Humans are the weirdest aliens?

That's really cool background info. Not sure how much it has to do with humans being the weirdest aliens though

 

Yeah, I'm going to quote it in the General Space Worldbuilding thread when it's made.

 

I was gonna make one in make it so, if anyone was interested. I wasn't sure how much of a tangent this would be, but it looks like enough people are interested to warrant its own thread.

 

Thread made!

 

I quoted all my big worldbuilding discussion posts from here to the World Factory thread.

 

a good post

 

My fav human trait is our ability to befriend anything. Like, maybe we can't domesticate it and breed it, but we've gotten to the point where we can get pretty much any animal to like us enough not to freak out when we get near. I know someone who has a "pet" squirrel. It's definitely still a wild animal, but it comes when its called most of the time and will eat peanuts out of his hand and ride around on his shoulder for a while. Has a mind of its own and won't live inside with him or anything, but it likes him and chills with him sometimes.

Now imagine an alien who doesn't have a full concept of domestication of animals, like still has to hunt for any meat it wants to eat, watching the crocodile hunter.

 

A plurk friend posted a late night question the other night, asking why all mammalian newborns look so much like potatoes.

Mammals took such predominance on earth after ice ages, but before that? So I'm thinking mammalian life could be relatively rare in the universe. Especially compared to insects, lizards, and the dino/bird tree.

So humans: potatoes in space.

 

Agreed.

I think Matt Damon was in Martian and Interstellar. Arrival is the film with Jeremy Renner and Amy Adams. It's really, really cool.

 

I mean, not all newborn mammals look like potatoes. Deer and giraffes are ready to walk like half an hour after birth. And there are plenty of other things that have a potato stage. Larva, tadpoles, tons of birds, and I think at least one kind of fish (though don't quote me on that because I don't know a lot about fish) are borderline or completely useless for the first couple weeks/months of their lives. Humans have an extremely long useless stage because A: we live a hella long time for an animal and B: our bodies are barely set up to deliver our giant heads as they are, and if fetuses were any more developed when they came out we physically wouldn't be able to birth them.

 

favorite weird human thing: superstition

quotes from the other day when I threw wild conjectures at my friend:

"time for my favorite story!

two cavemen, Bob and Jim stand in a field

they both hear a noise

"it's a lion!" Bob yells, and runs

"it could be a lion but odds are against it" Jim comments, and stays where he is

outcomes:

a. it's not a lion. they both survive

b. it is a lion. Bob lives

superstition and seeing patterns is a weird human paranoia thing from when that made sense: and it totally still works in a lot of cases. instinct, hunch, suspicion, etc

ok I'm done, I just really love how weird & neurotic humans are"

"I think ghost may have been a lion at one point to our human ancestors"

 

With regards to the throwing thing: any projectile weapons developed by such aliens would either be guided missiles (and so not much use except against large targets), or require a lot of complicated calculations to get any degree of accuracy, as these species would lack the ability to instinctively aim. They would therefore both be developed late-like, possibly at the same time as spaceflight late.

Space combat with those aliens would involve boarding ships, likely, or guided missiles-essentially, ramming other ships with a very small explosive-packed spacecraft. Sometimes you'd get lasers, but mostly as point defense.

And then humanity would arrive and be able to accurately shoot nonmoving projectiles that don't have a drive plume to make them easily visible and therefore easier to shoot down or evade. In ground warfare, humans would be able to issue projectile weapons to every soldier, and aim them accurately without having to sit for several minutes doing calculations, meaning that simply moving the command post every few minutes would be ineffective.

(Human snipers actually use complicated calculations to aim their very long distance shots, but these aliens would need them at ranges greater than a few meters.)

 

Probably!

Weird data point: I am bad at throwing. I am also bad at telling if something coming in my general direction is going to hit me.

It's likely that the two things are linked in the mind, so...aliens that suck at dodging projectiles and at throwing them trying to capture a human weapon to see how the computer-controlled aiming system works...only to discover that there's none. The aiming is done in the soldier's head. And none of the soldiers have cybernetics that could provide that ability.

 

I wouldn't think so, necessarily. Even if nothing on your planet throws things, shit falls down all the time. I'd think knowing when to duck, at least, would be selected for.

 

But, for example, a tundra-dwelling burrower would have been selected for knowing when the tunnel was about to collapse, not if something in a parabolic arc would hit them.

 

Yeah I think being able to, say, knowing that a thrown baseball will pass a foot in front of your face so you don't have to dodge- despite only having seen it arc for maybe a second- that takes a LOT of instinctive, subconscious calculations that a non-throwing species likely wouldn't have, at least not anywhere near that degree of accuracy.

Also- imagine how freaked out about Ultimate Frisbee these aliens are gonna be

 

Dodgeball, that is all.

 

trick shooting

 

I like that one because I'm assuming that aliens probably don't allow their children to damage each other in the name of fun and object lessons, and would be completely horrified