Humans are the weirdest aliens?

I mean, by the time they get to space they're probably aware of light's existence in a sciencey kind of way. But that wouldn't make it not weird to deal with people who need it so much!

To blind, echolocating aliens we'd be some kind of stealth masters. We can find our way around without making noise! And our information readouts are conveyed to us by the patterns of radiation emitted by apparently featureless screens! This is mega-super-spy shit.

 

And to an alien who doesn't have a sense of sound, it wouldn't feel supernatural so much as equivalent to those "OMG, sharks can feel magnetic fields" things. I mean, "humans can feel slight vibrations in the air and triangulate their source"?

 

"Humans can track you even in total darkness via triangulating vibrations you make in the air."

 

"Humans communicate both visually and audibly. There are different social situations that require one or the other."

 

Re: not learning how throwing and projectiles work

I have a prebuilt Europan alien newt people who call themselves Javeen. They're like basically if you cross a crested newt and a Aurorus pokemon, stand on hind legs and add a few extra sets of arms. But anyway, they evolved in Europa's volcanic under-ice seas and built cities in the icy crust. Up until they hit spaceflight (which for the record is bio-engineered off something like the way squid and jellyfish move irl, as well as Modulated Exploration and Recon (MER) units XDD) they only had water-density experience with gravity and trajectory and some limited use of 'dry' tunnels. (They're somewhat amphibious but need to keep their skin damp with gels and suchlike to respire)

But they learned fast. Within a few generations, like. I'm not sure that a race that has experience with any gravity at all would find the concept of throwing things accurately completely alien, just complicated. I'm p sure if I gave one of my Javeen a reinforced support gauntlet they could manage decent aiming within a couple weeks of practice, you know?

Anyway I'm very tired and like 35% loopy on pain meds, I'm sure I misunderstood everything but I wanted to talk about my moist nerds XDD

 

It'd be even more funny trying to explain the senses we don't even understand very well, like proximity and magnetosensing and directionsensing.

"No, wait, we came this way earlier, let's turn around-"
"Look, I know it's a featureless maze corridor, but I think we've already-"
"No, I don't know how I know, I just KNOW, okay?!"

 

The English language would probably be its own particular mess as far as xenolinguistics go ("Why is this language just a bunch of other languages stapled together") and its love affair with the word "fuck" would probably be the subject of academic papers for decades. The versatility, the unclear etymological origins, the variable intensity. If a human starts saying "fuck" with emphasis and frequency it's either horny, angry, amused, or some mix of the previous options, God knows what.

 

Ive been thinking about this for a long time and i keep coming back to dogs. Like, okay. Take a german shepherd, because those are some pretty serious-looking critters. Heres this 70-80 lbs animal, clearly a predator and coincidentally looks basically like a mini version of a wolf which is one of the apex predators of the planet, it has stamina to rival our own, it can and has killed humans before, and we just. Hug them and give them sweet kisses and teach them how to do jobs!

Imagine an alien seeing a TSA dog. They come to earth probably for some diplomatic meeting without doing too much research because "come on, humans cant be that weird" and are going through Space Customs and theres a goddamn Big Predator nosing around, but the humans around it are not the least bit worried. Some of them are grinning at it. One mentions how cute it is and what a good job its doing working.

After a bit the alien is probably like "Okay, that makes a little more sense, the animal is trained to do a service for the humans." They leave Space Customs. A lady outside is walking her Great Dane. The alien is baffled and kinda scared.

 

The great dane comes up and sniffs the alien, who understandably freaks out a bit until the human pulls it away, "Bad Buster, I'm so sorry sir, he's really a sweetheart, just can't mind his manners around strangers." and the alien chills a little, because the woman clearly doesn't think the dog is going to attack, and it isn't showing any classical signs of aggression or anything. The alien goes a little farther down the street and is ASSAULTED by a shrill, bouncy, angry little dog. It body slams into him, but weighing about five pounds, bounces off without doing any damage. It takes hold of his pants-leg and shakes furiously. A predator on the attack. It doesn't look like it could do a lot of damage, but it may be venomous (he's heard that about some small earth creatures), so he backpedals to try to get away from it. Another human, laughing, picks it up around the middle and cradles it like a baby, all the while the dog is still barking at the top of its tiny lungs. "Sorry about that. He does the stupidest shit sometimes, I swear." The alien doesn't understand. A predator just attacked him, and the humans are acting like it's an ill-behaved child.

He turns around and heads back for the space station. There may be an intergalactic war on, but at least up there he knows what's dangerous.

 

Of course this raises the question, what will dogs think of aliens? Especially tiny ones. (Tiny aliens, I mean. Though also tiny dogs.)

 

I'm just imagining showing an alien, like, a fuckin chihuahua and going "yeah, that's a dog", and then showing them like, a fuckn st bernard and going "yeah that's a dog too" and watching them slowly lose their shit

 

They will swiftly locate and sniff the best approximation to what we would call a "butt".

 

Alien: "Wow you humans have such specialized roles for these creatures! You have species that are specialized in pulling sleds, many specialized in hunting, some for guarding resources, it's astounding! It must have taken millennia to domesticate them all!"

Human: "Yeah, no all those are all the same species, we kinda domesticated them when they were still one breed. They're all dogs. Yeah, even the huge one. Yeah, that one pulling a sled? Dog. The one that's 2 lbs soaking wet? dog. They're all the same species."

Alien: "what the fuck"

 

"except that one, that's a cat, we didn't really domesticate them so much as they decided to crash our rat-infested party"

 

consider: aliens meeting parrots

 

I read a short story about that! The alien at first thought the sound of the parrot's wings was a ship leak and started putting on an evac suit. Then the parrot showed up and the alien mistook it for a person.
Everything got sorted out after a bit.

 

Aliens not being able to tell certain species apart.

"Why is that person in a cage?"
"That's a gorilla."

 

Aliens are aghast that humans seem to find being scared fun.

For a lot of small or more fragile aliens a big burst of fear-causing chemicals kicks their systems into overdrive. They could produce resource-intensive defenses, depleting their own bodies and taking a long time to recover. It could considerably shorten their lifespan. They might even die of fright in extreme cases.

Imagine an alien asking what the humans had planned for the night and having to be explained the concept of a horror movie. Or a ghost train, or a rollercoaster. Creepypasta. Bungee jumping. Ghost stories. Pranks. Imagine the rumours about the crazy biped species who routinely scare themselves and others for bonding and recreation.

"Wait, so your mating partner actually camouflaged themself as a non-threatening object in your living quarters and then ambushed you like a predator?!"
"Yeah. They tackled me and sprayed me in the face with whipped cream."
"I'm so sorry. You must be devastated that your mate would try to blind you and brutalise you. Did you manage to chase them off your territory?"
"What? No! We both had a good laugh once the shock wore off, it was pretty funny!"
"It was... funny."
"Yeah! I'm going to put a fake spider in their lunch bag tomorrow. They hate spiders. They'll scream bloody murder when they find it."
* backs away slowly *

 

alien: that's racist
human: *facepalms*

 

A human cracks their knuckles and the alien is horrified. Did.... did the human just break their own phalanges??? Another human cracks their neck and the alien screams