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

stardustfromvelaris:

humans-are-seriously-weird:

leontarius:

humans-are-seriously-weird:

waiteverybodyhide:

humans-are-seriously-weird:

devilshornrandom:

humans-are-seriously-weird:

mentallydobious:

humans-are-seriously-weird:

that-obnoxious-roommate:

humans-are-seriously-weird:

mentallydobious:

humans-are-seriously-weird:

hermionously:

humans-are-seriously-weird:

oceanstops:

humans-are-seriously-weird:

nightowlett:

humans-are-seriously-weird:

Hey all! Some of you are asking about the bear incident. I will tell you in due course, but for now ill give you a teaser

It involves a bear, a tree, and a lack of pants

Well I’d be worried if the bear was wearing pants…

To clarify. Im lacking pants

hopefully you’re fully equipped with as many pants as you need at this point in time, i’d be much more worried if you didn’t have any pants at all.

To clarify AGAIN: AT THE TIME OF THE BEAR INCIDENT I WAS LACKING PANTS

CURRENTLY I HAVE MANY PANTS AT LEAST 2 OK

Okay but did the tree have pants

THE BEAR HAD NO PANTS I HAD NO PANTS
AND THE TREE HAS MY PANTS OK

YOU WERE ROBBED BY A TREE???

…..maybe…..not exactly

As a non-native speaker I always wonder: pants as in two long tubes of fabric that go down to your ankles or pants as in the underwear.
Please tell me it’s the latter

I mean at that point it was both

A tree panty thief… i always knew trees were suspicious…

Wait, how does the bear fit in??

DAMMIT YOU GUYS

I WAS GONNA GIVE THIS ONE TO YOU LATER WITH PROPER THOUGHT AND WRINTING BUT NO YA’LL HAVE NO CHILL

BUCKLE UP FRIENDS YOU’RE IN FOR A WILD RIDE

Ok so i’m twelve. little twelve year old Rekina. I was a scout for most of my life, so the forest is like home to me ok. In a city i get super turned around, can’t find my way around to save my life 

but drop me in a forest? man ill have an entire camp set up and find my way out in less than a day ok im wilderness survivor exrtordinare

So i’m out camping with my troop. We’re big kids now so the adults dicthed us for our very own solo three day hike

let me just say that my troop didn’t like me. I was the quiet nerd kid who read alone in my tent and kicked everyones aass at lighting fires, when they all were sneaking in booze, peeping on girls, and failing to light fires

So one afternoon while i’m out hunting for supper (a task no one has succeeded at, they just wanted me out of the way. fools) i discover i severly have to pee. So i got ahead and prop mysef agaisnt a tree as you do

Now, when you’re a girl, you don’t get the lucury of just whipping it out and pissing on a mushroom ok you have to remove all clothing from the lower half and squat agsint a tree like a weight lifter

so im doing my thing, my pants around my ankles, when i hear the bushes near by rustling

Those fucking boys i swear im going to kick their asses if they’re spying on me

but im midstream and you don’t just stop midtsream ina  forest cause then you drip all over your under wear and its not fun

I get two more seconds of peaceful pee time 

BAM the bush fucking explodes 

i scream, and almost fall over because my legs are getting tired ok peeing in a forest is hard work for women let me get an amen

But its fine, i look over and it isn’t one of the boys

it’s a baby bear no threat to me

I continue about my buisness. 

wait

baby bear =

mama bear

Sure enouogh the second i think that she rears up from behind the bush

now this thing is gigantic im talking would knock an nba player away from the hoop and get a slam dunk with out even trying ok

huge

I don’t move. I;m racking my brain like ok what did the manual say to do what would indiana jones do shitshitshitshit well ok as long as it doesn’t see me im safe ill just wait for it to go away and make no noise

she looks over and roars

had i not already been peeing i would have pissed my pants

I was caught, literally, with my pants down.

I think its time to beat a hasty retreat i threw the manual and indiana jones out the window

id like to say i calmly made my escape, floating like a graceful ballerina

didnt happen

i waddled away like a psychotic penguin screaming and flailing and being decidedly ungraceful ok i would have made Mumble proud for how my my little feet were moving i was like a penguin tap star

I booked it, desperaty trying to pull up my pants so i can at least die not looking like Bert from mary poopins doing his ridiculous little dance

so im running for life, a big ass knife in my hand and i know i won’t be able to stab this thing 

or out run it

or out last it

i couldnt out anything it

but im good at climbing

I beeline for this massive oak and scramble up that thing like a penguin, squirel hybrid. I prop my self up on one f the high branches, stilling trying to pull up my pants, but that’s kind of hard while your ass is being tickled by fire ants

lets just say i took the short cut down

I plummeted face first out of the tree, screaming like a banshee

The bear screamed back andd ran away because when i say banshee i mean banshee ok i have the shriek of a dolphin on helium

suddenly im not falling. 

A branch had snagged my jeans and now i was dangling maybe ten feet of the ground by my pants

in a true, rekina, cliche move, i slip from the branch and crsh the ground completely unharmed (except for my bruise dignity) and somehow managed to not stab myself with my knife on the way down

on small problem

i left my pants in the tree. 

The branch had flung my three layers of pants three different ways

my underwear fluttered to the ground beside me like the graceful ballerina i wish i was

my long underwear was twisted around a branch not far above my head

and my jeans had been freaking rocketed into one of the highest branches, the bough too thin for me to climb

i so i put on my now fire ant infested under wear (after doing my best to clean them and quickly snag my long johns because i know one thing for certain

i still see baby bear

mama is coming back

I high tail it like i have never high tailed before ok i was hauling ass outta there

I sprint for a good minute or so when suddenly a brown blur shoot from he bush and im thinking oh shit ima dead man  so i do the only logcal thing because im going down fighting aint no bear gonna find me curled on the ground

i lashed out with my knife like a frickin knight in shining armour except im not a knight

and im in my under wear

and it wasn’t a bear

in my amazing survival stab the beast reflexes i didn’t notice how low to the ground i was aiming

i had stabbed a water rat

you can bet your ass im not wasting that meat

I scoop it up, its blood splatterd all over my face and strut back towards camp

i roll in there pantsless, covered in blood, dirt, and fire ant, grinning like a maniac

“I found supper”

none of the boys ever peeped on me again

How are you even still alive

I wish i knew

Mother fucker this is exactly why the aliens are never going to attack earth. A furious monster attacked a human youngling while as vulnerable as possible and the youngling not only survived, it also climbed a tree half naked, scared the monster away, and caught dinner for it’s pack members with a blade. Not to mention we’re all just chillin’. Laughing about a terrifying near death experience.

Story of my life bro (literally)

@dannyaches american scouts are freakin hardcore man…

Pal i be canadian we hardcore 🇨🇦 🍁

@space-australians

(via littlestartopaz)

alexandot:

“Is it actual clowns or people dressed up as clowns” is such a dip into the modern human psyche where we all just collectively know that “clown” is a species

(Source: hollyblueagate, via charminglyantiquated)

slyrider:

dalekteaservice:

radioactivepeasant:

On the topic of humans being everyone’s favorite Intergalactic versions  of Gonzo the Great:
Come on you guys, I’ve seen all the hilarious additions to my “humans are the friendly ones” post. We’re basically Steve Irwin meets Gonzo from the Muppets at this point. I love it. 

But what if certain species of aliens have Rules for dealing with humans?

• Don’t eat their food. If human food passes your lips/beak/membrane/other way of ingesting nutrients, you will never be satisfied with your ration bars again.
  
• Don’t tell them your name. Humans can find you again once they know your name and this can be either life-saving or the absolute worst thing that could happen to you, depending on whether or not they favor you. Better to be on the safe side.
• Winning a human’s favor will ensure that a great deal of luck is on your side, but if you anger them, they are wholly capable of wiping out everything you ever cared about. Do not anger them.
• If you must anger them, carry a cage of X’arvizian bloodflies with you, for they resemble Earth mo-skee-toes and the human will avoid them.
• This does not always work. Have a last will and testament ready.
• Do not let them take you anywhere on your planet that you cannot fly a ship from. Beings who are spirited away to the human kingdom of Aria Fiv-Ti Won rarely return, and those that do are never quite the same.

Basically, humans are like the Fair Folk to some aliens and half of them are scared to death and the others are like alien teenagers who are like “I dare you to ask a human to take you to Earth”.

We knew about the planet called Earth for centuries before we made contact with its indigenous species, of course. We spent decades studying them from afar.

The first researchers had to fight for years to even get a grant, of course. They kept getting laughed out of the halls. A T-Class Death World that had not only produced sapient life, but a Stage Two civilization? It was a joke, obviously. It had to be a joke.

And then it wasn’t. And we all stopped laughing. Instead, we got very, very nervous. 

We watched as the human civilizations not only survived, but grew, and thrived, and invented things that we had never even conceived of. Terrible things, weapons of war, implements of destruction as brutal and powerful as one would imagine a death world’s children to be. In the space of less than two thousand years, they had already produced implements of mass death that would have horrified the most callous dictators in the long, dark history of the galaxy. 

Already, the children of Earth were the most terrifying creatures in the galaxy. They became the stuff of horror stories, nightly warnings told to children; huge, hulking, brutish things, that hacked and slashed and stabbed and shot and burned and survived, that built monstrous metal things that rumbled across the landscape and blasted buildings to ruin.

All that preserved us was their lack of space flight. In their obsession with murdering one another, the humans had locked themselves into a rigid framework of physics that thankfully omitted the equations necessary to achieve interstellar travel. 

They became our bogeymen. Locked away in their prison planet, surrounded by a cordon of non-interference, prevented from ravaging the galaxy only by their own insatiable need to kill one another. Gruesome and terrible, yes - but at least we were safe.

Or so we thought.

The cities were called Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the moment of their destruction, the humans unlocked a destructive force greater than any of us could ever have believed possible. It was at that moment that those of us who studied their technology knew their escape to be inevitable, and that no force in the universe could have hoped to stand against them.

The first human spacecraft were… exactly what we should have expected them to be. There were no elegant solar wings, no sleek, silvered hulls plying the ocean of stars. They did not soar on the stellar currents. They did not even register their existence. Humanity flew in the only way it could: on all-consuming pillars of fire, pounding space itself into submission with explosion after explosion. Their ships were crude, ugly, bulky things, huge slabs of metal welded together, built to withstand the inconceivable forces necessary to propel themselves into space through violence alone.

It was almost comical. The huge, dumb brutes simply strapped an explosive to their backs and let it throw them off of the planet. 

We would have laughed, if it hadn’t terrified us.

Humanity, at long last, was awake.

It was a slow process. It took them nearly a hundred years to reach their nearest planetary neighbor; a hundred more to conquer the rest of their solar system. The process of refining their explosive propulsion systems - now powered by the same force that had melted their cities into glass less than a thousand years before - was slow and haphazard. But it worked. Year by year, they inched outward, conquering and subduing world after world that we had deemed unfit for habitation. They burrowed into moons, built orbital colonies around gas giants, even crafted habitats that drifted in the hearts of blazing nebulas. They never stopped. Never slowed.

The no-contact cordon was generous, and was extended by the day. As human colonies pushed farther and farther outward, we retreated, gave them the space that they wanted in a desperate attempt at… stalling for time, perhaps. Or some sort of appeasement. Or sheer, abject terror. Debates were held daily, arguing about whether or not first contact should be initiated, and how, and by whom, and with what failsafes. No agreement was ever reached.

We were comically unprepared for the humans to initiate contact themselves.

It was almost an accident. The humans had achieved another breakthrough in propulsion physics, and took an unexpected leap of several hundred light years, coming into orbit around an inhabited world.

What ensued was the diplomatic equivalent of everyone staring awkwardly at one another for a few moments, and then turning around and walking slowly out of the room.

The human ship leapt away after some thirty minutes without initiating any sort of formal communications, but we knew that we had been discovered, and the message of our existence was being carried back to Terra. 

The situation in the senate could only be described as “absolute, incoherent panic”. They had discovered us before our preparations were complete. What would they want? What demands would they make? What hope did we have against them if they chose to wage war against us and claim the galaxy for themselves? The most meager of human ships was beyond our capacity to engage militarily; even unarmed transport vessels were so thickly armored as to be functionally indestructible to our weapons.

We waited, every day, certain that we were on the brink of war. We hunkered in our homes, and stared.

Across the darkness of space, humanity stared back.

There were other instances of contact. Human ships - armed, now - entering colonized space for a few scant moments, and then leaving upon finding our meager defensive batteries pointed in their direction. They never initiated communications. We were too frightened to.

A few weeks later, the humans discovered Alphari-296.

It was a border world. A new colony, on an ocean planet that was proving to be less hospitable than initially thought. Its military garrison was pitifully small to begin with. We had been trying desperately to shore it up, afraid that the humans might sense weakness and attack, but things were made complicated by the disease - the medical staff of the colonies were unable to devise a cure, or even a treatment, and what pitifully small population remained on the planet were slowly vomiting themselves to death.

When the human fleet arrived in orbit, the rest of the galaxy wrote Alphari-296 off as lost.

I was there, on the surface, when the great gray ships came screaming down from the sky. Crude, inelegant things, all jagged metal and sharp edges, barely holding together. I sat there, on the balcony of the clinic full of patients that I did not have the resources or the expertise to help, and looked up with the blank, empty, numb stare of one who is certain that they are about to die.

I remember the symbols emblazoned on the sides of each ship, glaring in the sun as the ships landed inelegantly on the spaceport landing pads that had never been designed for anything so large. It was the same symbol that was painted on the helmets of every human that strode out of the ships, carrying huge black cases, their faces obscured by dark visors. It was the first flag that humans ever carried into our worlds.

It was a crude image of a human figure, rendered in simple, straight lines, with a dot for the head. It was painted in white, over a red cross.

The first human to approach me was a female, though I did not learn this until much later - it was impossible to ascertain gender through the bulky suit and the mask. But she strode up the stairs onto the balcony, carrying that black case that was nearly the size of my entire body, and paused as I stared blankly up at her. I was vaguely aware that I was witnessing history, and quite certain that I would not live to tell of it.

Then, to my amazement, she said, in halting, uncertain words, “You are the head doctor?”

I nodded.

The visor cleared. The human bared its teeth at me. I learned later that this was a “grin”, an expression of friendship and happiness among their species. 

“We are The Doctors Without Borders,” she said, speaking slowly and carefully. “We are here to help.”

@words-writ-in-starlight

Every single time I read this I tear up a little. This is the best of us, guys, the part we like to think of as the soul of humanity. God I hope this is the part of us that holds out a hand to another planet someday.

Space Australian Medicine

jumpingjacktrash:

saffronheliotrope:

jumpingjacktrash:

mx-delta-juliette:

Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, something truly nasty escaped Earth. They call it giardia, a microscopic organism that their Planetary Protection Officer called “pretty dumb” and “not too bad, really, a week of digestive upset and then it’s over.”

Yes, Earth has a Planetary Protection Officer. They have a Planetary Protection Office, and have had one since they were sending probes around their own solar system. Doctor Ma-et had found it a bit silly, like a child concerned about the cleanliness of their toys, until she learned that the job of the Planetary Protection Office had always been protecting other worlds from Earth.

Keep reading

i love this so much.

i love this individual piece of writing, and i also love the narrative tumblr has been developing around Crazy Primates From The Death Planet Just Want To Love You. it feels so real and so US. it feels like maybe if genuine contact happens, this is how it’ll go down.

we’re too young, as a species, to do any galactic business of our own. we’re barbaric and awkward, still fighting amongst ourselves for resources. we’d probably make the galactic powers very nervous. but the thing is, there is nothing more dangerous to a human than another human, and hasn’t been for centuries, and this is on a world where half the ‘habitable’ environments regularly kill people and the rest only kill people on occasion with floods and stuff. we make buddies with our predators, we make our diseases brew us chemicals and fuel. we turn everything to our own use, and would bloom through the universe like a horrible all-consuming plague – except that we already sorta did that a little bit on our own planet, we were THAT powerful, and we learned not to.

we are the infant titans who, having seen our siblings eaten, swore to protect instead of consume. we police each other – and ourselves – at the deepest levels, down to the bones of our spirituality. even the most vicious warmonger knows, KNOWS, in their heart of hearts, that what they do is not right, and will not be allowed to go on.

more advanced species didn’t have to learn this lesson, because they weren’t violent to begin with, or learned it a long slow way under the tutelage of older powers. and here we are already, these holy fools, who hold death itself in our hands, and have the hunger for infinity in our eyes, and they ask us what we plan to do with this power, and we say: “where can we help?”

“and also, can we pet your dog?”

I love this so very much, both the fic and the commentary. As much as I love Star Trek and always will, its utopian vision of humanity as a distinguished part of the galactic UN, everybody-just-learning-to-get-along seems a little impossible at times like these. This picture of reckless, a little bumbling, ultimately good-hearted and good-doing humanity seems somehow more plausible, and gives me some real flickers of long-term hope.

a further thought on my previous thought:

if humans are the one species so toxic we learned by experience not to be a hegemonizing swarm before we developed time travel, and survived it… that means anyone who starts trying evil empire shenanigans now is NEW AT IT.

imagine a relatively little-known species suddenly gets to acting real hincty, breaking treaties and taking stuff and breaking stuff. the galactic council is horrified. the humans are like “oh they’re just being little shits, smack ‘em on the snoot.” the galactic council respectfully suggests the humans volunteer to be the ones doing the smacking. the humans point out that yeah, that is what they were doing.

the first ones to show up are, as always, the helpers. maybe this change in behavior is due to some disease or disaster. but nope, it turns out to be a nasty ideological vector, and the humans know from long experience that this one does not go away on its own, but fighting it from the outside makes it last so much longer.

so the next ones to show up are a different kind of helper: military advisors.

galactics: what are you doing??? you’re making it worse!

humans: worse? or BETTER???

under clearly delined circumstances and non-allegiances, so as not to break any interplanetary laws on behalf of humanity, these vicious masters of war teach the upstarts how it’s done. from the warp-tech version of village-burnings to mutually assured destruction, with defcon settings and terror alerts in all the spaceports, in under a generation. the upstarts have gotten much better at war, but only in their own space, and they are learning how it is that a whole species can be tired.

galactics: ok, we think we kinda see what you’re up to, but it’s awful and we wish you would’ve just made them stop fighting.

humans: you can only do that to forces that understand they’re in trouble. when we first got there, they were still having fun.

galactics: we don’t understand.

humans: right. the sick thing is, war is fun. that’s the disease. you can’t fight fun with bigger, better fun. you have to run ‘em around their own back yard until they work off the rush. only then can they look at their own mess and wonder what cleanup’s gonna be like.

galactics: it makes a weird kind of sense. so is that it, now? are they done? are they… cured?

humans: hahahahahahaha no. they’re just finally starting their treatment. now we send in the economists.

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

elodieunderglass:

jacquez45:

sinesalvatorem:

wayward-sidekick:

wayward-sidekick:

so you see, humans evolved to be bipedal on account of how our ancestors transitioned from the forest environment to the savannah environment, and in the savannah environment bipedalism was more adaptive because it provides better thermoregulation and allows you to carry things, but most of all because bipedal locomotion is highly energy efficient and energy efficient locomotion would have been very strongly selected for on account of how time budgets are a limiting factor on home range which is a limiting factor on diet quality and breadth which is really quite important

my lecturers have been very clear and very insistent that bipedalism evolved first and then allowed tool use, tool use did not spur a transition to bipedalism, the fossil record is Clear On This Point

and what I do not understand is: if bipedalism is so completely wonderfully energy-efficient and optimal, why are there so few bipedal things? How come lions and gazelles and giraffes and buffalo aren’t bipedal? Why aren’t other savannah species selected for energy-efficient locomotion too?

I am sure there is a good explanation for this but my lecturers have still not provided it and I must know please god just somebody explain this to me or I will die of curiosity

Reasons Why We Have Bipedal Apes, But Not Bipedal Lions, According To My Biological Anthropology Supervisor:

You know when creationists talk about how an eye couldn’t possibly evolve gradually, because half an eye is useless and a waste of resources and worse than no eye at all?

They’re wrong about eyes; a single photoreceptor cell (usually just an evolutionary ‘tweak’ away from a regular epidermal cell with biochemistry that happened to be photosensitive) is actually useful and great, and more is better. If you imagine breaking a modern wing in half and attaching it to a bird, “half a wing is useless” sounds true, but it stops sounding true when you realise that halfway to a wing doesn’t look like a modern bird wing but broken in half, it looks like a slightly enlarged membrane between a limb and your body that gives you just an extra half second of glide time when you jump.

But there *are* adaptations in this class of things, where it’s great if you have full-blown X but shitty to have half-baked X. As you might imagine, they are quite rare, because as the creationists correctly observe, if half-X is maladaptive there is no path to arrive at X through gradual adaptation to an environment. And yet bipedalism is of this class. How?

Well, you wanna know what it looks like to have enough bipedal foot structure that you decide to go adventuring around in the savannah on two feet, but you haven’t got the pelvic structure to make it efficient yet? YOU CAN’T RUN. You are literally incapable of moving faster than a kind of slow awkward lope. Your back kills all the time because your bones are all pointed the wrong way and your back muscles are trying to keep you upright. Your ankle and leg bones take far more pounding than they were ever optimised before and occasionally shatter. You’re unbalanced and ungainly and frankly sort of pathetic, and at very high risk from predators (to repeat: RUN AWAY IS NOT AN AVAILABLE STRATEGY).

Why would anything go through a long gradual process of getting much shittier and then eventually getting better, since evolution can’t plan or foresee? WRONG QUESTION. Whoever told you evolution was a slow gradual constant drift was a dirty rotten liar, just like all your other teachers from when you were twelve. More commonly, evolution involves long periods of relative stability where the organism is pretty much as adapted to its niche as it’s going to get, and then something changes and there’s a very rapid response. Or it involves successful populations dispersing widely over a landscape, then becoming distinct reproducing populations which lost genetic contact with each other and diverging, and then there’s an environmental change and they reconnect and sometimes they happily interbreed and sometimes one of the divergent branches drives the others extinct and disperses itself widely and rinse and repeat.

What happened was, basically:

Hi we’re early hominins and we just love hanging around in trees and we’re proud to say we’ve been hanging around in trees now for a couple million years and we haven’t changed a bit, slightly bigger skulls aside, we’re basically just per- what the fuck? WHAT THE FUCK? WHERE DID THE TREES GO?? WHY IS IT SUDDENLY SO DRY???? oh my God I can see nothing but grass and I am having to walk around on my hind legs all the FUCKING time and FUCK FUCK FUCK THAT’S A LION FUCK PANIC RED ALERT oh okay we’re bipedal now I guess, that was quick, oh well, all fine, carry on

Somehow we survived when a change in environment pushed us into a new ecological niche. The selection pressure was strong enough to make us acquire a really quite extensive range of mods to make bipedalism work, but not strong enough to make us dead.

Of course, “strong pressure to adapt somehow” doesn’t necessarily mean “strong pressure to adapt in this specific way we know is really good”. Early hominins who lived before the forest shrinkage have been shown to have a few bipedal adaptations. We weren’t sure what the hell they were doing with them, so we looked at chimps. Turns out chimps display short-distance carrying behavior - as in, picking up an object and carrying it. They don’t carry tools and can’t move far bipedally, but what they do do is pick up a valuable resource like a choice bit of prey and haul it off with them, away from the group of moneys fighting over the rest of the prey. So before the forests collapsed, there was a mild selection pressure to be able to use only your hind legs for a short stretch so that you could carry something in your arms, and when they collapsed, individuals good at that behavior were better at surviving the savannah and evolution just slammed its foot on the gas pedal until you get obligate bipeds.

So, a species that wasn’t forced into a rapid niche change like that, wouldn’t evolve an initially-painful thing like bipedalism. What about all the other species that made the same change as the same time as us? Eh, many went extinct, that happens a lot with ecological change, but the ones who survived didn’t do bipedalism.

Points to those who said it was about evolution having different starting points to build on, y'all were correct. No matter how awesome and efficient and optimal bipedalism is, evolution only cares about whether the next tiny step in some random direction increases or decreases how many offspring are produced. Evolution “looks” for the NEAREST solution that counts as a solution, not the best solution.

For a species of monkeys that were forced to spend less time in the forest and range wider and already had some variable locomotion abilities, evolution went for bipedalism. Bipedalism may have enabled the future awesomeness of humans with its efficiency and head stability and what have you, but evolution made it happen just because it was the local maxima - its awesomeness is a lucky side effect.

But where monkeys used short bursts of bipedal movements to carry things, another species might use something more convenient for them - say, a lion might pick up and carry things in its mouth, and if there was a selection pressure to be better at carrying the lions might end up with bigger mouths, but “become bipedal” is very unlikely because half bipedal is worse than no bipedal at all.

Basically, monkeys had the preconditions for bipedalism, nothing else did. (Note that this does not make monkeys special - the ancestor of any species with an unusual adaptation, from giraffes’ long necks to penguins’ Arctic-water-proofing feathers, was a thing that had the preconditions for that adaptation when nothing else did.)

Bipedalism didn’t happen because it was awesome, it became awesome because the range of adaptations it supports turned out to be a package that turned into, well, us.

…Notice that we are not actually the only bipedal species. Notice what they mean when they say things like, “Bipedalism leads to the ability to carry things leads to tool use leads to bigger brains”. On a naive reading, it means “bipedalism is a part of the tech tree and once you’ve bought it you can get hands optimised for holding tools”, and if it says this then you are right to be confused as to why perfectly good bipedal emus do not also have spears and control of fire.

When you realise that evolutionary studies is so full of ridiculously many caveats and preconditions that lecturers just omit them and assume you know they’re there, you start interpreting what they say more like, “In a species that already dabbled in just a tiny bit of bipedalism, bipedalism was the only way to go when the niche changed, it was way better for the new niche then the old way of locomotion, and given the likely presence of some proto-tool-like behaviors like throwing rocks or poking things with sticks, it created an adaptive opportunity to better fit this particular environment by improving on the tool behaviours using the new physiological advantages.”

Also god I learned a lot in that hour. Why does time spent *not* talking to biological anthropologists have to be a thing? Talking to biological anthropologists is the BEST.

Epistemic status: my recollection of a conversation an hour ago between me and an academic in this field, any misunderstandings are because I’m an undergrad who didn’t get what he was trying to say.

THIS IS SO COOL

(Why do I not live on a university campus D:)

SO YES and also, I’m going to pull out my Vaclav Smil* for a second here.

Human locomotion is not particularly energy efficient! It takes us more energy to walk or run than it does for most mammalian quadrupeds, but our energy use curves look pretty different from theirs. 

If a horse goes for a trot, its trot (like all its gaits) has a U-shaped energy curve. It costs more to trot at slower speeds, goes down to a most-efficient pace, and then comes back up. At a certain point, it crosses over the energy curve for the horse’s next gait, and the horse will (left to its own devices) start to canter or gallop.

Human WALKING has a U-shaped curve like that, but human RUNNING does not, and that is damned strange for a mammal. Our friend Smil says: “the energetic cost of human running is relatively high, but humans are unique in virtually uncoupling this cost from speed”. That particular aspect of things is a direct side-effect of bipedalism: we can vary our breathing in ways that quadrupedal animals (who have supporting legs all attached to their breathing apparatus) cannot. Basically, we are the evolutionary equivalent of cartoon characters who can spin their legs really fast. So we aren’t as efficient at running as a horse who is going at its optimum pace, but we can speed up and slow down and it won’t cost us much, which is not true of the horse.

Not incidentally, this is why many humans practiced (or still practice) persistence hunting. If you are less efficient than that delicious antelope, but you can make it run at its least-efficient panic speed while you trundle along at a nice constant rate, you can exhaust it.  

* Smil, Vaclav (2007-12-21). Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems (MIT Press). The MIT Press. Kindle Edition. 

I’m so glad OP came back and corrected themselves, I was sitting on my hands reading the first part! Omg those lecturers. I mean they’re getting minimum wage but still. Bless their hearts.

The lecturers conflated tool use and tool making. Tool USE is observed throughout the animal kingdom. Tool MAKING is said to be primate-specific (we ignore corvids in this scenario.) note that this isn’t hominid-specific, though. Tool MAKING is not a function of bipedalism; it’s a function of having your hands free. These are two very different things. Now, it’s certainly true that tool MAKING - in the form of shaped bones, flints and stones - postdates bipedalism in the fossil record, but we must note

1. A shaped blade of grass or a shaped branch counts as a tool, and does not reliably fossilise;
2. Behaviour is notoriously bad at fossilising;
3. Scientists must acknowledge the biases of the fossil record in geology and paleontology, so don’t think that anthropologists are going to be allowed to get away with it.

So tool-making, like bipedalism, is something that popped up occasionally in our lineage and is still practiced by our living relatives. It became fixed in our lineage, and is distinctive to hominids, but it was not dropped on us by the Hand of God. Very very few things are.

We also note that birds are bipedal, and are something of the original biped. We are kind of hipsters in that sense. (BEHOLD! THE MAN!)

But, you see, birds generally don’t have HANDS.

When you’re looking at something like bipedalism and asking yourself “what does this say about humans?” Then look at other animals, and see what they’re doing. And then come at it from a different angle. sometimes the answer isn’t the feet. Sometimes it’s the hands.

(via slyrider)

decepticonsensual:

gallusrostromegalus:

jewishdragon:

frosttrix:

bigscaryd:

animatedamerican:

rainaramsay:

argumate:

gdanskcityofficial:

collapsedsquid:

argumate:

If space travel doesn’t involve sea shanties then I think we’ll have missed an opportunity.

You see though, for sea travel you want big strong people who are capable of managing rigging.  For space travel you want small low-mass people who are technically educated, as they are called, nerds.  Your space shanties are going to be less booming and more squeaky.

in so far as there will be space shanties, they’ll be filk

I call shenanigans on the big strong people; sailors were young and malnourished by modern standards, and climbing around the rigging is easier if you’re small and light.

Like, I am 100% in favor of shanties in as many situations as possible, but I’m having trouble coming up with a mode of space travel that would require multiple humans to move in concert, thus necessitating songs with a strong beat to move to.  

Sea chanties were for providing a strong beat to move to.  Space chanties might very well arise just because we’re bored, out there between point A and point B for so long.

(Also yes, @gdanskcityofficial up there has the right of it.)

Space shanties are for warp piloting. Under warp drive, human time perception and time as measured by crystal or atomic oscillators don’t match. Starship pilots listen to a small unamplified chorus singing a careful rhythm while keeping their own eyes on a silent metronome that the chorus can’t see, linked to a highly-precise atomic clock. How the chorus and metronome fall in and out of sync tells the pilot how to keep the ship safely in the warp bubble and correctly on course.

Depending on route, a typical warp jump can last anywhere from one to ten minutes, and most courses consist of five to fifteen jumps before a necessary four to six hour break to check the engines, plot the next set of jumps, and give everyone a chance to recover. A good shanty team, with reliable rhythm, a broad, versatile, and extendible repertoire, and the stamina to do 3-4 sets a day over the course of a voyage, is just as vital to space travel as a pilot, navigator, or engineering team.

@tmae3114

YESSSSS

Other reasons Shanties will experience a revival in the space age:

• We will sing for any freaking reason, or no reason at all, and Shanties are FUN to sing.
• Deep Space is a lonely place and recruiting people suited to long periods of isolation might be a good idea.  People from Newfoundland/Labrador, for instance.
• SPACE WHALES
  
• THEY’RE DEFINITELY REAL I FEEL IT IN MY SOUL
• “What Do We Do With A Drunken Sailor” is basically a revenge fantasy against your most incompetent co-workers and if there’s something humans love doing, it’s being petty.
  

Plus, no need for work songs in space?  Tell that to all my colleagues who’ve come up with little ditties they’ve sung under their breath while at the computer.

“The Printer Song” and “I Will Fucking End You, Google Chrome” are my favourites.

(via littlestartopaz)

spec-fiction-leigh:

writing-prompt-s:

When Earth discovers FTL travel, the world never unifies into one government. When new species make contact, they are surprised to learn that the twenty strongest empires in the galaxy have their capitals on the same planet.

this is going to be 100% accurate one day. @human-aliens-collection

(via littlestartopaz)

samuraiknitter:

bisected8:

jumpingjacktrash:

dearthoughthenightisgone:

petralemaitre:

somethingninga:

aethersea:

sepulchritude:

on the topic of humans being the intergalactic “hold my beer” species: imagine an alien stepping onto a human starship and seeing a space roomba™ with a knife duct taped onto it, just wandering around the ship

it doesn’t have any special intelligence. it’s just a normal space roomba. there are other space roombas on the ship and they don’t have knives. it’s just this one. knife space roomba has full clearance to every room in the ship. occasionally crew members will be talking and then suddenly swear and clutch their ankle. knife space roomba putters off, leaving them to their mild stab wounds.

“what is the point?” asks the alien as another crew member casually steps over the knife-wielding robot. “is it to test your speed and agility?”

“no it doesn’t really go that fast,” replies the captain.

“does it teach you to stay ever-vigilant?”

“I mean I guess so but that’s more of a side effect.”

“does it weed out the weak? does it protect you from invaders? do repeated stabbings let your species heal more quickly in the future?”

“it doesn’t stab very hard, it gets us more than it gets our enemies, and no, but that sounds cool — someone write that down.”

“but then what is its purpose?”

“I don’t know,” the captain says, leaning down to give the space roomba an affectionate pat. “it just seemed cool”

this is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard but I thought about it for five seconds and realized that if I were, say, a random communications officer onboard this ship and someone taped a knife to a roomba it would take maybe three weeks before even I was inordinately fond of Stabby. I would be proud of Stabby when I met up with my other spacefleet friends for space coffee, I would tell them about the time Stabby got the second mate in the ankle five seconds before the fleet admiral beamed on board and she swore in seven different languages in front of high command. 

also by the fourth day Stabby would be in the ship’s log, he’d have little painted-on insignia, people would salute him as he went by, and someone would hook up a twitter account to tweet maniacal laughter and/or a truly terrible knock-knock joke every time he managed to nick someone.

Omg so the ting I typed up might actually happen this is gold

I am suddenly astonished that Stabby isn’t Farscape canon. 1812 was weird enough.

Stabby’s little charging dock would start accruing cuddly toys and commemorative holo-vids of Stabby’s greatest stabs. Its insignia would start off at a fairly low rank, but soon, without anyone every discussing it, everyone would know that Stabby got to take the rank of the highest ranking crew member it stabbed. The ceremony for Flag Admiral Stabby was beautiful. The captain gave a speech. 

why am i proud of stabby this is irrational

INCIDENT LOG: 46-7-2 Action #45437: Desc: Covert enemy boarding attempt

Details: Six (6) members of a Mercenary/Pirate crew of little renown attempted to infiltrate ship in order to steal equipment and/or personnel.

Prior to being detained they had remained undetected for eight (8) hours and accumulated several high value materials (see attached log), and incapacitated and restrained several crewmen (see attached log) in dock #3, with the intention of using a life boat to exfiltrate.

Just prior to their would-be escape, the boarding party encountered the ship’s mascot. A cleaning unit which had been modified by crew members to mount a traditional Terran melee weapon, as well as an officer’s insignia (having been jokingly given a commission by the Captain the night before). Curious, one picked it up, before realising the mounted weapon had a nickel finish (highly toxic to their species) on the handle, and dropped it in a panic.

As the unit’s anti-impact sensors had been disabled, it immediately tried to right itself on landing. This caused it to flip over and slash the third knee of the boarder who dropped it, prompting the rest of the boarders to flee. In doing so, they tripped over a waste container, causing the unit to “chase” them, as it collected the trail of dust they left.

The security crew were alerted to the boarding party’s presence by an entry on “Sargent Stabby’s Hit List” - an account on an intership microblogging site which automatically logs any injuries caused by the cleaning unit in question - and quickly intercepted them.

Casualties: Four (4) crewmen treated for minor lacerations sustained after detaining boarding party, one (1) captured crewman treated for negative reaction to sedatives used by captors.

Belligerent status: Two (2) members of the enemy boarding party remain in stable condition in sickbay. Three (3) remaining surrendered peacefully and remain in the brig. One (1) refuses to leave the safety of a storage cupboard he went to ground in.

Recommendations/Actions:

• All captured guards to undergo debriefing and possible disciplinary action for breaches of security protocol.
  
• Remind all crew members to report missing colleagues immediately.
• Retain a guard outside cleaning storage room 87 until the final boarder can be coaxed out and properly detained.
  
• Cleaning unit D4.87 AKA “Sargent Stabby” has been promoted to Quartermaster, and is now considered the superior officer of all autonomous drones on the ship. All Class #1 drones have been programmed to salute their superior with their effector, should it enter the room while they’re active.
  

This is less stupid than things I’ve heard that go on, on submarines. 

Bored humans are very very easily amused. 

(via ifeelbetterer)

humans are weird – adhd.

instantgalaxy-justaddstars:

So after reblogging literally every single “humans are weird” post that came on my dash I decided it’s time to make my own!

Consider the following;

Humans are already weird space orcs that like either worship the term “fuck it” or make sacrifices to the ship’s rulebook, basically. They have a strict series of social interactions that even distinguish themselves between cultures. Deviation is rare, and sometimes ostracized, no matter how seemingly arbitrary.

So when the ship of the Vyrg’s first human shows up, they were expecting a smiling (humans smile for a lot of the time) human who will shake their first right hand.
Instead, they got a messy, spaced out creature whose hair was falling in their face and whose things were overflowing from their arms, all seemingly hobbies and random trinkets. A backpack hung on their back.

Their first words were accompanied with a (sheepish…the captain thought) smile;
“Sorry, I overslept and I forgot deployment was today! And I forgot my saline for my contacts back in my room but we’ve got to take off, right?”

Great. The crew got a dumb one.

Or so they thought, until their human explained the entire summary of how their ship’s mechanics worked, and fixed their left engine to work at maximum capacity in record time. The human followed it up with a seemingly random tangent about something called the “Stonewall Riots” and “gay rights”.

“Sorry,” Human-Clara said.
“A bit of light just reflected here and it looked like a rainbow and it made me think of it.”
Human-Clara had a tendency to speak either so fast they ran out of breath, or with so many pauses it sounded like they were gathering their scattered thoughts at that moment.

Life with Human-Clara was – odd. They kept to themselves mostly, quietly chatting with crew mates on certain days or absorbed in their transponder for others. Sometimes they would walk out of their room so wholly absorbed in yet another new hobby that the Captain feared xe’d never pull them out of it. The crew never saw a hobby finished. Sometimes when they were spoken to, Human-Clara responded slowly and distractedly, eyes distant and far away as if still thinking of something else. They regularly forgot to eat, or sleep, or take care of themselves if they were absorbed in something else. Directions had to be written down or sent to their transponder. The Captain learned to be patient, as Human-Clara seemed to excel with patience.

Human-Clara was also oddly sensitive. It was quite a culture shock for them to learn that the Vyrg didn’t really have a notion of “friends” other than immediate family, and was almost – crushed, for a few days, the Vyrg’s usual polite friendliness not enough. They seemed depressed when their crazy, thousand-lightyears-an-hour tangents weren’t paid attention to, so the crew began to adapt, and things became much more harmonious.

Sometimes Human-Clara got angry. They were terrifying when angry. It lasted only a few seconds, really. They would blow up, the explosion big enough to scare even the Captain, and after the explosion, be calm in seconds afterwards.

Stimulant chemicals made them sleepy, which the Vyrg thought was adorable. They watched videos of what they called “stims”, and flapped their hands when they were happy, and slapped them quickly and repeatedly on flat surfaces when they were really excited about knowing something. These were “stims” too. The Vyrg wasn’t sure what these “stims” were, really, but they seemed to regulate Human-Clara, emotionally.

Then they got another Human, Human-Steve. Human-Steve was often condescending in their remarks, saying that if Human-Clara “tried”, they could concentrate. It was then that the Vyrg learned what “attention deficit hyperactive disorder, primarily inattentive” was.

They panicked, a little. Was their first human sick?

“No,” Human-Clara explained. “It’s just where the connections in my brain are different, so some things I do differently. Human-Steve doesn’t have that, so he doesn’t understand”.

The Vyrg didn’t either, but their previous methods of interaction worked just fine, so they kept using those.

(If anybody wants to add anything, you don’t have too, but feel free!)

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

Humans Are Weird

cloakedsparrow:

dendritic-trees:

elidyce:

insane-male-alphabeticalsymbol:

otherwise-called-squidpope:

unicornempire:

arcticfoxbear:

the-grand-author:

wuestenratte:

val-tashoth:

crazy-pages:

radioactivepeasant:

arafaelkestra:

arcticfoxbear:

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 if several species (including humans) land on a world and the humans are all “SCORE! Earth like world! Let’s get exploring before we get out competed!” And the planet starts offing the other aliens right and left, electric storms, hypothermia, tornadoes and the humans are just … there… counting seconds between flashes, having snowball fights, and just surviving. 

To paraphrase one of my favorite bits of a ‘humans are awesome’ fiction megapost: “you don’t know you’re from a Death World until you leave it.” For a ton of reasons, I really like the idea of Earth being Space Australia.

Earth being Space Australia Words cannot express how much I love these posts

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 -20 at least.”

Human: “Heh. Yeah everybody knows someone like that.”

Alien: “……. And did you also say 50 Celcius? As in, half way to boiling?”

Human: “Eugh. Yes. It sucks, we sweat everywhere, and god help you if you touch a seatbelt buckle, but yes.” 

Alien: “……. We’ve got like 50 uninhabitable planets we think you might enjoy.” 

“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 the groundwater near them.”

Sounds like the “Damned” trilogy by Alan Dean Foster.

“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…”

“… what?”

“…we kinda……. sent……….. people…..”

“…”

“…”

“…what?”

“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 didn’t… die?”

“Well the first few did”

“PEOPLE DIED OF THE COLD AND YOUR SOLUTION WAS TO SEND MORE PEOPLE???!?!?!?”

My new favorite Humans are Weird quote

“PEOPLE DIED OF THE COLD AND YOUR SOLUTION WAS TO SEND MORE PEOPLE?”

aka The History of Russia

aka Arctic Exploration

aka The History of Alaska

Being from Alaska, this was sort of how I felt going to college in the lower 48′s and learned that no one else had been put through a literal survival camp as a regular part of their school curriculum, including but not limited to:

1. Learning to recognize all forms of animal tracks in the wild so you can avoid bears and moose and search out rabbits and other small animals to eat.

2. Extensive swimming and climbing on glacial pieces with competitions to see who could last the longest, followed by a group sit in the sauna so we wouldn’t get hypothermia (no, not kidding, I really did this many times as a kid!)

3. How to navigate using the stars to get back to civilization.

4. How to select the right type of moss from the trees to start a fire with damp wood (because, y’know, you’re in a field of snow. Nothing is dry.)

5. How to carve out a small igloo-like space to sleep in the snow to preserve body heat and reduce the windchill so you won’t freeze to death in the arctic.

“I’m telling you, I don’t think we need to worry about territory conflicts with the humans. You know all those deathtrap hell-worlds in the Argoth Cluster?”
“Those worthless rocks? Yeah.”
“80% of them are considered ‘resort destinations’ by those freaky little primates.”

This would be an interesting read if this was a book.

Like, an alien invasion is about to start and the book is a chronicle of how the aliens couldn’t handle both humans in general and the range of environments and ended up being destroyed through the eyes of one of the aliens.

Like a caption from the book would be something like

“So we sent a recon team to this place called Russia, but all we’ve heard back thus far is about the temperatures, giant monsters with fur the humans call “Bears”, and that once again, we have been reminded of how heavily well armed almost ever human settlement is.

Thus far we have lost more than a good chunk of our forces through experiments gone wrong, unsuccessful fire fights, and above all else, the humans seem to be more worried about these strange variation of their species calling themselves “Clowns”.

I don’t know what a Clown is, but sounds as if it is the dominant faction of this planet, and considering we only just found out humans practically poison themselves with this thing called beer and only get stronger and more violent, I don’t ever want to encounter such a being.

I believe this invasion was a mistake.“

I’ve been reading a bunch of these and all I can think about now is aliens finding out about our insane ability to walk away from accidents.

“Human Colony SDO435**, this is Gxanimi survey vessel 3489. We regret that we must inform you that the wreckage of your ship ‘Gecko Flyer’ has just been detected on planet F56=K=. We offer expressions of sympathy for this catastrophe.”

“Shit, thanks for telling us, we’ll be right there.”

“Why?”

“To find our people, of course.”

“… you wish to retrieve the corpses for your traditional death rituals, of course, we understand. We have sent the coordinates.”

“What do you mean, bodies? No survivors at all? There must be some.”

“Official mouthpiece of Human Colony SDO435**, the ship has crashed. It has impacted the planet’s surface at speed. Moreover, this might have happened as much as five vek ago. We do not understand why you speak of ‘survivors’.”

“Oh, there’ll be survivors. There always are.”

“(closes hyperspace voicelink) How sad that they are unable to accept the reality of their loss.”

*

“Hey, Gxanimi survey vessel 3489, thanks for letting us know about the Gecko Flyer. More than half the crew made it!”

“Made what?”

“They survived! A couple of lost limbs and so on, but they’ll be fine.”

“… but that vessel was destroyed! Images have been examined!”

“Oh, well, everyone in the fore-below compartment was crushed, obviously, but the others made it out.”

“… but the crash was vek ago! Excuse we… at least eighty of your ‘days’! How could they survive without a ship? Without shelter and supplies?”

“Well, the wreckage gave them some shelter, and of course the emergency supplies kept them going until they could start growing stuff. It’s actually a nice little planet, they said. Quite a lot of edible flora and fauna. T-shirt weather, in summer, too.”

“What is… t-shirt weather?”

“Oh, you know, when it’s comfortable to go around with only modesty covering over the epidermis. Exposed limbs.”

“That planet is so cold that even water solidifies in its atmosphere!”

“Well, in winter, obviously. But we like that. Listen, our people have been raising crops down there, and that’s usually how we rule a planet as ‘colonized’…. is anyone else using it, or can we call it?”

“Er… we have claimed the warmer planets in the system, but we believe we could come to some arrangement.”

*

It was really nice, the humans thought, how carefully most of the aliens kept an eye out for downed ships after that, once they found out that humans tended to survive anything less than explosive decompression or… well, explosions generally. They’d immediately inform the nearest outpost of a wreck’s location, or even ship survivors back themselves. It was very thoughtful.

They didn’t find out until a long time later that the Gxanimi had put out the word to every species they were in contact with. It was vital that everyone knew the things they had learned about humans after that first encounter.

1. Humans can literally walk away from an impact that renders a space-worthy hull so much scrap and would have actually liquefied a Gxanimi.

2. Humans will eat just about anything not immediately fatal to them - including, in extremis, the corpses of their dead crewmates. In fact, most human vessels keep a list of those willing to be eaten and those whose socio-religious scruples forbid it. They have a ridiculously high tolerance for dangerous substances, and if they can breathe on a planet they can probably eat something on it too. They also have something they call the ‘Watney Protocol’, which requires them to carry live soil samples, seeds, and simple tools that will allow them to start farming their own native foodstuffs on any remotely habitable planet immediately in the event of an accident.

3. Once they’ve farmed a planet, they bond with it. They’ll be polite, but it’ll take significant effort to get rid of them even so.

Conclusion: If a human ship crashes on a planet you like and want to keep, get other humans to come and get them immediately. Remove them yourself if you have to. Even the worst crash can result in a thriving colony in a few vek.

And don’t, for the love of gravitational regularity, try to solve that problem by killing off the survivors. Just don’t. It won’t work and it just makes all the rest of them mad.

This is the best one yet! 

Once they’ve farmed a planet, they bond with it.

I love that.

(via primarybufferpanel)