Humans are the weirdest aliens?

Imagine a planet gently toddling through space driven by EM drives, making the same 'brprprprprprprprpr' noise

 

So uh...



The pot is the biggest one they could easily carry, and contains live worms, because this sort of situation definitely involves humorous failures to understand requirements re: food, shelter, etc.

 

that's adorable

 

Just read through this whole thread, so

According to all known laws of physics, there is no way a human should be able to stand.

 

I feel like aliens would be really intimidated by humans' ability and willingness to use anything as a weapon. I imagine they would have, like, specialized blasters or bioweapons if they were advanced enough (eg a colonizing species or smth), plus whatever natural weapons they have like claws or venom, but what if the whole concept of improvised weapons never really cropped up?

Like, imagine a small research vessel lands on a planet and is approached by a hostile alien.

"Human-Sara, we're weaponless and the enemy is immune to my venom!"

Human-Sara, who was working on ship repairs at the time, holding a large claw-hammer in one hand and a socket wrench in the other: "Don't worry about it, check this shit out"

 

One thing that ties into the "Humans are a bureaucratic species but also ridiculous" subset of this kind of stuff is that, in some countries such as France, politicians have pushed for pies to be classified as a weapon.

 

In Ontario last year i think, someone robbed a convenience store wielding a snow brush, humans are for sure the wacky macguyver species

Along with octopi and crows and such

...birb aliens and humans having dance-offs? Because birds have the Power Of Rhythm

 

I wish I could send you a video of how hard I just laughed.
As an extension of this, birb aliens meeting ostriches and parrots and trying semi-successfully to get into dance-offs with them.

 

This isn't normally my favorite trope but I gotta leave this here

Spoiler: long

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”.

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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.

Keep reading

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[text from under cut because its awesome]

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.”

 

Dogs though....

Alien: "BE CAREFUL! This creature is closely related to one of the apex predators on Earth and is one of the only animals capable of matching a human's stamina! They're incredibly dangerous and cause hundreds of human deaths annually!"

Human: "Yeah check this out." *puts hand into dog's mouth, pulls up lips to show its very large teeth* "Look at them chompers. He could totally kill me," they say as the dog licks their arm

 

Idk why, but i love the idea of a sentient alien species looking exactly like house cats. Hilarity ensues when a human accidentally picks up an intergalactic diplomat and goes "aww, someone put a little suit on their cat!" and starts making kissy faces at a very confused alien.

More hilarity later when a human brings their cat along on a space ship and it takes months before the rest of the crew figures out they dont have to salute the cat.

 

I have a friend who accidentally turned a one hour hike into eight hours because he kept finding new trails to explore and then lightly poisoned himself by drinking polluted river water, and I keep imagining trying to explain to a non-pursuit-hunter, non-generalist alien that the man who traversed the mountains for a full day then survived drinking poison isn't a cultural hero whose legend will be passed down for generations, but just this idiot I know who needs to take a chill pill.

 

"I Am Legend!" he proclaimed as he marched into the creatures' settlement, dirty, tired, sick, but unbroken. And from their point of view, he was.

 

Jennifer Pharr Davis holds the record for fastest run through the Appalachian trail, at 46 days, 11 hours, and 20 minutes, about 47 miles a day. Dean Karnazes ran 350 miles without sleeping in 80 hours and 44 minutes in 2005. And theres tons of other endurance runners like them!! The do it for fun!! Theres literally no reason for them do do it other than pushing their own abilities. Imagine explaining that to an alien, just, "oh yeah some people like to go run the width of a small country for fun, they're kinda weird tho like they're definitely the outliers" and the alien is like "oh my god??"

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/6r5g1h/oc_how_to_break_a_human/

 

hi I haven't backread I'm sharing anyway

Imagine: humans imitating alien expressions, and vice versa. Humans raising their arms above their heads and approximating the antennae bobs their coworker makes when they're happy. Alien coworker swinging the tips of their antennae while being sarcastic, imitating an eyeroll.

 

LOV IT

 

Honestly, humans are really suggestible. We know this, we make entertainment of it (space memes, or... spemes?!), it's a big thing. The question becomes how suggestible are the aliens, and then, how do they respond to being subconsciously imitated?

 

so apparently the human hand is the only known configuration that can effectively form a fist while still maintaining dexterity

 

more importantly, the human hand is the only known configuration that can flip someone the bird while still maintaining dexterity