katyfield:

Humans are space orcs

I would to add to the whole humans are weird/ space orcs tag. As it has come to my attention how much it would probably freak aliens out that we can loose the majority of some of our most important internal organs and be pretty much fine. (Obviously some would need dietary changes or vitamin supplements but honestly a small price to pay).

Like imaging the horror an alien would feel over learning that the human in their care literally has half a brain but is functioning comepltely normal. Arguably the most important organ a human has, the one that controls everything and makes sure they’re alive, can have half of it removed with little to no difference to the human (it is more common than you would think and is often used to treat bad epilepsy)

Ah ha! But it doesn’t end there. There are many other vital organs humans can do without/ most of it gone. Here’s a list of a few which I think aliens would be horrified to know:

– Part or even a whole lung (and what’s even more remarkable is the remaining lung can work with 70-80% of the efficiency of 2 lungs, amazing right ?!)

– You can have your entire stomach removed! They just attach your oesophagus to your intestines! (Most of your digestion takes place in you small intestine anyway so it’s not greatly affected, some supplements are needed and the diet changes a bit but overall not too much different (not including dumping syndrome (no that is nothing to do with poos but actually blood sugar)))

– You can have your spleen removed and your stomach just gets attached to your liver

– Even more fascinating is that you can have up to 65% of your liver removed and the it’ll grow back by a year! A full liver can be grown from ¼ of the original. The liver is one of the only organs where you can completely remove whole sections and it’ll just grow back like nothing ever happened (livers are freaky man).

– You can straight up have your gallbladder taken away, and it has little effect, you just don’t have anywhere to store your bile, but that’s a pretty minor thing retrospectively.

– Finally you can have a whole kidney removed (or in some cases it’s not even taken out) and the remaining one works just as well as when there were 2. Even more unbelievable is the fact sometimes if both of someone’s kidneys aren’t working doctors will sometimes leave them in and just put in a 3rd kidney which does all the work.

– One final thing I would like to add is the fact that humans can have their entire anatomy flipped around in their body and not even know!

I thought this would be a good entry to the humans are space orcs tag as our bodies are such finely tuned survival machines yet we can be missing so much of vital organs with little impact. I know I would be freaked out by these weird creatures if I was an alien. Like humans are scary enough with our weapons, endurance, recklessness and healing capabilities. Couple that with being able to have major parts of our anatomy missing and you’ve got yourselves one scary race. (Honestly humans scare me sometimes). I think this would be especially creepy if with other alien species any damage or loss of parts of organs results in almost guaranteed death and then there’s is humans who can rock up with half a brain and one lung, missing an arm of leg and be like “right who we fighting next”.