okay, so, I love all the posts that run off the assumption that humans are the most ridiculous sapient species in the galaxy
but what if it’s just the other way around
what if humans are notoriously straitlaced and obsessed with protocol. the bureaucrats of the stars.
which is obviously something we would constantly try to complain about and disprove only for some Alpha Centaurian to be like “Captain, your species formalized spirituality, repeatedly, and a recurring theme therein is that the heavens themselves are run as a bureaucracy. Even your rebellions and revolutions are meticulously planned.”
it’s not a bad thing, per se, to have a human on your team — analytical minds, good diplomats (if only because one human etiquette system can be more complex and even contradictory than the vastly varied customs of an entire species) — but be prepared for them to call attention to moral quandaries and loopholes that never would have occurred to you.
and speaking of loopholes, do be careful, because the only thing worse than a human armed with an ironclad system of rules is a human who’s found a gaping hole in them.
“You’re telling me there was a mass movement to name a boat something dumb as a joke?”
“First of all, it wasn’t a mass movement, and second of all, the boat was by no means the first time nor the last.”
“…Exactly how much of Earth comedy is based on incongruous branding?”
Hear me out here: Humans as both.
Like most sapient species assume the above; humans are straitlaced, meticulous, and methodical. They follow strict rules which dictate their social interactions and even a slight variation is considered taboo. They are the quintessential bureaucrats.
Except when they’re not.
We’ve talked about humans method of scientific exploration and advancement involving a ridiculous amount of danger for all parties involved. But, ya know, we write it all down in a very orderly manner and get published and peer reviewed. And then other humans copy the incredibly dangerous experiment to see what happens for themselves.
Humans survived the volatile early years of their species rise through community-bonding. They put the needs of a group of individuals over all else; hunting as a group, eating as a group, raising families as a group, and sometimes dying as a group. This tendency to form strong bonds means that while a human’s signed contract can always be trusted. It also means that a human cannot be trusted to not rip that contract up and say “Fuck it” if an individual with whom they have a community-bond is in danger. Other species are baffled to discover that the individual in question need not be human, or even sapient. Stories of humans who have defended what would normally be considered prey animals by other omnivorous species, of humans who have killed to defend their non-human crew mates, even one story (surely just a story, it can’t be true) of an entire crew of humans who elevated a simple non-sapient cleaning bot to officer’s rank and threatened rebellion if it was decommissioned.
So, sure, humans are logical and awfully organized for such a diverse species. They make phenomenal bureaucrats and politicians. They’re highly sought after as strategists and advisors to royalty the galaxy over.
But, they’re also appear to take great pleasure in looking the rules dead in the eyes and very deliberately thumbing their nose as those rules. Because, the rules (and logic) say you probably shouldn’t jump off a cliff into unknown waters and humans have made multiple sports based entirely off that concept.
as an individual: logical, organized
as a species: hold my beer
I love that Stabby the robot has become part of the Canon of “human interaction with aliens”.
Thought about “Humans are space orcs/space fae”. There was a line talking about how theres a human working on a ship but no-ones entirely sure if they’re meant to be there, but they didn’t want to like offend the terrifying space orc.
What if the “drifter” archetype continues into space? Like maybe we negotiated for free travel with one of our allies, but because humans come from a death world and are terrfiying, and because humans can be oblivious, we just assume we can board on any ship going anywhere, nbd?
like not as stowaways. we’re not hiding. Like those wolves and wild dogs in russia that use the railways. Are YOU going to tell a wolf they shouldn’t be riding the train?!? Thought not.
Captain Diii did not become aware of the… problem until her ship was a full half-cycle out from the resupply station. She was halfway through a standard sweep of the ship, to be sure it was all in good order, when she came across a sort of cocoon constructed of light, sturdy fabric strung up in the end of service corridor alpha. It was not blocking access to anything of even minor importance, it simply was not meant to be there. It had no use she could discern, but it had no place aboard Captain Diii’s ship.
“What is the purpose of this?” Captain Diii asked the young technician assigned to the sector.
Their mood-spots cycled to anxiety-orange as their feet shuffled in discomfort. “The human called it her ‘hammock’ and said it would be out of the way there?”
A human. On Captain Diii’s ship. Her spots flashed from fear to anger to consternation and settled on worry. This had never before happened to her. She’d only been captain for two annuals, and she operated so far from any of the major travel hubs she had hoped she would not have to deal with this.
The problem had started after the war. The terrifying human ‘marines’ had been key to repelling the Kkoin invaders, with their wild recklessness and near-indestructibility. They had put an end to the war very quickly, and the terms of alliance in exchange for this service had been seen as extremely generous. They asked for transportation, mainly, since human FTL drives still lagged behind galactic standard. It had been assumed that by this they meant transporting goods and perhaps colonists by arrangement, but the wording had been ambiguous in translation.
That did happen, but in addition humans would simply… step onto ships going where they wanted to go. And stay. Who would dare contradict a human? Any one of them could turn deadly at a moment’s notice. Their hardiness and ferocity was legend. As of yet, no way of repelling them had been 100% effective. Their comfort range was massive, so keeping a ship hot or cold did not help. Scents designed to be maximally unpleasant to the human sensory array dissuaded some, but others would simply laugh and joke about them as they boarded anyway. It seemed they could acclimate to even the most noxious of scents within a few cycles.
Some humans would uproot their entire families and head for another planet, seemingly on a whim. Other humans would then go visit these families, and go back home, or not. Some humans traveled from planet to planet and station to station to satisfy their near-endless curiosity. Some traveled because to travel and see new things gave them pleasure, and then returned to their homes seemingly refreshed.
Such a strange species.
Captain Diii had been certain she had assigned someone to guard the ship and tell any hopeful humans that there was no space for them if they tried to board. Captain Diii did not have any facilities for humans aboard her ship. She hurried to the nearest communication pod and signaled for her second in command, Taa, to join her.
Taa already had anxiety flashing on her mood spots when she arrived.
“Taa, were you not assigned to inform humans that there was no space?” Captain Diii asked.
“I did, Captain!” Taa protested. “But she answered that she did not need much and walked right past me! What could I do?”
“And where is she now?” Diii asked.
“The kitchens. She… she said she wanted to be added to the duty roster, and that she enjoyed food preparation?”
That was another thing about the humans. They almost all wanted to work on the ships they boarded. Often they threw duty schedules into disarray by simply volunteering themselves to do tasks. At least this one seemed to know to ask the officer in charge of duties.
Diii found the human in the kitchens, as expected. She was very tall and thin for her type, of the morph ‘all bones’, if Diii was remembering the mandatory human-culture lessons that had been recently been added to ships-captain certification classes. She seemed to lack the jiggling bits that were so disconcerting on some humans. She did not reek of artificial fragrances as some humans did, instead scented pleasantly of human natural musk. Her head-covering stands, ‘hair’, was a friendly violet. Diii was certain this was not a natural coloration for the species. Her loose cloth coverings were earthy browns and creams, reminiscent of a child’s camouflage.
The human turned to look at Captain Diii, and showed her white-bone teeth in the body language ‘smile’, a gesture of friendliness and pleasure. Now that she was turned, Diii could see that half of the human’s head was shaved, and an array of electronics were installed directly in her skull. It was testament to their extraordinary healing powers that augmenting themselves with inorganic parts was commonplace in human culture. The humans had the technology to make their implants invisible, but some chose to make them visible because it looked ‘bad posterior’, which was somehow a good thing and aesthetically pleasing to them?
The human’s implants lit up, showing the exact blue of happiness, as she straightened up to give the human ‘salute’–a greeting to a superior. “Captain Diii? It’s good to meet you. I’m Elizabeth, but you can call me Zizi.”
Captain Diii could not help but be somewhat charmed. She must have the latest language-translation chip, Zizi’s speech was near perfect, and that she had something that functioned nearly like mood-spots was comforting. Her chosen name, as well, was easy to pronounce and nonthreateningly low-status.
“A greeting, Zizi,” Captain Diii answered carefully. “May I inquire your purpose aboard my ship?”
“Oh, I’m just a drifter,” Zizi said. “I just love traveling, you know? I heard the moons of Sigma7 were gorgeous, so I’m working my way that-a-ways.” Zizi’s pseudo-mood spot lights switched to anticipation before cycling back to happiness. “I’ll be off your ship at the next supply depot, if I can find someone heading more that direction.”
Ah, the ‘drifter’ type. Captain Diii had heard of them. ‘ship-hoppers’. An entire sub-class of humans who wandered the galaxy simply because they did not want to do anything else. They were famously the most difficult to dissuade from boarding a ship, and most likely to board from strange ports and going strange directions. Clearly it was not Taa’s fault she had been unable to keep Zizi out, and Diii signaled brief apology toward her.
“I won’t be any trouble,” Zizi continued. “I can set my hammock up anywhere to sleep, if it’s in your way?”
“The location you have chosen is… acceptable,” Captain Diii allowed. Zizi’s hair’s constant show of friendly had her own spots heading toward that color in automatic prosocial response. It was somewhat disconcerting. “I will leave you to your work,” Captain Diii said, retreating, and Zizi smiled and threw another quick salute before turning back to the food on the stove. Her implants showed concentration and curiosity, and then Captain Diii was outside the room with her again.
She turned toward Taa, who was still concerned. “I have heard that ships with a human listed on their crew roster have a 30% lower chance of being targeted by pirates?” Taa volunteered.
“Yes, yes,” Captain Diii mused. The risk was very low to begin with, especially for a ship like hers that did not haul valuable cargo, but anything that lowered it further could not be all bad. “It is not your fault in any case, Taa. Nothing could have prevented this human from boarding.”
Taa relaxed some, and Captain Diii returned to her inspection of the ship. Then she went to the helm and transmitted her updated crew roster to the main control base, encrypted only very lightly.
It certainly would not be bad to be known to have a human aboard.
on the subject of Humans Are Space Orcs i keep thinking it would be funny if ‘pursuit predator’ humans got together with an ‘ambush predator’ feliform species. and like. humans enjoy walking around with their friends! and the feliforms enjoy huddling in a concealed location with their friends! and it takes all of half an hour for a human to pick up a scarf and make a sling to take their pal with them while they go grab some lunch.
our new friends are like ‘are you sure this isn’t an inconvenience’ and the humans are like ‘are you kidding we do this with terran cats whether they like it or not’
also the team-up of humans and the feliform species gives most herbivore species in the galaxy screaming nightmares because here is a mobile tower that will follow you for 16 hours straight and it’s carrying a bag full of sneaky murder like it’s a baby this is not okay
Okay, so the whole humans are space orcs/earth is space Australia thing has me thinking: what about grooming/pampering?
Like, a lot of us go to spas/salons (or do the cheaper at home versions) to literally get hair ripped from our bodies using a large variety of different methods, to obtain our own personal desired levels of body hair. And we call it pampering. What if humans are the only ones who do that? Aliens that cut/dye hair, comb/style it in totally unique ways to suit themselves, but pull it out completely? What kind of creature tortures itself like that?
And we have so many ways of doing it. Tweezing, waxing, threading, hair removal creams that can burn your skin to name a few.
Plus there are facials that leave your face red and splotchy for hours afterward because they pick at your skin to remove gunk.
Massages, where in order to feel good they have to hurt you to remove the tension from your muscles, so while eventually it feels good, it hurts first.
We twist ourselves into weird positions to paint our toenails because our knees get in the way (not so painful, but reasonably uncomfortable).
We are willing to sit still for obscene amounts of time to get our hair/nails/make up done, even though humans are notoriously fidgety.
So some aliens at first would probably think we’re super vain (and some humans are), but more experienced aliens would be like:
“no, that’s just something the humans enjoy. It’s how they ‘treat themselves.’”
“But, Skrill, she’s literally ripping hair out of her face?”
“It’s how she gets her eyebrows - how did she put it? - ‘on fleek.’ Compliment them, humans are thrilled when you compliment them when they spend a lot of time on face hair removal.”
About twelve years ago, a man died in high orbit over Tau Ceti V.
His name was Drake McDougal, and aside from a few snapshots and vague anecdotes from his drinking buddies, that’s probably all we’ll ever know about him. Another colony-born man with little records and little documentation, working whatever asteroid field the Dracs deigned to allow them. Every now and then a Drac gunship would strut on through the system, Pax Draconia and all that. But that was it.
One fine day, one of those gunships had a misjump. A bad one. It arrived only ninety clicks above atmo, with all its impellers blown out by the gravatic feedback of Tau Ceti V’s gravity well. The Dracs scraped enough power together for a good system-wide broadbeam and were already beginning the Death Chant when they hit atmo.
People laughed at the recording of sixty Dracs going from mysterious chanting to “’what-the-fuck’ing” for years after they forgot the name Drake McDougal. The deafening “CLANG” and split second of stunned silence afterwards never failed to entertain. Drake had performed a hasty re-entry seconds after the gunship and partially slagged his heatshield diving after it. Experts later calculated he suffered 11Gs when he leaned on the retro to match velocities with the Dracs long enough to engage the mag-grapples on his little mining tug.
Even the massively overpowered drive of a tug has its limits, and Drake’s little ship hit hers about one and a half minutes later. Pushed too far, the tug’s fusion plant lost containment just as he finished slingshotting the gunship into low orbit. (It was unharmed, of course; the Drac opinion of fusion power best translated as “quaint,” kind of how we view butter churns.)
It was on the local news within hours, on newsnets across human space within days. It was discussed, memorialized, marveled upon, chewed over by daytime talk-show hosts, and I think somebody even bought a plaque or some shit like that. Then there was a freighter accident, and a mass-shooting on Orbital 5, and of course, the first Vandal attacks in the periphery.
The galaxy moved on.
Twelve years is a long time, especially during war, so twelve years later, as the Vandal’s main fleet was jumping in near Jupiter and we were strapping into the crash couches of what wee enthusiastically called “warships,” I guaran-fucking-tee you not one man in the entire Defense Force could remember who Drake McDougal was.
Well, the Dracs sure as hell did.
Dracs do not fuck around. Dozens of two-kilometer long Drac supercaps jumped in barely 90K klicks away, and then we just stood around staring at our displays like the slack-jawed apes we were as we watched what a real can of galactic whoop-ass looked like. You could actually see the atmosphere of Jupiter roil occasionally when a Vandal ship happened to cross between it and the Drac fleet. There’s still lightning storms on Jupiter now, something about residual heavy ions and massive static charges or something.
Fifty-eight hours later, with every Vandal ship reduced to slagged debris and nine wounded Drac ships spinning about as they vented atmosphere, they started with the broad-band chanting again. And then the communiqué that confused the hell out of us all.
“Do you hold out debt fulfilled?”
After the sixth or seventh comms officer told them “we don’t know what the hell you’re talking about” as politely as possible, the Drac fleet commander got on the horn and asked to speak to a human Admiral in roughly the same tone as a telemarketer telling a kid to give the phone to Daddy. When the Admiral didn’t know either, the Drac went silent for a minute, and when he came back on his translator was using much smaller words, and talking slower.
“Is our blood debt to Drake McDougal’s clan now satisfied?”
The Admiral said “Who?”
What the Drac commander said next would’ve caused a major diplomatic incident had he remembered to revert to the more complex translation protocols. He thought the Admiral must be an idiot, a coward, or both. Eventually, the diplomats were called out, and we were asked why the human race has largely forgotten the sacrifice of Drake McDougal.
Humans, we explained, sacrifice themselves all the time.
We trotted out every news clip from the space-wide Nets from the last twelve years. Some freighter cook that fell on a grenade during a pirate raid on Outreach. A ship engineer who locked himself into the reactor room and kept containment until the crew evacuated. Firefighter who died shielding a child from falling debris with his body, during an earthquake. Stuff like that.
That Dracs were utterly stunned. Their diplomats wandered out of the conference room in a daze. We’d just told them that the rarest, most selfless and honorable of acts - acts that incurred generations-long blood-debts and moved entire fleets - was so routine for our species that they were bumped off the news by the latest celebrity scandal.
Everything changed for humanity after that. And it was all thanks to a single tug pilot who taught the galaxy what truly defines Man.
This makes me cry
It had been so many cycles since the Drac incident, and even more since the Drake McDougal event, and the the galaxy had sort of come to the conclusion that humans were, well, human about things, and that they regarded their lives in completely incomprehensible ways.
Yet for all of the witnessed sacrifices, few warriors had ever been taught to recognise the most terrifying of human deeds. In a forgettable corner of the galaxy, in an unremarked planet with a previously less than recorded history, a party of six human security escorts bringing their rescued survivors to a hive ship became a party of five,
A lone human, holding one of their handheld ‘melee’ weapons wordlessly tilted their head to their commander, and stopped, standing in plain sight in the middle of a field.
Waiting.
When asked, the lower ranked humans simply said “She knows what’s she’s doing”. The human captain’s inexplicable statement “She’s buying us some time” made it as if their companion had stepped into some form of marketplace.
Katherine of Rescue Group’s fate was never confirmed, but no pursuit came that night. On the next dawn, when the hive ship was able to leave, the humans insisted we departed immediately, and did not go back for their companion.
We do not know for sure what became of Katherine of Rescue Group. All we know is that when pressed, the human captain explained to our own that the one who stayed had communicated an ancient human tradition, the rite of self sacrifice. In words, the captain explained, the look and the nod would mean “Go on. I’ll hold them off. It was not, as we thought, that this one warrior had sought victory over many enemies, but that they had calculated a trade off of the minutes or hours it could take to defeat a human, against the time needed by their companions.
Humans, as humans say, do not go gentle into that good night.
Worse, they do not go gentle into bad nights, worse days, or terrifying sunsets. Dawn seems to fill them with potency and rage, as if to call upon the solar gods and tell the deities to come down here and say that to their human faces. We do not know how long she bought us, but we, the hive now called K’thrn, understand what it means to have someone expend their existence for the survival of others.
I’m usually pretty particular about the sorts of traits that get assigned as humanity’s “special thing” in sci-fi settings, but I have to admit that I have a weakness for settings where the thing humanity is known for is something tiny and seemingly inconsequential that it wouldn’t normally occur to you to think of as a distinctive trait.
Like, maybe we have a reputation as a bunch of freaky nihilists because we’re the only species that naturally has the capacity to be amused by our own misfortune.
Alien: Why are you happy? You’ve been seriously injured!
Human: *struggling to control laughter* Yeah, but I can imagine what that must have looked like from the outside, and it’s pretty hilarious.
Alien: …
Captain XXlr’y: First Officer Jane The Human, your olifactory protuberance is severely damaged! Why is this a matter for mirthful celebration???
First Officer Jane The Human: A SPARKLY LITTLE POMERANIAN THING WITH A GODDAMN UNICORN HORN CHASED ME STRAIGHT INTO A WALL! OH MY GOD! DID YOU SEE THAT? I RAN STRAIGHT INTO THE WALL.
Captain XXlr’y: Yes I just observed this sequence of events! It was terrible!
First Officer Jane The Human: OKAY WHO GOT THAT ON CAMERA, I WANNA SEE.
Captain XXlr’y: So you more fully understand that this is a situation you should never get into again?
First Officer Jane The Human: SO I CAN SEND THE VIDEO TO MY MOM!
Captain XXlr’y: For… for the solicitation of maternal concern…?
First Officer Jane The Human: NO, BECAUSE SHE’LL THINK IT’S HILARIOUS TOO.
viewings of the ancient human art based seemingly entierly around purposefully inducing misfortune are a source of constant xeno-anthropological arguments. As near as anyone can discern, these acts are some kind of core human performance form- so meaningful to their culture that recording these acts was very nearly the first concern on the invention of moving visual media.
Somewhat more disconcerting is the fact that these aren’t just recordings of accidental happenstance, but carefully choreographed, practiced, and refined to such a degree that there are nearly species wise recognizable symbols and routines performed.
There are thesis’ on ‘large wedding cake destroyed’, and hotly argued debate on the purpose of ‘Jackass’
Reblogging this again to suggest a different view of humanity, one where it’s not that we find injuring ourselves to be hilarious is the “defining quirk”. No, this one’s got to do with why you always want a human engineer or programmer (or both) if your ship’s going to be within two parsecs of a human.
Humans break things. They don’t mean to, and it can’t just be their curiosity – other species are curious, but they don’t break things like humans do. Humans make things stop working by trying to do things that they were never meant to do in the first place. I should know, I’ve seen it firsthand – one of the stubborn little bastards decided he was going to get the holodeck to show him an outdated media format called a “Vee-Ay-Chess”, and he spent twenty chrons trying to fix it after it started belching black smoke – and then he was at it AGAIN! And don’t even get me started on how he almost wiped our nav computer to try and play something called “Wolfenstein”.
But the scary part is, for every time it fails, there’s three times it works. There was a time when our warp drive broke down. You know, it was a Caledon Industries model, they’re cheap but they like to break. The problem was that it was a Tritium Reactron Fitting, and it got wedged in the back. Like, “take the ship apart and put it back together to get the fitting out” wedged. We were convinced we were going to be stuck for a few days before our signal got noticed.
And then the human – same one who broke the holodeck twice with his Vee-Ay-Chess crap and almost wiped all our nav data with his Wolfenstein game – he goes into the engine room and begins calling over the intercom for random tools, trash, parts of other things that were working just fine. He spends maybe twelve chrons in there, and when he comes out, he tells us to fire up warp. It sails us right to the nearest star system, no problems. And then the chief engineer takes a look at what he’s done. It looks like – I kid you not – it looks like the entrails of a Galthan Wingbeast. One that got splattered by a bomb.
Says he “jury rigged” it, whatever the hell that means, and we should get it replaced before it breaks again. And that’s why I never go anywhere without a human anymore.
Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles,
tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they
don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight
them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit
space-magic countermeasures out of their arses - but they’re as likely
as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the
process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and
accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually
happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.
So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.
Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.
THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE’S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING
vulcan science academy: why do you need another warp core
humans: we’re going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast
vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast
humans: hahaha yeah
humans: it did tho
vsa: IT EXPLODED
humans: it exploded twice as fast
I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as they’re unique wacky superscience shenanigans.
Yeah, I love this.
Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms - they’re basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.
Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their “cooler” heads take action in months or weeks.
All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.
klingons: okay we don’t get it
vulcan science academy: get what
klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way
klingons: why do you let them run your federation
vulcan science academy: look
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip.
vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.
vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.
klingons: …. can we be a part of your federation
Come to think of it, I mean. Look at the “first human warp drive” thing in the movie. That was… Not how Vulcans would have done it.
you know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down. minor malfunctions that irritated O’Brien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird shit that befell Voyager and all the starships Enterprise. what was the weirdest malfunction DS9 ever had? the senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the station’s core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computer’s hard drive out for a memory card from a PlayStation 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.
you know what, I’m not done with this post. let’s talk about the Pegasus. the USS Fucking Pegasus,
testbed for the first Starfleet cloaking device. here we have a handful
of humans working in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation
of a treaty with the Romulans. they’re playing catchup trying to develop
a technology other species have had for a century. and what do they do?
do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely, just
see if they can match what other species have? nope. they decide, hey,
while we’re at it, while we’re building our very first one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, let’s see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we can fly through planets while we’re invisible.
“but why” said the one Vulcan in the room.
“because that would fucking rule” said the humans, high-fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.
there
must be like twenty different counselling groups for non-human
engineering students at Starfleet Academy, and every week in every
single one of them someone walks in and starts up with a story like “our
assignment was to repair a phaser emitter and my one human classmate
built a chronometric-flux toaster that toasts bread after you’ve eaten
it.”
Humans get mildly offended by the way they are presented in non-human media.
Like: “Guys, we totally wouldn’t do that!” But this always fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say: “You totally did.”
“That was ONE TIME.”
There’s that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about electricity.
And human historians go, “Oh, uh, this is historically accurate, but also kind of boring.” To which the producers respond: “How is doing THIS CRAZY THING boring????????”
There are entire serieses of horror movies where the premise is “We stopped paying attention to the human and ey found the technology.”
reblog for new meta.
RE that last line: McGuyver.
“MacGuyver” is the equivalent of Vulcan vintage human horror television.
during orientation at a human college, vulcans are presented with a list of swear words.
“what is the word ‘fuck’ for,” the innocent young vulcans want to know. “surely there are more logical intensity modifiers.”
“yeah, you’d think so,” say the weary, jaded vulcan professors. “you’d really fucking think so.”
there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’.
This is why the Federation is the only organisation to ever stand a chance against the Borg
The Borg can adapt to the brilliant millitary strategies of the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingons and even the cold logical intellectual prowess of the vulcans
The Borg weren’t prepared for a starship captain to lure them into his 50′s noir detective holo-novel and then machine gun them to death with a weapon made out of hard light
ANDORIAN YEOMAN: Captain! The replicators are malfunctioning, and the
ambassador’s party will be here in an hour!
KIRK: Don’t worry. We got this. *calls engineering* Hey Scotty, you
were in the dorms at Starfleet, right?
SCOTTY: Aye.
KIRK: And you weren’t allowed to have large appliances in your dorm rooms,
right?
SCOTTY: Nae, we were not.
KIRK: Ok. So, the ambassador and co are gonna be here in an hour, and we
need to set up a feast for them. And we have no replicators.
SCOTTY: *catching on* Right! I’ll take me team to the mess hall and
we’ll get right on it!
KIRK: Thanks. Kirk out.
ANDORIAN YEOMAN: …What just happened?
KIRK: Ah, you weren’t in a dorm, I see.
ANDORIAN YEOMAN: No, I was part of the offworlders’ fraternity… we had a
kitchen…
KIRK: So, you never fried eggs on tinfoil on a flat iron. Never painted a
can of stew black, poked a hole in the top, and set it in a sunny window to
slow-cook all day. Never used an instant coffeepot to boil rice to pour the
stew over.
ANDORIAN YEOMAN: *horrified* N-No, sir.
KIRK: We’re gonna treat the ambassador’s team to a Genuine Earth-Style Scholar’s
Feast!
*comm chirps* *Kirk answers*
SCOTTY: Well, we don’t have an iron or a coffeepot, but the warp core
produces heat and we think we can rig a pipe from one of the vents to a storage
locker to make an oven; Jones has volunteered some of his beer – good lad! –
and we’re gonna get the guys in Science to extract some of the yeast and grab
some of those grain samples and see if we can get some bread going. If not,
we’ll settle for more beer. Also the Weapons team guys think they can set the
phasers to shoot through a metal mesh screen and get us grilled cheese. So
we’re off to a good start.
Karikki was sitting in the ship’s mess when the most recent addition to the crew stumbled into the room and collapsed into a chair with a relieved groan, dropping her head onto the table.
“Rough shift?” ie said, making a sympathetic noise as ie broke off another piece of ir food pack.
Melanie Dupré, recently hired on as a ship’s mechanic and as of one month ago the only human crewmember of the Xanaki Star, mumbled something into the table before lifting her head so that her translator could actually be of use.
“I could swear the ventilation ducts actually hate me personally,” she said. “I’ve been running around all day.” A look of horror crossed her features then, and she groaned again, dragging her hand across her eyes. “And I left my food packs in my room. Goddamn it.”
Karikki churred soothingly. “Don’t worry about it, you can have one of ours,” ie said, getting to ir feet and digging one of the vacuum-sealed silver packs out of the pantry.
Melanie made a noise that Karikki had learned to interpret as grateful and peeled the pack open, looking down at it dubiously. “You’re sure this is okay?”
“We’re nutritionally compatible!” Karikki said. “The captain checked, before we hired you on. Just in case you ran out of your own supplies. It should be fine.”
“Okay. Thanks,” she said, breaking off a square of the compressed nutrition block and popping it into her mouth.
A look crossed her face then that it took Karikki a moment to identify: disgust, ie realized. That was disgust–which was made all the clearer when Melanie gagged and grabbed a napkin, spitting the square out into her hand. “Oh my god,” she said.
Karikki could feel ir antennae fluttering anxiously. “What’s wrong? Are you okay? Is that a bad texture for humans?”
Melanie wiped her mouth, scrubbing at her tongue with the side of her hand. She shook her head. “No, the texture’s fine, it’s just like one of our protein blocks. It’s the [——], I’m sorry, I don’t mean to offend you, but it’s awful! How can you eat that?”
Karikki flicked ir ear. “Sorry, say that again? I think your translator cut out in the middle. It’s the what?”
![theotherguysride:
“ stephendann:
“ fattyatomicmutant:
“ space-australians:
“ the-real-seebs:
“ madddscience:
“ An interesting sci-fi short story from 4chan.
[Imgur]
”
That is some fine writing.
”
The Imgur link is broken so:
[Series of posts on...](http://68.media.tumblr.com/c926250ea0fa5af724048f1813ed7dc2/tumblr_nhetbcEijo1tcuhpfo1_500.jpg)
