Challenge #01958-E134: The New Terror — Steemit
“That’s not exactly true,” said one of the survivors. “Alfred Hitchcock tried, but it didn’t quite get there.”
Sandy fed another page of a glossy magazine to the guttering flames as she tried to work this out. “You mean The Birds?”
“That was full of crows and seagulls and pigeons, though.”
“Yeah, well. Ducks are hard to be believable as a threat. Or they were.”
Support me on Patreon / Buy me a Ko-fi
Challenge #01862-E038: Trust Yourself — Steemit
Time travel was a bitch. Sorting out the mistakes of life retroactively was never a fun thing. Making sure she would pay attention to her own warnings to herself had been the work of several journeys. And multiple encounters. She could not talk to herself. Both brains shut down for that sort of thing. Leaving notes, however, was perfect.
Her teenaged self was asleep in bed. Sleeping the sleep of the unaware.
She put her note in the jewelry box, where she had always left it. She had always had the only key. And then she left. Back to her own time and to the decompression suite where she would wait in isolation for time and her memories to resynchronise.
Support me on Patreon / Buy me a Ko-fi
I <3 William Shatner on Twitter
I love how they respond to him, as if he is actually a captain, even more.
Nasa confirmed for huge fucking nerds
This is awesome and priceless and people that work on space stuff are the best people of all time.
Honestly this just about brings me to tears.
Roddenberry, Shatner, Nimoy, Nichols and all the rest of the original Star Trek cast and crew had no small role in making the moon landing as important as it was. A few years before they set that lunar module down, this little TV show came along and fanned the dream into wildfire with an image of what humanity in space could actually look like—not only peaceful on our own world, endlessly curious, and prosperous enough to pursue it, but an active force for good in the greater universe. Carrying not what’s most toxic about us, but what’s best about us out to the stars.
Everybody who has worked at NASA or any other space agency for the past 50 years is waiting for the day when that unmanned probe doing a flyby on a comet can be controlled from the bridge of a space-faring vessel. When we’re not just looking at that comet through a color-coded sonar map, but we can look out a porthole and see it tumbling by with our own eyes. When as a species we can finally outgrow hate and fear and violence, and turn our faces with joy toward all the beauties and wonders that lie waiting to be discovered.
And every time he does this, Shatner is reminding them of what that hope feels like.
This was too great to not repost.
(via bonehandledknife)
Challenge #01320-C225: The Catalogue of Bad Ideas
@wilwheaton - and again, the thing.
They thought they were so smart, didn’t they? Gotta count on humans to act like… humans.
therobotmonster | moniquill | siderealsandman | friendlytroll | prokopetz | mikhailvladimirovich | bogleech |
It’s funny how science fiction universes so often treat humans as a boring, default everyman species or even the weakest and dumbest.
I want to see a sci fi universe where we’re actually considered one of the more hideous and terrifying species.
How do we know our saliva and skin oils wouldn’t be ultra-corrosive to most other sapient races? What if we actually have the strongest vocal chords and can paralyze or kill the inhabitants of other worlds just by screaming at them? What if most sentient life in the universe turns out to be vegetable-like and lives in fear of us rare “animal” races who can move so quickly and chew shit up with our teeth?
Like that old story “they’re made of meat,” only we’re scarier.
HOLY SHIT THEY EAT CAPSAICIN FOR FUN
YOU GUYS I HEARD A HUMAN ONCE ATE AN AIRPLANE.
A HUMAN CAN KEEP FIGHTING FOR HOURS EVEN AFTER YOU SHOOT IT
humans are a proud warrior race with a pantheon of bloody gods: Ram-Bo, Schwarzenegger, etc.
REMOVING A LIMB WILL NOT FATALLY INCAPACITATE HUMANS: ALWAYS DESTROY THE HEAD.
WARNING: HUMANS CAN DETECT YOU EVEN AT NIGHT BY TRACKING VIBRATIONS THROUGH THE ATMOSPHERE
WARNING: HUMANS CAN REPRODUCE AT A RATE OF 1 PER SPACEYEAR. DESTROY INFESTATIONS IMMEDIATELY
THE HUMAN MOUTH HAS OVER THIRTY OUTCROPS OF BONE AND POWERFUL JAW MUSCLES.
HUMAN BITES CAN BE FATALLY INFECTIOUS EVEN TO OTHER HUMANS
WARNING: HUMANS CAN AND WILL USE IMPROVISED WEAPONS. SEE CLASSIFIED DATA LABELED J. CHAN.
HUMANS CAN PROJECT BIOWEAPONS FROM ALMOST EVERY ORIFICE ON THEIR BODY. DO NOT INHALE
OH GOD THE HUMANS FIGURED OUT DOOR HANDLES OH GOD OH GOD
More seriously, humans do have a number of advantages even among Terrestrial life. Our endurance, shock resistance, and ability to recover from injury is absurdly high compared to almost any other animal. We often use the phrase “healthy as a horse” to connote heartiness - but compared to a human, a horse is as fragile as spun glass. There’s mounting evidence that our primitive ancestors would hunt large prey simply by following it at a walking pace, without sleep or rest, until it died of exhaustion; it’s called pursuit predation. Basically, we’re the Terminator.
(The only other animal that can sort of keep up with us? Dogs. That’s why we use them for hunting. And even then, it’s only “sort of”.)
Now extrapolate that to a galaxy in which most sapient life did not evolve from hyper-specialised pursuit predators:
- Our strength and speed is nothing to write home about, but we don’t need to overpower or outrun you. We just need to outlast you - and by any other species’ standards, we just plain don’t get tired.
- Where a simple broken leg will cause most species to go into shock and die, we can recover from virtually any injury that’s not immediately fatal. Even traumatic dismemberment isn’t necessarily a career-ending injury for a human.
- We heal from injuries with extreme rapidity, recovering in weeks from wounds that would take others months or years to heal. The results aren’t pretty - humans have hyperactive scar tissue, among our other survival-oriented traits - but they’re highly functional.
- Speaking of scarring, look at our medical science. We developed surgery centuries before developing even the most rudimentary anesthetics or life support. In extermis, humans have been known to perform surgery on themselves - and survive. Thanks to our extreme heartiness, we regard as routine medical procedures what most other species would regard as inventive forms of murder. We even perform radical surgery on ourselves for purely cosmetic reasons.
In essence, we’d be Space Orcs.
Our jaws have too many TEETH in them, so we developed a way to WELD METAL TO OUR TEETH and FORCE THE BONES IN OUR JAW to restructure over the course of years to fit them back into shape, and then we continue to wear metal in out mouths to keep them in place.
We formed cohabitative relationships with tiny mammals and insects we keep at bay from bothering us by death, often using little analouge traps.
And by god, we will eat anything.
- We use borderline toxic peppers to season our food.
- We expose ourselves to potentially lethal solar radiation in the pursuit of darkening our skin.
- We risk hearing loss for the opportunity to see our favorite musicians live.
- We have a game where two people get into an enclosed area and hit each other until time runs out/one of them pass out
- We willingly jump out of planes with only a flimsy piece of cloth to prevent us from splattering against the ground.
- Our response to natural disasters is to just rebuild our buildings in the exact same places.
- We climb mountains and risk freezing to death for bragging rights
- We invented dogs. We took our one time predators and completely domesticated them.
- On a planet full of lions, tigers and bears, we managed to advance further and faster than any other species on the planet.
Klingons and Krogan and Orcs ain’t got shit on us
We drink ethanol (in concentrations high enough to be used as an effective as microbicide or a solvent!) for the express purpose of achieving blood toxicity and disrupting normal brain function… AS A RECREATIONAL ACTIVITY!
On the same subject, we also deliberately incinerate assorted substances and then inhale the particulate-heavy smoke and vapor resulting for the same effect. EVEN IN THE FACE OF SAID SUBSTANCES BEING CARCINOGENIC, BECAUSE WE JUST DON’T GIVE A FUCK.
Humans do not have biological castes. Kill their commander and another will take its place. Soldiers left alone on a planet will start farming and manufacturing to survive. Farmers and manufacturers will take up arms and kill you if pressed. Just because two humans look different doesn’t mean they cannot do each other’s jobs.
Breeding does not kill them. A single human can mate dozens or hundreds of times in a lifetime. They often do so as recreation. Xenobiology team six believes they do not have a mating season but this is too strange to be true.
Their appendages are not designed for hitting, so they developed special training to make them very good at hitting anyhow.
The proteins making up their bodies are toxic and cause prion disease. Do not touch anything humans have touched. Do not consume earth foods. Fire does not adequately remove this contamination.
Humans perceive sixteen times the colors we do. Do not hide in bushes or vines from humans. They can distinguish your pelt from the foliage with ease.
We tried venting waste gas into the tunnels to kill the humans when they attacked. Turns out they breathe it.
Everything on their planet came from a single biological strain. They developed comprehensive genetics BEFORE they developed space travel.
They lack radio receptors and cannot be brought into compliance with right-thought simply by broadcasting to them. Even after we learned how to translate it into sound-waves one of their hatchlings drove the Great Authority mad by responding to every demand with a single question: “Why?”
All of this was the very beginning of my novel, The Amity Incident and the universe canon that humans are, indeed, space orcs. Buy it. Read it. And hopefully enjoy it.
(Source: bogleech, via tarragonthedragon)
Free Baby - out now at Amazon!
Lyr Marken prays every night for a peaceful day. As a Security Officer, her ideal day is one in which nothing happens. Unfortunately for her, there is a very small matter to greet her in the morning. A small matter named Peaches (F), 3.4 Standard Weight Units, aged two hours, who has been found, abandoned, at a Transit Station. She has to find the mother and make certain that she has all the welfare she needs. And there are signs that the mother may be fleeing an abusive situation.
And worse - all the potential parents who have been waiting to adopt a child have her number…
Challenge #01105-C008: Smart Way to Die
So sharp, he cut himself.
Challenge #00997-B266: Time to Clean the Tank
@primarybufferpanel, @shadowmaat: Here you go.
I’ve tried three times to @ mention primarybufferpanel… I deleted the other two because they failed :P Please let hir know that they now have a story.
Challenge #00991-B260: What is 'Painting'?
@manyblinkinglights : One more for you.
@chaoswolf1982: Pretty sure you gave me this prompt. Enjoy.
Challenge #00986-B255: What is 'Light'?
@chaoswolf1982, @manyblinkinglights… your scifi story is ready.
I had to keep it brief, of course. But I’m up for sequels.