Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

flvffs:

archivistofnerddom:

ceemoy:

howlingguardian:

Been seeing a lot of these Humans Are Space Orcs posts around- which is good, because I love them- and I started thinking: in sci-fi stories, humans in the future often have a bit of genetic engineering- like disease immunity or faster healing or even just a lack of body hair.

And I had a thought- what if that’s just us? What if we’re the only species to engineer ourselves like that? Imagine how freaked out they’d be;

“You’re telling me that you alter your own genetic code?”

Or take it a little further- we’re the only species to use vaccines. Every other race just toughed it out and evolved past it, but humans injected ourselves with weakened diseases to make ourselves stronger. 

Or even further back, when people used to drink poison to gain an immunity- imagine that reaction:

“OH MY GROP THEY DRINK POISON TO GET STRONGER THAT’S IT FUCK THIS PLANET I’M OUTTA HERE”

Equally, what if we’re the only ones who don’t use genetic engineering on a mass scale? Like, we just make machines that’ll adapt for us, and everyone else does it by biology - much slower, but much less chance of it breaking down at the critical moment?

Imagine a species who’ve spent decades adapting a small group to colonise a planet with an inhospitable atmosphere, almost ready to start their mission, and along come the humans like “masks on, lads, here we go!”

And imagine the reactions that humans get when they come along in their environmental suits. Like, we have everything our bodies need to survive in our suits and then we go off and explore. We use our suits to set up shelter that we can live in without our suits.

And the aliens are uber-confused by the fact that we don’t wait to adapt to an environment. We go with what we’ve got and then change the planet to meet our needs. (“What do you mean your bodies aren’t suited for this environment? Why are you here then? Wait, you can deal with it because of that mask?”)

Can you imagine how frustrating it must be when they’ve spent years adapting a group to survive a planet they want to colonize and humans just show up and go, “Eh, we’ve got breathing masks. Let’s go!”?

@words-writ-in-starlight