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And here's my attempt. It's the first story I've put on here, hope you like it.
The first sign something read wrong was the fuel pressure warning light. Pressure was dropping in the main tanks.
"Stax, the fuel pressure is dropping!" Shouted the pilot to the captain. Both were aliens from very dangerous death worlds, so every action was planned and contingencies planned. This was evolved into their species because failure to do so in their planet was generally fatal.
"We filled up at the last port." Freya, one of the ships humans informed the captain. She handled logistics and had overseen the purchase of fuel herself.
The captain, remained calm as they had a contingency for low fuel pressure, and that was to check the levels, and re pressurise the tanks. They were only staying on the same planet to sell the rest of their cargo on a different continent. Their plans included another refill stop if needed there.
"Follow the procedure. What are the current levels, Tovrio?".
The pilot checked the dials, but each time the number dropped so they couldn't get a reading.
This was something that wasn't planned for. They were actively losing fuel so fast they wouldn't make it to the next stop.
The pilot started to panic and yelled something incoherent at the captain. At this point, George the only other human on board walked in and asked what the fuss was. Add they were out of contingencies the captain told him what the situation was, then told them all what an honour it had been to fly with them all.
"Wait, you're giving up?!" Was the incredulous response. "Let me see what the problem is." And marched off. The captain made a final announcement telling the test of the alien crew that they were out of contingency plans and that they were losing fuel and wouldn't make it to their destination.
Freya had worked with a human logistics company back on Earth and this was not a dire emergency. Nothing that bad happened ever. She had no idea of course of the relative safety of Earth. Here there were many places where you couldn't even breath the air, and every creature was so heightened in their competitive survival instinct that they could kill you in an instant.
However, not knowing these details did the Humans a favour. George had already found the problem, sabotage by bots planted in the fuel that had gathered together and ruptured the tank after they'd left (knowing that the final checks would be done and they would be discovered if they activated before).
There was no official replacement and you needed to empty the tank before welding. So he got creative and solved the problem with some spare rubber from the bedding and air tight tape which wouldn't survive contact with the fuel but he only stuck it to the rubber.
Having stabilised the immediate problem, he informed Freya who was by then the only coherent person on the bridge. She took over flight controls and guided them gently to am unplanned stop where she'd heard fuel and propper repairs were available.
Captain Stax found this unbelievable. Thinking on their feet was not a strong point and they just stared in disbelief as the Homans just continued in the face of near certain death. Then they nearly collapsed when the problems had been solved. Both humans got a special recognition from the merchant fleet admiral and a new contingency of always having a human on board was formed.
Thus humans became one of the most well travelled species due to their adaptability and creativity in difficult situations.
Alternate take to the "earth is a death world". What if earth is one of the safest worlds out there?
This could cause the aliens to all have an extremely organised and well planned nature. If something isn't fully planned with contingencies, they just don't survive.
Humans ability to 'just wing it' is unusual and a little concerning. Similarly the human nature to attempt to make friends with local creatures is seen as near suicide to the aliens.
Story to come, just wanted to get the concept written and remembered.
Alternate take to the "earth is a death world". What if earth is one of the safest worlds out there?
This could cause the aliens to all have an extremely organised and well planned nature. If something isn't fully planned with contingencies, they just don't survive.
Humans ability to 'just wing it' is unusual and a little concerning. Similarly the human nature to attempt to make friends with local creatures is seen as near suicide to the aliens.
Story to come, just wanted to get the concept written and remembered.
I see humans are space orcs and I raise you, Humans are space ants.
Work in large groups to build seemingly impossible things, fight each other to the death, taking care of young is very important, and strong for our size. Additionally, we’d be tiny.
So, I’ve seen a ton of these posts, but not one exploring a darker side. Like, everyone’s talking about how humans would pack bond, welcome, or just be total bad asses and defend Earth or whatever. But I haven’t seen a post about humans experimenting.
For example, I see a ton of media with humans just experimenting on alien like cretures.
We’re curious creatures. We want to find out more about things. And if it’s something new and strange, there would be different reactions. The new thing could be shunned upon or seen as some sort of object.
Take the people who aren’t straight. There are people who don’t like them. Homosexual relationships are also overly sexualised too. People force trans people to choose one or just completly disregard who they are. Humans forget that the people of theLGBTQ+ community are people too.
What makes aliens any different? There are people who wouldn’t hesitate to hurt them in the name of science.
Aliens shouldn’t be afraid of humans just because they’re all cool and unkillable. They shouldn’t just be afraid of the fact that Earth is a literal kill zone. Aliens should also be afraid of the fact that humans are willing to lock them in a room. See what poisins aliens react to. How fast are their regenerative powers?
As much as I love the fun Space Orcs posts, I can’t help but think of the darker parts of humanity.
I'm really into the whole humans are weird trope, and I know I'm like years overdue.
Humans are distinct in our ability to throw objects, especially with the speed, strength and precision we throw them with. We are the only species on earth that can throw like that.
It's even scientifically impossible for us to be able to throw. It's not even controlled in our brains because that would be too slow. It's controlled in the muscles in our arms, we do it without even thinking about it.
Just imagine a human a pen into the trash 3 meters away, and aliens being so confused.
i have only 2 words mountain lion, also why has no one talked about Africa??
I really want a science fiction story where aliens come to invade earth and effortlessly wipe out humanity, only to be fought off by the wildlife.
They were expecting military resistance. They weren’t counting on bears.
I would love to see someone write about aliens learning about video games like halo that involve us fighting aliens if anyone is willing to write about it in this fandom
We willing put our kids in spot where they can get hurt and consider it a lesson to the kids when they get hurt. We have spinning platforms. Ramps. Swings all of these are very dangerous and can harm kids. I think that Aline’s would be super protective of their kids imagine them seeing all the pain kids go through and how often they get hurt.
Has anyone else been just a bit angry that humans are omnivores?? Why couldn't we be just carnivores or herbivores? we as humans need protein, vitamins, minerals, fats, and carbs. I just wanna go out and eat leaves like a giraffe. Giraffes weigh over 1800 - 2000 pounds on average (i think) and they survive on leaves why can't we? or at least raw meat why do we have to cook it to eat it without dying or getting sick?? aren't we omnivores??
Sometimes i will be watching a cooking video and they will describe how to de-bone a chicken or butcher a turkey and ill just think how horrifying that would sound to an alien race that are all purely herbivores
Entry 10-5786:
Since our last entry on entry regarding our human companion (Male), a lot has happened:
Starting the day after our last entry about him, he found the human section in our database and found that we had videos of people doing different types of work. "For studying your kind in their natural states," we told him.
After some time, he seemed to be fascinated with the art of heating metal up with fire and banging it with a hammer into different shapes; a craft that seemed to have been practiced by their species for many of their centires.
After looking into it myself, I discovered that one has to destroy a large quantity of valuable resources and burn the end result just to get the metal hot enough to work.
Telling my finding to Steve (what our human perfers to be called by), he replied with, "Yeah, that seems to be a pattern for my species; a lot of work to make something valuable."
A few weeks later, as we were gathering resources from Planet 115-X-18, we found him bringing in resources of his own into the ship, which was unusual for him. We didn't think much of it.
We should've asked what he was up to that day.
Over a period of several months, he renovated his living quarters to resemble the workshop of the person working metal in our database, fit with forge, chimney, a hunk of metal to hit in and a workbench with tools. His bed seemed to be moved to the neighboring quarters. "It'll be fine," he told us after we asked him why he moved his bed.
We lost seem for several days as we heard repeated banging and the faint smell of something burning coming from that area. Steve seemed to be happy, but he smelled like the burning smell every day.
"You'll appreciate what I'm up to," he told us at meat time.
The day after that, he showed up what he made: a knife
We immediately told him he wasn't allowed a weapon on the ship, but he insured us it wasn't what it was.
"Humans don't have sharp teeth or claws, so when we have time cut something, we need something to do it for us. A knife is one for those things. It's no different than the pencil you let me have," he told us, then demonstrated what it could do by removing a thin curls off the piece of wood he had with him. Where'd he had the desire to do any of this still make us wonder about to this day.
He seemed to make more and more refined knives as time went on; making more tools to help him to do so.
This seemed to both keep him busy and give us the opportunity to see his thinking process.
He seemed to like certain shapes of tools over others and seemed to learn how to shape wood while learning "blacksmithing" (what he called what he was doing).
These days, he's been hourding rocks and stones that were larger than his hand while we are out gathering supplies and seemed to be working them into a useful shape because the metal of the knife he keeps with him now resembles a mirror rather than the dark grey, black or dark orange look we see his tools in on occasion.
He's given us items we never knew we needed until they were in place. Just the other day, he gave me a hanger to hold my hand computer when it's not in use.
He's been staying dirty, but he doesn't seem to mind; he seemed to have found a source of joy in expressing his own species.
End transmission
Concept: xenofiction sci-fi where the main characters are different alien beings. It’s all treated and framed as “normal” from both the audience’s and each other’s perspective, even when their behavior is obviously not something a human would do.
Eventually, we meet a human character, whose actual name appears to be “Smith the Human”, and who acts like aliens from mediocre pop sci-fi stories – like, someone goes “Oh, I’ve never met a human before!” and he responds by spouting random (technically-accurate-to-real-life) factoids about human culture and biology in a way that no real human being ever would, i.e. “Humans are social persitence hunters and apex predators – on our harsh homeworld of Terra, we evolved to form hierarchal hives or colonies, like your world’s Zoink-Ants or Frisk-Bees! We weren’t that fast over short distances, and so we caught our prey, not by ambush or by pursuit, but by simply walking, brisk jogging, and tracking our prey until the prey tired itself out, allowing us to catch it at our leisure!” He always maintains the same stilted but forceful tone of voice, devoid of any emotional content, and his facial expression never changes from “we didn’t bother to animate his face”-style dull surprise.
He wears American soldier gear and says “Humans are a Proud Warrior Race™!” without a trace of irony.
Now, one possible punchline would be that the protagonists eventually meet other humans, and it turns out that he’s the only human who’s Like That. However, I think that in order to commit to the whole “xenofiction” bit, you’d need to make every human completely identical, in exactly the same way that members of an alien species in pop sci-fi are identical. The way I personally would do it is,the loud-deadpan-weirdo routine is just an “unreliable narration” due to the perceptions of characters who aren’t familiar with humans; as a group, even if the nonhuman characters are like “Wow, they really are synchronized like a hive of Frisk-Bees!” or whatever, the humans behave exactly how an actual group of humans would behave in that kind of situation, if you read between the lines. (And, y'know, a squadron of uniformed soldiers with a CO in the background is inevitably going to act differently from a similarly-sized group of civilians; the nonhuman characters, and hence the audience, just don’t get to see how they are “normally”.)
The actual punchline is that after the “human” plot is resolved (maybe they’re antagonists, and the prior ramble about their biology proves to be a vital component?), there’s a scene where the viewpoint character is a human, and the whole situation is precisely reversed: humans look more diverse and talk like normal people, and all the nonhuman characters of each species are identical and do the loud-deadpan-weirdo thing.
this text was a reply to this post but i wanted to post it separately!
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The thing about humans is that they do not consider themselves a hive mind. However, by the mosr acceptable definitions, they are one. Humans must be kept together, either physically or virtually with each other. They must know about their “news”, about “what is happening”. And, much to the Greeder’s fears, they must know about “ideas”.
Those things are like one of the Great Universal Plagues to a Greeder! No ideas shall pass to humans. They have developed guides for that, even. “How to Contain an Earthling”. The authors of such guides studied Human History as much as they could, learning with their ancestors on the art of lies and dismay.
What Greeders failed to understand is that they would have been the richest of the Galaxy if they truly knew how to contain an earthling.
At first, aliens didn’t know what safe work conditions were for the species that punched each other for sport. Most of the ships then developed new safety measures, following human guidance. Some did not.
Greeders are stubborn. They took one look at the week’s newly discovered “horrific beast beyond imagination” and did not think about said beast’s wrath. They heard the tales of the humans working together, singing, even, while fixing dangerous things using simple safety measures, and thought they could be easily fooled. “Of course we have safe work conditions”, they lied to some of them, never bothering to be more than looks.
There are three universal rules between species. Never assume the other is like you, always ask before doing something you never did before, and don’t mess with a member of a hive mind
But the foolish small beasts that behaved like little gremlins, those armed with weird and gross “hands” capable of doing anything they wanted, those who would jump deep into engines and cover themselves with dirt to do their job, never saw themselves as a hive mind, and everyone else was too terrified of what a hive mind made of terrifying horrors buried within Earth itself would behave like.
But when the first humans started to be hurt and the Greeders did everything they could to pretend they did not saw it, the historians of the Earthly Hive remembered. They told the engineers. The healers were angry. The idea appeared.
The idea spread.
The idea took over.
They demanded sympathy from the Greeders, knowing well it would be denied.
They left the ships. The idea was pulsing, much like a heart.
They did not have to re-remember how to fight.
The Earthly Hive appeared as a small group, less than ten thousand, agrouped in a small multitude of a hundred ships. The machines buzzed, identical to the ones they had to give their blood to fix.
They sang in unison. They made noise. And, at the end of the act, they
sent
a
(((small)))
message
written
in
holograms.
“Give us safety”, shown in yellow, as images flashed in the background. “Or you will be the next”.
The invention of the guillotine was something that fascinated other alien workers.
The Greeders were too terrified to look at it a second time.
true be that.
I still love how when the switch came out Nintendo was like “I know! We will make the switch games taste bad so kids won’t eat them!”
And all of humanity collectively said: “Okay but how bad does it taste?” And licked their switch cartridges.
Philosophers and anthropologists have debated it for years. “The defining trait of humanity is our intelligence/compassion/creativity/curiosity, etc.”
No no. All of that is wrong.
The defining trait of humanity is that we are weird as shit.
no >:3
Aliens have such different gender and biology from humans that none of them menstruate. So imagine this.
Alien: Human Steve, why did I find blood on the lavatory floor?
Steve: Oh, that's just Karen.
Alien: What??
Steve: Human females bleed from their reproductive organs once every month for five to seven days.
Alien: wHAT?!
Steve, calmly: Yeah, they can lose enough blood in a lifetime to kill ten grown men.
Alien: WHaT ?!?!
Karen, walking in: Steve, I need A FUCKING break. And chocolate. And a heating pad. I'll be in my sleeping quarters. Also, I threw up.
Steve: Okay, take the day off, I'll bring you your stuff in a bit.
Alien: *jots down in notebook* Human females are indestructible and fearsome. Regard them with respect.
EDIT: I swear, if this is the thing that makes me Tumblr famous, I’m gonna blow a braincell. And I don’t have many of those left, so…
Edit 2: Guys. Guys. What?! My grumpy menstrual rant is in no way worthy of being tumblr famous. *is mildly to severely confused/thankful/bumfuddled*
Edit 3: Why is this still getting notes wtf
Edit 4: STOP REBLOGING THISSSSSS