Sunday, January 10, 2021

Tumblr Thread: Humans Are Weird, Durable Space Orcs


One Tumblr thread leads into another, and they're all focused on honoring the strangeness of human beings. It's a fun shift in perspective to consider an alien fleet arriving, chatting it up with some humans, and ultimately being impressed/baffled over how humans pull off the crazy stuff that they do. Maybe aliens are the normal ones. 

1.

Text - Text - arcticfoxbear 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

2.

Text - crazy-pages Alien: "I'm sorry, what did you just say your comfortable temperature range is?" Human: "Honestly we can tolerate anywhere from -40 to 50 Celcius, but we prefer the 0 to 30 range." Alien: I'm sorry, did you just list temperatures below freezing?" Human: "Yeah, but most of us prefer to throw on scarves or jackets at those temperatures it can be a bit nippy." Other human: "Nah mate, I knew this guy in college who refused to wear anything past his knees and elbows until it was -2

3.

Text - Text - val-tashoth "You're telling me that you have.. settlements. On islands with active volcanism?" "Well, yeah. I'm not about to tell Iceland and Hawaii how to live their lives. Actually, it's kind of a tourist attraction." "What, the molten rock?" "Well, yeah! It's not every day you see a mountain spew out liquid rocks! The best one is Yellowstone, though. All these hot springs and geysers from the supervolcano-" "You ACTIVELY SEEK OUT ACTIVE SUPERVOLCANOES?" "Shit, man, we swim in th

4.

Text - Text - wuestenratte Sounds like the "Damned" trilogy by Alan Dean Foster. the-grand-author "And you say the poles of your world would get as low as negative one hundred with wind chill?" "Yup, with blizzards you cant see through every other day just about." "Amazing! when did you manage to send drones that could survive such temperatures?" well, actually.." 44 what?" .we kinda....... sent. people.." .what?"

5.

Text - Text - "we sent-" "no yeah I heard you I just- what? You sent... HUMANS... to a place one hundred degrees below freezing?" "y-yeah" "and they didnt.. die?" "Well the first few did" "PEOPLE DIED OF THE COLD AND YOUR SOLUTION WAS TO SEND MORE PEOPLE???!?!?!?" burntcopper 'But surely you have records of volcanic activity doing tremendous damage to human settlements.' 'Yep. Pompeii is legendary. Entire cities went. Towns buried under lava, peoples' brains boiled in the first rush of heat, loa

6.

Text - Text - "Are you seriously telling me this volcano is legendary for killing several urban conurbations and you built on top of it AGAIN?" "In our defence it hasn't actually done it since.' What about earthquake-prone areas? Tell me you're at least vaguely sensible about those. "Oh yeah. After the first major earthquake that flattens a city, we build them better.' 159,505 notes

7.

Text - Text - iztarshi: Inspired by various tumblr posts. Humans quickly get a reputation among the interplanetry alliance and the reputation is this: when going somewhere dangerous, take a human. Humans are tough. Humans can last days without food. Humans heal so fast they pierce holes in themselves or inject ink for fun. Humans will walk for days on broken bones in order to make it to safety. Humans will literally cut off bits of themselves if trapped by a disaster. You would be amazed what hu

8.

Text - Text - Humans are adorable. teaboot: Supporting evidence: 1. Humans say'ow', even if they haven't actually been hurt. It's just a thing they say when they think they might have been hurt, but aren't sure yet. 2. Humans collect shiny things and decorate their bodies and nests with them. The shinier the better, although each individual has a unique taste for style and colouring 3. Humans are not an aquatic or even amphibious species, but they flock to bodies of water simply to play in it. T

9.

Text - Text - 6. Some humans use pigments and dyes to make their bodies flashy and colourful! They even attach shiny dangly bits to their cartalidgous membranes! 7. Humans are very clever, and sometimes adopt creatures from other species into their family units. They don't seem to notice the obvious differences, and often raise them alongside their own young! 8. If a human sees another creature in distress, they can commonly be observed trying to help! Even at their own risk, most humans are dee

10.

Text - Photography - 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.

11.

Text - Text - 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

12.

Text - Text - 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

13.

Text - Text - More seriously, humans do have a number of advantages even among Terrestrial life. Our endurance, shock resistance, and ability to recover from injury is absurdiy 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 i

14.

Text - Text - • 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

15.

Text - Text - In essence, we'd be Space Orcs. ia LikeAlangh.org 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 bot

16.

Text - • 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 can we talk about how pursuit predation is fucking terrifying it's one thing to face down a cheetah, which will slam into you at 60 mph and break your neck it's another thing to run very quickly to get away from a thing, only to hav

17.

Text - WAITING WHEN YOU WAKE UP and you split! again! but it keeps following you. always in the corner of your eye. until you just die we are scary motherfuckers ok

Submitted by:

No comments:

Post a Comment