…on making humans unique on a galactic scale without turning us to either primitive brutes, diplomats, or supah-speshul-snowflakes.
I’m not sure if I’ve submitted this before, but a cursory search didn’t turn up anything.
Poster A: Humanity possesses the right combination of above average curiosity and below average sense of self-preservation. This has lead to us following technical development pathways that the rest of the galaxy would consider, well, insane.
When other species reached for the stars, they did it only after they’d safely developed antigravity or teleportation technology. Mankind put a man on top of a missile and pointed it up.
When any other civilization suffers a hull breach battling aliens, they reroute power from the primary phase disruptor array to compensate and retreat. Humans slap some duct tape on it and return fire.
For the rest of the galaxy, major organ failure was a death sentence until they invented nanoregenerative therapy. We tear open the bodies of our dying and restore their vitality with zombie organs ripped from our still cooling dead.
In the eyes of the galaxy, we’re the mad science race.
Poster B: In addition to zombie organs, we also have robot organs. When our bones break, we bolt them back together until they heal. We consider nukes a viable form of propulsion for spacecraft [Ed: Orion Project]. We make explosives so unstable they destroy the lab equipment used to measure them. We keep class 4 biohazards around because we aren’t done studying them.
The real kicker? Humans consider such things perfectly reasonable and ordinary science, done by reasonable and ordinary men who live in ordinary houses with ordinary jobs.
Mad science? Nope, just regular science. – RecklessPrudence
(#00366 - A001)
[AN: You’ve pretty much nailed why the other species still call humans insane]
From the lectures of Kagzak:
The field of human studies is only partially dangerous. Yes, I am aware that humans have higher thresholds for physical damage, coupled with a centric thought that has to learn other species are different.
Before the discoveries of T'reka the Mad, also known as T'reka the Inquisitive, humans were widely believed to be incredibly hazardous.
[An image of a human from the pre-Amity pool of media. The human had a splinted leg and, though walking with the aid of a crutch, still reached towards the evidently terrified saurians. The legend on it read: HORROR OF THE HUMAN]
And it is true that events that would permanently disable any other cogniscent are viewed as a mere annoyance to humans. We well know that events that would cause death in other cogniscents merely incapacitate a human. Indeed, it is possible to remove all of a humans’ limbs and they will still find means to get around and accomplish things.
[An image of a quadruple amputee in a motorised wheelchair, steering the device with a straw in her mouth. On her lap, a monkey dressed in children’s clothing.]
This image, of course, dates back to “The Shattering”, a continuing event in which spacefaring humans sent colonists down the Terran system’s wealth of one-way wormholes. This example has a trained animal as an assistant. Helper animals are an old concept, dating back to domestication.
[An image of a man with a dog on a harness]
This human has no use of their eyes. The animal with him assists in navigation. And in the event that an animal is unwanted or unavailable…
[An image of a woman with a striped stick, paired with another wearing cumbersome goggles.]
…the humans have both simple and complex technologies to assist instead.
But enough of disabilities. I must warn you that some images you will see here are of a disturbing nature.
[An image of a stone carving, depicting humans in a series of complicated poses. Central to the scene is a pregnant woman and another approaching her bulbous belly with a knife]
This is an ‘operation’. Also known as 'surgery’. A procedure in which medical personnel cut a living human to fix what has gone wrong with their insides. The one pictured here is a 'caesarian’ in which the human infant is extracted through such surgery.
This image dates back to the early bronze age of the humans, and pre-dates the use of anaesthetics.
[Gasps, murmurs, and nervous laughter from the audience]
[An image of another stone carving. This time the one with the knife was working on the patient’s head.]
This is early brain surgery from the same era. The belief at the time being that holes put into the skull bone would relieve symptoms of mental disorders. Or what the early humans believed to be mental disorders.
It would be centuries before humans would use drugs to keep surgical patients both quiescent and unaware of their surgeries.
[A video of a chemical rocket launching. Judging by the slowness of its ascent, it was a large rocket]
This is the launch of Apollo eleven. An historic moment in human history. They literally strapped themselves to an explosive and fired themselves at the moon.
Astonishing, I know. They did this in the infancy of their computer age, without having first developed their famous gravity drive or magnetic launch technology. In fact, they continued to use primitive explosives as a means of launching from their planet’s surface for some significant time.
Human medical science has benefitted from their 'space age’. Including temporary, mechanical, replacement organs. This never quite supplanted harvesting the dead for organs used to replace defective ones in a living human.
[Gasps and murmurs from the audience]
Surgery is frequent with humans, and sometimes performed for vanity. They will hire a surgeon to break and re-set their facial bones, rearrange their skin, their hair… insert or remove things deemed 'ugly’, simply to attract a more desirable mate.
So much so that, before the age of the Great Return, it was 'natural’ for males and females alike to alter their physical selves in order to fit arbitrary and unrealistic beauty standards.
We have since been able to train them out of such atrocious habits, fortunately. That said, humans still possess a high tolerance for pain, and low thresholds for personal safety. There is even an ethos of sacrificing a 'hero’ to protect the larger populace.
Flying headlong into battles where divine intervention would never poke a stick, as it were.
[Giggles from the audience.]
Before the uniquely human invention of non-lethal combat, their chief strategy was to charge straight in, guns blazing. This proved especially effective, since other vessels would prefer to preserve their occupants rather than win the fight.
This included strategies like the Kamikaze Bomb.
[A video of a small human vessel with one pilot flying straight towards an alien vessel and ending in immolation]
This course will cover this, and many more human insanities. We will attempt to plumb their reasons for their seemingly bizarre choices, and why such strategies are mind-bogglingly successful.
Remember, always, should you continue this course, the seeming human motto: “If it’s crazy and it works, then it was never crazy.”
I expect an essay on that motto by the end of next week. Thank you for your Time.
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