Humans Are Humans - Tumblr Posts
I just had the ecstatic realization that, because of the Before/After First Contact date system in one of my sci-fi universes, June 9th of the year 2503 is, to them, 6/9/420 APC. I dunno about y’all, but I’m willing to bet that humans absolutely will not have outgrown the sacred numerology of The Weed Number and The Sex Number by the 26th century. there will be a hedonistic holiday across known space...
04:25 Common Fleet Time, 06.09.420 APC
USSC Aixsaio-Jien Ship Log, Capt. Exiuen Ybnekh recording. Was awoken by a chorus of impossibly loud "NICE!" emanating from every human aboard the ship at exactly 04:20 hours. Ordinarily this time is within normal hibernation cycle span for humans. Brief communication with other vessels and stations across the Coalition fleet indicate identical experiences regardless of location. This is entirely unprecedented, and will be investigated. Punishment may be issued accordingly, if necessary.
04:41 Common Fleet Time, 06.09.420 APC
Addendum Log: Upon investigation, human crew members sheepishly explained that 04:20 hours is regarded as a sort of sacred time for the human species, particularly on this day. Was subsequently invited to partake in human recreational herb inhalation. Invitation... declined.
today in “things i’m disproportionately emotional about”:
it’s facial reconstructions of prehistoric humans!!
like, look at this part-homo sapiens, part-neandertal man from well over 30,000 years ago:
doesn’t he just look like a dude you’d wanna hang out with? like he probably washes dishes in the kitchen with you, and has excellent weed
what a charming fellow. what stories he probably has to tell. i’d definitely go shoot the shit with him on Contemplation Rock after i’d finished my day’s work carving a bone flute for the autumn hunting ceremony, or whatever
people have been people ever since people first became people, i tell you what
they all had lives and histories and families and friends and dumb gossip and games they played and total bullshit in which they believed wholeheartedly
they all argued about the nature of the world, and of themselves
they all sang songs
they all drew pictures
they all buried their dead in graves, and they buried their dead in graves well before they did a lot of that other stuff. they buried their dead with flowers, with panther claws, with the bones of animals they’d killed, with the bones of family members who had died at the same time or earlier. they buried their dead with their arms folded across their chests
they fell in love
they took care of their old and their sick and their disabled, even when it cost them
they made new things, and worried about what the new things meant for people everywhere, as a whole
An interesting sci-fi short story from 4chan.
[Imgur]
crying about cave paintings at 7:51 pm is a good exercise that i recommend
Specifically because of this reblog on this post, I decided to listen to the greetings and sounds on the golden record that the Voyager probes are carrying. And as the speaking progressed, I was reminded what the record truly is. This isn’t a first contact greeting. This is a monument.
This is the final and true monument.
These disks and the sounds they carried are a testament to the existence of a species that looked up and dared to fathom what the sky meant. This is our essence. This is our prologue and our epilogue. The small, boxy spacecraft and its five golden disks are the eternal physicality of our call out to the endless night, not the cry of “who is there?” but the shout of “I am here!”
And then I got to the brain wave recording, and read Ann Druyan’s explanation of what she thought of while this section was being recorded, and I broke down in tears.
“I began by thinking about the history of Earth and the life it sustains. To the best of my abilities I tried to think something of the history of ideas and human social organization. I thought about the predicament that our civilization finds itself in and about the violence and poverty that make this planet a hell for so many of its inhabitants. Toward the end I permitted myself a personal statement of what it was like to fall in love.”
That section is the last one out of the five.
The closing note of our longest, greatest, most complex message to alien intelligence –and quite possibly our cosmic epitaph– is the most intimate possible description of the most human experience of all. It is the very thought of love.
Now to me, the greetings in the opening ring in my ears not as “hello,” but as if they are reaching across time to say, “We are alive! In this time and place, we are alive! We existed, and we mattered, and whoever else may be out there please know that we love you!”
crying about cave paintings at 7:51 pm is a good exercise that i recommend
I should also point out that humans are incredibly resistant to impact damage and able to naturally heal from injuries that would kill most other mammals, broken limbs in particular. part of this is, of course, because of our elevated sense of community, which drives us to care for other humans (and organisms in general) that can’t care for themselves, but the other part of it is just that we’re freakishly good at fixing ourselves.
Human vs Animals
thinking about what makes humans special and I’m kind of in love with the idea of a sci-fi universe where humans are the first and only species that invented FTL because we just Would Not Fucking Give Up on it. all these other interstellar civilizations are thousands of years older than we are and most have megastructures and immortality and plasma weapons and crazy advanced supercomputers. but they all resigned themselves to the fact that FTL is impossible, and nearly shat themselves when these primitive backwater super-monkeys showed up in their systems by dropping out of warp drive.
“How did you do that?” they ask, with their effortless and flawless auto-translators that are centuries from anything we could achieve.
“Do what?” we reply, eyeing the oxygen meter because we still haven’t quite perfected atmospheric recycling.
“What do you mean, ‘do what?’” they press, incredulous. “Your spacecraft just crossed an interplanetary distance in minutes!”
“Oh, the Alcubierre drive? Pretty simple, we just tricked the quantum vacuum into giving off a controlled negative energy density to create a localized bubble of warped spacetime that amplifies apparent velocity. Still working on the power efficiency though, it’s real basic and eats up so much fusion fuel.”
“You did WHAT to spacetime?? With a fusion reactor?! What about relativity?!”
“Yeah it turns out Einstein was a little wrong and the universe can be treated as a single reference frame, because knowing takes precedence over observing... Hang on, how do you guys with your Dyson spheres and antimatter engines not have faster-than-light drives?”
“HOW DO YOU FUSION DRIVE SIMPLETONS HAVE THEM?! We tried for centuries and gave up on it!”
“Oh yeah it took a while but we just kept trying.”
“Why?”
“Hubris and general cosmic spite, mostly.”
I’ve noticed this thing that happens whenever the learnéd armchair academic types talk about resource-based reasons to go live on the moon or Mars or wherever else in space. They always make a big deal about “oh it’s not really worth all the trouble when there’s more accessible and cheaper alternatives.”
Let’s use Helium-3 as an example.
He3 is the miracle fuel. Using it in a nuclear fusion reactor with hydrogen will get you loads of useful energy with negligible beta radiation and no radioactive byproducts. The only problem is that it’s rare as shit on Earth, to the point where the vast majority of it available at the present time has to be synthesized in difficult and highly radioactive deuterium-lithium reactions.
Most relevant studies indicate that the surface of the moon is loaded with He3, at least compared to Earth, because it has no atmosphere to intercept the solar wind. But of course, economists and aerospace nerds alike hem and haw about if it’s reeeeally worth it to go all the way to the moon for He3.
Okay, sure, you have to get off the surface of the Earth, which takes a lot of energy, then burn more energy getting to the moon, then burn even MORE energy getting OFF the moon and back to Earth orbit, and then a little bit more energy to get it safely to the surface of Earth. But I fucking guarantee you that if there was oil on the moon, the United States would have invaded it by now. That’s not a joke, it’s just stating the fact that oil barons have the money to get what they want whenever they fucking want it, regardless of how “practical” it is. It’s a matter of how broken our civilization’s value system is.
This extends to Mars (and beyond), because in the course of my researches I keep seeing people saying “there’s no useful resources on Mars we can’t get on Earth and living on Mars is hard to do so there’s no real reason to settle it.”
Do you know why Edmund Hillary climbed Everest?
In his own exact words: “because it was there.”
“Because it’s there” is the approach we should have to developing space exploration and expanding our civilization beyond Earth’s gravity well. Besides the scientific value (which is always superior to resources), actually living on other worlds is worth all the challenges.
Why?
Why not?
We as a species are prone to doing things just because we can, or because we think we can. We like to solve problems just so we can feel clever. Why live in hollowed out asteroids? Why live on Mars? Because we fucking can, dude, because it’s cool as shit and it’s a thing that we can do if we solve enough problems.
I was reading a Reddit thread earlier (bear with me) about what economic resources a Mars colony could provide. You know what the best answer was?
Art.
The most valuable thing future Martians will have to offer the rest of humanity would be their culture. Their new, exciting, melting pot culture. I think that’s 100% correct, and also the best thing I’ve read all year.
Once we get into space and start mining asteroids and gas giants, or hopefully long before that, our value system will have to change dramatically. Because metals and gases and water and carbon are abundant in the universe, but you know what isn’t?
Creativity.
Imagination. Art. Music. Literature. Dancing. Films and books and songs and a million other ways that humans express themselves. Imagination is the human spirit; art is love made manifest. That’s rarer than life itself, but it’s what makes life worth living for us human beings. For such small creatures as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.
yknow
"someone will remember us in another time"
i think that's not quite even going far enough
even if nothing about you is written down? people are people, and at some point there might be someone like you- or someone who imagines other people, and the people they imagine might be like you. i can think about the idea of a changeling child who cannot get enough of the feel of slightly clumpy sand- that person shares one aspect of me, probably more, and that person could exist back in time up until whenever a person was a person.
larger scales, too. and sure, those are less detailed... but a world in one's head goes far, even if it might not be too accurate. in a hundred million years, will someone marvel at a set of human bones and make a lucky connection? given how much ive seen about the idea of sapient dinosaurs, i think it's possible.
on earth there are people who dream of life on mars, of glittering green-blue worlds somewhere out there. if you draw a random squiggle enough times, will pareidolia resolve one into the shape of a continent? if the world is a dream, i must congratulate our worldbuilder on imagining some truly ridiculous monkeys.
given that it’s been about six months since I made this post and I’ve learned more about warp theory and relativity in the intervening time, I feel I ought to correct and clarify what I meant by that specific line.
first of all, just because you see something happen does not mean it is currently happening. when you look at the moon, for example, you’re seeing about 3 seconds into the past since that’s the time it takes for photons to cross that distance. if we were to observe a system orbiting α Centauri, we’d be four and a bit years behind. however, that means that whatever is happening “right now” at α Cen, we will see it four and a bit years later. if your warp ship leaves α Cen and arrives in orbit of Earth four years later, you may be able to look through your telescopes and watch your departure, but that’s just the light; you’re here, so of course you’ve already left there. if instead you were to immediately turn around and return, you would still arrive after you left because your transit still occurred over a given amount of time for both you and observers (~8 years). even though you beat out the light echoes by two thirds of a year, you still moved forward in the chain of causality.
now, what complicates this is the fact that time flows differently under varying conditions of gravity and velocity. however, the only places in the universe where this difference is noticeable enough to cause problems are in the vicinity of extremely massive objects (black holes, neutron stars, etc) or from the reference frame of objects moving at significant fractions of light speed in real space. therefore, we can safely assume that the pace of time on any inhabitable body in the universe (planet, moon, asteroid, station, spaceship below 0.1c) is functionally identical to the pace of time here on Earth, with perhaps a second-per-year time slip at worst. and because you aren’t physically exceeding the speed of light with a warp drive, the relativistic effects of your transit wouldn’t be any worse than had you simply traveled at your real-space-velocity in real space– in fact, it would probably be better, since rather than coming home to find out everyone you knew is dead, your personal body clock would merely be a few hours or days behind local time (depending on your real-space-velocity, and distance travelled, of course). I dunno about you, but I would vastly prefer the interstellar jet lag.
thinking about what makes humans special and I’m kind of in love with the idea of a sci-fi universe where humans are the first and only species that invented FTL because we just Would Not Fucking Give Up on it. all these other interstellar civilizations are thousands of years older than we are and most have megastructures and immortality and plasma weapons and crazy advanced supercomputers. but they all resigned themselves to the fact that FTL is impossible, and nearly shat themselves when these primitive backwater super-monkeys showed up in their systems by dropping out of warp drive.
“How did you do that?” they ask, with their effortless and flawless auto-translators that are centuries from anything we could achieve.
“Do what?” we reply, eyeing the oxygen meter because we still haven’t quite perfected atmospheric recycling.
“What do you mean, ‘do what?’” they press, incredulous. “Your spacecraft just crossed an interplanetary distance in minutes!”
“Oh, the Alcubierre drive? Pretty simple, we just tricked the quantum vacuum into giving off a controlled negative energy density to create a localized bubble of warped spacetime that amplifies apparent velocity. Still working on the power efficiency though, it’s real basic and eats up so much fusion fuel.”
“You did WHAT to spacetime?? With a fusion reactor?! What about relativity?!”
“Yeah it turns out Einstein was a little wrong and the universe can be treated as a single reference frame, because knowing takes precedence over observing... Hang on, how do you guys with your Dyson spheres and antimatter engines not have faster-than-light drives?”
“HOW DO YOU FUSION DRIVE SIMPLETONS HAVE THEM?! We tried for centuries and gave up on it!”
“Oh yeah it took a while but we just kept trying.”
“Why?”
“Hubris and general cosmic spite, mostly.”
humans are an essential part of the ecosystem. nearly every ecosystem on earth had humans as an essential part of its function. the earth would be worse off than before if we were gone suddenly overnight. send tweet
i hate pessimistic takes on human nature so much
Tell me a soft memory
Even when people have Alzheimer’s or dementia they don’t ever lose their humanity. My grandma had really bad Alzheimer’s in the end and even though she didn’t know any of her family anymore she was so kind and gentle with my baby nephew. It means something, I think, that caring for others is so ingrained in our psyche that not even disease could make us lose that
40,000 years ago, early humans painted hands on the wall of a cave. This morning, my baby cousin began finger painting. All of recorded history happened between these two paintings of human hands. The Nazca Lines and the Mona Lisa. The first TransAtlantic flight and the first voyage to the Moon. Humanity invented the wheel, the telescope, and the nuclear bomb. We eradicated wild poliovirus types 2 and 3. We discovered radio waves, dinosaurs, and the laws of thermodynamics. Freedom Riders crossed the South. Hippies burned their draft cards. Countless genocides, scientific advancements, migrations, and rebellions. More than a hundred billion humans lived and died between these two paintings—one on a sheet of paper, and one on the inside of a cave. At the dawn of time, ancient humans stretched out their hands. And this morning, a child reached back.
I got to hold a 500,000 year old hand axe at the museum today.
It's right-handed
I am right-handed
There are grooves for the thumb and knuckle to grip that fit my hand perfectly
I have calluses there from holding my stylus and pencils and the gardening tools.
There are sharper and blunter parts of the edge, for different types of cutting, as well as a point for piercing.
I know exactly how to use this to butcher a carcass.
A homo erectus made it
Some ancestor of mine, three species ago, made a tool that fits my hand perfectly, and that I still know how to use.
Who were you
A man? A woman? Did you even use those words?
Did you craft alone or were you with friends? Did you sing while you worked?
Did you find this stone yourself, or did you trade for it? Was it a gift?
Did you make it for yourself, or someone else, or does the distinction of personal property not really apply here?
Who were you?
What would you think today, seeing your descendant hold your tool and sob because it fits her hands as well?
What about your other descendant, the docent and caretaker of your tool, holding her hands under it the way you hold your hands under your baby's head when a stranger holds them.
Is it bizarre to you, that your most utilitarian object is now revered as holy?
Or has it always been divine?
Or is the divine in how I am watching videos on how to knap stone made by your other descendants, learning by example the way you did?
Tomorrow morning I am going to the local riverbed in search of the appropriate stones, and I will follow your example.
The first blood spilled on it will almost certainly be my own, as I learn the textures and rhythm of how it's done.
Did you have cuss words back then? Gods to blaspheme when the rock slips and you almost take your thumbnail off instead? Or did you just scream?
I'm not religious.
But if spilling my own blood to connect with a stranger who shared it isn't partaking in the divine
I don't know what is.
i think the thing that bugs me most about the "earth is a deathworld" genre as a whole, from a narrative structure sense, is that they almost always combine it with human exceptionalism. like humans are the dominant species on earth yes but that's because being a tool user is like going at evolution with console commands enabled.
even if all the aliens are super physically frail for whatever contrived reason, that's basically irrelevant to "your materials science must be this good to build spacecraft", and materials science trumps physicality for tool users.
aliens encountering earth for the first time wouldn't be like "whoa a planet of ubermenschen to save us from insert-evil-imperialist-species-here i'm glad someone found a way to make the noble savage narrative about white people" it would be "why are so many of their signals celebrating the eradication of another species shouldn't that be a traged-holy fuck I'm glad this variola thing is dead. what do you mean they sequenced its entire genome"
What is the purpose of the human species?
Think about it: what are the two things that have defined our entire genus for two million years?
Learn everything and care for each other.
It's been twelve thousand years since the beginning of civilization on Earth. In that time, humankind has invented dogs, the wheel, economics, the steam engine, capitalism, and the nuclear bomb. We're as much of a mess as we've always been; probably even more so. It can be kind of hard to see us for what we really are these days. But whenever someone mentions Sputnik, or Vostok 1, or the Apollo program, or the ISS, you know what they say?
"We did that."
That's why space exploration is important. That's why it's important to me. Not just because it instills hope, but… because it's the root of us, all over again.
Cooperation and curiosity are the bedrock of space exploration. You just can't go out there without the intersection of both. And lucky for us, they're the same two traits that got us from flint to fission over the past two million years. Another sophont species of different ancestry would balk at the unbelievable array of challenges inherent in spaceflight and probably decide it's not worthwhile. We do it anyways, because two million years of wanderlust sing in the bones of every one of us from the day we're born to the day we die.
We have to KNOW, you see? We have to KNOW, we have to EXPERIENCE, and we have to do it TOGETHER! When we go, we are becoming ourselves again. We are wandering together. That's what we were made to do.
"Drink this water of the spring, and rest here a while. We have a long way yet to go, and I can't go without you."