Might Do Something With This Tbh - Tumblr Posts

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.”