Humans are the weirdest aliens?

BLESS THESE POSTS THESE ARE LIKE MY FAV THINGS

 

Okay, so hear me out on this: advertising.

Communications that use pattern recognition and brain tricks with a dusting of factual statements to plant the idea that people want a thing. A commercial jingle like "I'm lovin' it" or anything else of the sort is basically a memetic virus that lodges itself in our brains and makes us want and, just as important, remember.

Deception as a strategy isn't necessarily unheard of in other species (sometimes you gotta be tricky), but that mostly comes down to shit like camouflage, or having your fruit be bright and contrast from its surroundings so it gets eaten. But tying together certain sequences of noises, colors, shapes, gestures, and ideas—some or many of them combined in a way that is unique and therefore has no naturally occurring comparison (we aren't disguising it as anything, in other words)—so that an association is formed between them and a commercial product, which is then used to convince people to buy said product, even if they don't really need it or have something similar? The fact that those associations can form rivalries between people (Pepsi vs. Coke vs. Dr Pepper, video game consoles, etcetera)? That shit is honestly kind of mind-boggling when it's all laid out flat, and that's for the folks who are familiar with it. God knows what the aliens would think.

 

"CORPORAL RILEY. WHAT MUST I KNOW OF THE SEQUENCE 866-66-FASTER."

"I'm... sorry, captain?"

"I have received word over a public broadcast that I have received the green light but I dON'T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS. It was programmed into my mind so clearly it is either of great import or a memetic attack!"

"Captain, that's just the commercial for a mortgage company."

 

my housemate is obsessed with the mc Donald's jingle and puts it in all of his songs

 

I wanna see the reaction to eiGHT-SEVEN-SEVEN-CASH-NOWWWWWWW!

 

Aliens that think hanging with humans unsupervised or without protective gear is a death sentence and freaks out when they see a human napping with an alien in their arms

 

Like, there's all kind of reasons to be reading off strings of numbers on a spaceship, right? And they're so confused when anything that starts with 877 causes any nearby humans to start humming. Or one of them sings the first part and the others can't not join in. Is this a religious ritual, or is it some kind of memetic epidemic?

 

the human has a weird dream and gently wraps the alien in like, three layers of blankets and everyone is too terrified to intervene

 

aliens being so confused because their psycology differs from humans

like most advertising stuff (logos, jingles, etc) nowadays is done with psycology in mind, like how do we have the biggest impact and make people Want The Thing? but aliens just. don't get it. at all. their brains aren't wired in a way that the jingles were meant to resonate with

 

my parents watched the superb owl this weekend entirely for the ads. try explaining that one to an alien

 

the great owl, supreme

side note i wonder what aliens would think of human typos and verbal word substitutions (like when you forget the actual name for something and say something else)? because we can usually figure them out by context, but the aliens would be missing most of the context that helps make them make sense. and some typos are just because the some letters on a standard keyboard are close to each other, and it'd probably take aliens a bit to figure that out

what would aliens think of autocorrect? a widespread human creation that consistently fails in spectacular ways, how did we ever get onto the moon

 

I mean, rocket science doesn't necessarily have to be hypercomplex high-precision stuff. This is a rocket that can be built in a shipyard out of regular sheet metal.

 

Oh God, Super Bowl ads. Millions of dollars poured into the ability to have a timeslot during a heavily-viewed entertainment event, not to mention the resources put into production. And people exist who prefer the ads to the entertainment event.

If humans weren't so individually contrary the aliens would probably think we're brainwashed as an entire species.

Also, considering other subjects: I submit the concept of explaining the difference between "small" and "smol" to an alien.

 

"No, see, all smol things are small - well, except for, like, baby whales - but most small things aren't smol. Baby whales are smol but not small."

 

Spoiler: how that conversation would go

 

Probably not much differently than any other foreign language communication. If they could learn human languages fluently and had the brain structures to understand and appreciate wordplay it would just be puns. If not, they would wonder why their human was suddenly speaking nonsense and if it needed to be brought in for repairs.

 

On the one hand, a species with some of the disadvantages compared to humans would be unlikely to reach space in the first place. I mean, if they're afraid of the arctic, or they can't calculate trajectories, I can only imagine their reaction to the idea of 'strap yourself to a giant explosion and launch yourself into perpetual ballistic freefall through nothingness.'

On the other hand, this whole business is crazy awesome.

 

Spaceships are launched with complicated calculations, not the ones we can instinctively do.

So that, while still insane, would be somewhat less insane.

 

Wasn't there a tumblr post floating around about aliens who rely on senses other than sight and how we'd come off almost exactly like the bullshit-space-magic stuff in every soft SF ever? There's this stuff in the world (light) that allows us mysterious perceptions, only sometimes it's not there and we can hardly perceive anything at all!

 

"ok so there's this radiation, it's a wave and a particle?? don't ask me tbqh but anyway yeah our homeworld's local star emits huge amounts of it and a bunch of the lifeforms evolved to make use of it. ...yeah no it's?? you know temperature? yeah it gives off light and heat and that's kind of really important--"

"...and so humans can see light but only certain frequencies and my light receptors are kind of not exactly the right shape so i have to put objects in front of my face so the light bends a little and i can perceive it correctly"

"and then some humans can't see colour the same as other humans?? idek how that works. wait did i explain colour yet?"

"and did i tell you about photosynthesis?? yeah a decent chunk of life on earth just turns light and carbon dioxide into sugar. this makes most of them green"