Aliens of the universe are multitudinous and endlessly varied.
When the first aliens found Earth, they weren’t very impressed. It’s a dangerous, volatile environment, not really worth the danger of exploring until it was a real concerted effort from a dedicated research ship with a whole team of all sorts of species, it’s just… best to wait. The little planet seemed to have enough life to keep going for a few hundred solar revolutions, it seemed stable enough in its horrible nature of continuous tumult and awful cloud and storm systems and tectonic activity… if it hadn’t imploded by the time it was discovered, it could wait a few more decades before a research ship could slot some time for it.
Except, they had perhaps waited a little too long. Or underestimated how quickly that deathtrap of a world could evolve technology.
The next time a ship wandered into the Sol system, it was met by a combustion-propelled machine, and a few terribly odd-looking creatures that jabbered unintelligibly in what seemed to be positive excitement, despite the bared teeth, and lots of generally non-threatening gestures. (They were 100% accurate in this assessment; the creatures were extremely excited.)
After some time, the creatures pulled out a shiny sheet and little marking sticks, and one began to draw crude pictographs for communication. Awfully creative for such creatures. They hadn’t even developed antimatter propulsion! But they were at least creative enough to fire themselves off their planet, and to try to communicate with more highly evolved species. Very commendable!
After some tinkering and pulling parts from their ship’s stores, the creatures cobbled together a program on a little touch-tablet, and the device went to work on translating.
These creatures called themselves “humans” and there were many on their planet. The teeth-baring was a “smile” and it usually meant they were very happy when paired with the wrinkled upward foreheads. They had been looking into the stars forever, and dreamed of reaching out. They sent messages for decades, probes to take images of the further reaches of their system. They built telescopes to see out into the stars, and they hoped that they were not alone.
All in all, a very nice little surprise, this dangerous planet and its inhabitants being so affable compared to the place they came from! They had great thinkers and theorizers, they had many engineers, and they were making faster and larger strides in technology all the time. With the pace at which they accelerated, they would soon match most of the developed galaxies in progress.
For such a horrible world filled with of terrible things, the humans seem very well-adapted. They were only mildly inconvenienced by the horrors, almost blandly adaptive. Like their DNA slithered around all the bad things for survival and survival alone, and was not bothered with anything else.
Almost like the slime creatures on Calto Six’s eighth moon. Except humans were surprisingly… solid? Ish?
They adapted to anything. Both quickly and seamlessly, rarely noticed in the instance.
Until they met the wider universe, that is.
Humans mirrored their surroundings to blend, to survive, to make friends, to identity resources… humans were not boring.
Humans were an amalgamation of sixty different species abilities, no great master of anything they did, yet adaptive enough to get by anywhere they landed.
Swimming? They were horrible at it. Not built for water at all. No webbing, small lungs, no flippers, no gills… some humans made their whole lives about swimming in water.
They made competitions for everything. All of the things humans should never do, from running for long times, to swinging dangerous weapons at each other, to riding insane creatures, imbibing dangerous substances, to jumping off of high places or out of flying craft, to eating far more than they would never need to eat in one sitting, to sleeping, to not blinking their eyelids, humans would do anything “for fun”.
And it wasn’t that no species in the codex did any of these things… but no species did all of them! Sometimes more than one at a time!
Humans had no business being so voracious with their living, had no call to strive for insane goals, no reason to be so uniquely determined to survive anything and everything that came their way, and they had no reason for all the dangerous places they set their minds on exploring and surviving to write journals on. Nothing but that acursed phrase “I wonder if…” which led them into all manner of trouble and madness.
No other species did so many different things to the galaxy. Most picked one avenue to specialize in that complimented their capabilities.
Humans only seemed simple and boring. But an empty slate begs to be filled. So humans filled their life-slates with all variety of things, and no two were identical. As though the realm of possibility were a challenge to follow every path, meet every end.
They seemed normal among the pleasant variation of the galaxies, until one realized they weren’t. The crux of “normal” was a meeting point at which further familiarity with the human species only ever seemed to widen as time went on. Not parallel, but converging and immediately shooting off in some wild direction.
Humans would do anything, try anything, say anything, go anywhere, speak to anyone… or at least try to communicate, and they never stopped. They never once, as individuals or as a species, stopped moving or doing, until they were dead.
