve studied how humans fought during the Vilitras War and more particularly during the Kilkwa Slaughter. The whole thing is complex so I will make it short : They made their ennemies think they were winning. They let them inside their forts. They let them inside their homes. They made them think they had retreated. And as the whole Vilnar army was settling down, they returned. They were camouflaged, they had prepared explosives, they had prepared for when messengers would be sent away to warn the rest of the army and find reinforcements. They had prepared for any flying units with well placed turrets. They thought about everything. It was a slaughter. In short, as a warrior, never trust a human, what it is doing may not mean what you think, they can deceive you.

Humans really are a scary species.