Humans are weird

Mainly short stories about aliens reacting to the weird things humans do Ko-Fi Ask box and submissions are open Let me know if you need anything to be tagged or if I can do something to make this blob more accessible for you

[sunderwight]

"humans are space orcs" this and "humans are the jack-of-all-trades race" that and "humans are the ones with a reputation for trying to fuck everything" and etc but you know what I don't see too often?

humans are the moms

compared to other species on earth, humans have a really outsized "protect baby" instinct. you give a human a thing and tell them it's actually a baby thing and many humans will suddenly develop a complete and total aversion to harming it, even if it's like, a writhing mass of slimy tentacles in no way reminiscent of human infants

cats domesticated us by figuring out that they could leave their kittens with us when they went out hunting and come back and probably still have the same number as before they left. there is a decent chance that wolves did the same thing

word gets around the less parenting-inclined species and they're just like, are you doing a long haul space voyage? going to have to lay some eggs in the course of the trip? take a few humans with you. yeah they'll just start training the young and keeping from them climbing into the machinery themselves you don't even have to find specialists. I know a guy who budded unexpectedly on a freight hauler halfway through a four year trip, and not only did the humans not eat his spawn, they set up this thing called "babysitting" where they'd take turns monitoring its survival and helping to teach it basic skills

hazard is that if you're going anywhere with xenofauna, you have higher than normal odds of the humans trying to smuggle some weird creature aboard ship, though. you gotta watch 'em. on their own homeworld their officials have to put up goddamn signs telling them not to feed dangerous wildlife or try to touch the babies. most of 'em do understand the regulations and about potential bio hazards but there always seems to be at least one that loses their goddamn minds because some avian chick got caught in a mudslide or something

[marlynnofmany]

"You've got to be exaggerating. Why would they be like that?"

"Easy. You know how most civilized species lay eggs, and even the ones that don't will have young ones able to move around and fend for themselves within the day?"

"Yeah, obviously."

"Human newborns can't even lift their own heads. They require the full-time attention of as many adults as possible to make sure they survive to a self-sufficient age, much less adulthood."

"Whaaaaat. How long does that take?"

"Many years. And their planet has long years."

"What!"

"Yes. So their parenting instincts are overclocked for a reason. And sometimes that spills over onto other species. ...And by 'sometimes,' I mean all the dang time."

"Uh huh."

"So keep them away from the dangerous fauna, especially the little ones, and be prepared for them to get emotionally attached to the occasional inanimate object. Oh! And if you need to get their attention in a loud room, play a recording of one of their young making a distress sound. They hate that, and will want it to stop immediately."

"I am taking notes."

[injuries-in-dust]

Galactic Forum, human guide section.

I think we found the perfect enrichment for human crew members.

Our humans really enjoyed this area we provided for them.

They can run, fall, climb and more, to their hearts content.

They really enjoy being lifted and thrown into a large pit of foam blocks, or plastic spheres.

Note: our crew is mostly Xarnian, so we possess the necessary strength to lift the average adult human despite the density they have evolved on their deathworld.

Human larvae enjoy it the most, but even the mature humans are also thrilled by these activities.

Incidents involving "acts of human" are down 18% in the first cycle alone since we installed the enrichment chamber.

[planariaareneat]

How The Nocturnal Bottleneck and Nipples Make Us Human

Almost every post here considers what humans do have, really. It’s a little tiring; realistically every world has its harsh environments and vicious species and a sophont to match. We probably wouldn’t be unique for our adaptability or our persistence or even adrenaline

But our evolution is fucked up as hell, to put it lightly.

Mammals went through what’s been dubbed the nocturnal bottleneck essentially since the start of the mesozoic right up until the Cretaceous ended the archosaur’s exclusive hold over the daylight. We lost a lot of things from every mammal spending most of its time in either a cramped, suffocating burrow or scrounging around in the faint hours of nighttime. Our blood cells lost their nuclei to hold more oxygen while we spent time deep underground, we lost protections against ultraviolet rays in our skin and eyes, we can’t even repair our own DNA using the light of the sun. Most aliens probably wouldn’t have such traits unless their evolution followed a very similar path to ours. They’d be able to see ultraviolet and wouldn’t have to worry about sunburn and all the wonderful privileges essentially all fish, birds, amphibians, and reptiles enjoy as we speak. 

There’s also what we gained from spending so much time in the dark.

Brown fat is only found in mammals, it’s a special type of fat which bear cells with several oil droplets and are utterly jammed with mitochondria. This lets it make heat, a lot of it, fast. We don’t even need to shiver to induce this heat generation from brown adipose tissue - factor in our downright hyperactive mitochondria, and we can warm up quickly. Sure, it doesn’t have too much use in adult humans, but it keeps our infants warm and still provides a little boost the whole run we have in this universe.

Unless aliens also went through a time where their small ancestors had to face cold nights, they’d have to produce heat the old fashioned way when chilled. Aliens might have to shiver the whole time they’re in a cold room while the human watches in confusion, quite literally unshaken, and wonders if the room is a lot colder than the thermostat set to 60 says. The aliens stare at their companion in confusion, it’s just a normal temperature to shiver at after all, how is the human sitting so still?

Our small ancestors spending all their time out foraging at night is also why we have such a good sense of touch, smell, and hearing. They were more important senses than vision (we’re lucky to have even redeveloped basic color vision, frankly) at the time and place and simply ended up continuing to serve us well. Birds and reptiles rarely have acute senses of smell and the latter especially are lucky to have acute hearing, and birds rarely have impeccable hearing themselves either. Our skin is free of scales and honed to sensitivity, and our external ears and complicated ear bones provide an immense range of hearing (from 20 all the way to 17,000 hertz!).

Aliens might not be able to pin down the chirp of a cricket or the light click of a lock being picked. The human might be the only one on board a ship that can pick out the finer sounds of the engine’s constant thrum and know the critical difference between when everything is fine and when something is wrong. The human could probably pick out the sounds of an approaching enemy’s careless footsteps - they’re only as light enough for *them* to stop hearing them, after all - and be the one to see the horrified expression (well, more on that later) on their face when we get the drop on them in spite of their perceived stealth. 

But perhaps the most versatile, convoluted, amazing, and utterly unique trait we have is right on your face this instant. Lips.

Lips in most animals are a simple seal to hold in the mouth’s moisture and protect the teeth, even if they’re supple they’re NEVER muscular except in mammals, and we have only one thing to thank for it; milk and nipples. Lips evolved exclusively to allow babies to suckle, it required a vacuum to be created in the mouth, and with no other animal having anything like a nipple it never happened in other animals. Many animals make milk, to be frank, but no other animal has nipples.

Your cheeks and lips are a marvel among tetrapods, no other animal can suck like mammals can. Aliens wouldn’t have straws or even be able to sip from the edge of a glass, they’d have to have a proboscis or simply tilt the whole thing back. Aliens likely won’t have woodwind instruments or balloons you can blow into. We take so much about our lips for granted. Hell, our muscular faces are vital for expressions, we’re probably absolute facial contortionists among a cast of creatures with mandibles and beaks and expressionless scaly maws. Aliens might find us ridiculously easy to read, if anything, compared to their own kind (all the better to deceive them) - or perhaps they’d find us hard to decipher anyways, with our lack of color-changing skin or erectable crests of bright feathers. Baring teeth might not be seen as a sign of aggression in most of the universe, smiling would be all too distinctly human. 

Perhaps with how infectious we are sometimes, that’s what we’d contribute to the universe; others might have to make do with opening their mouths just enough to show their teeth or splaying their innumerable mouthparts with just the right curve, but perhaps we’d teach the galaxy to smile, one ally at a time. 

Wouldn’t that be amazing?

[resumbrarum]

cc @sith-shenanigans @marlynnofmany

[marlynnofmany]

Ooh, this is new information! Innnteresting.

[consultingreaders]

I want aliens who are baffled by the human attachment to name tags, the kind that are common at events like orientations or conferences.

Hivemind aliens who don't distinguish individuals in the same way. Doesn't Brandon already know what the hivemind rep told Martha? Why is it a problem to discuss with Conrad what Amita told the hivemind rep?

Perfect hyperthymesiac aliens who don't realize the name tags on the table are meant for specific individuals and just grab one at random, like a fun party token, because they remember everyone's name perfectly, forever, once they're introduced, why does anyone need a visual reminder?

Aliens with hypersensitive olfactory abilities, who distinguish individuals of their own kind based on scent, including emitting an echo of that scent when referring to them, without a separate auditory "name."

Alien cultures whose names change with moon cycles, life stages, and sometimes the weather, who become very confused at the concept of "nicknames" that are based on emotional intimacy or the informality of a setting, rather than meteorology. One time a five-day conference includes six distinct weather patterns; the human organizer in charge of the badge station has to go on medical leave afterward.

[skritzzy]

I feel like any aliens that were prey at some point in evolution would have an odd fear of humans. Mostly cause they look like predators, act a bit like predators, and ARE predators. One perfect example is when we're focused on something like a mosquito that's been bugging us for a long time and we are just done.

Alien: "What. What..?"

Human: *HUNTING down a mosquito it saw*

Alien: ".... yeah I am really uncomfortable...."

Human: *quiet footsteps, pupils dialated, intense focus,*

Alien: *WAR FLASHBACKS*

Human: "Found you." *absolutely desimates the mosquito, squashing it into a million pieces as it's guts and various body parts liquidize into blood of the bloodthirsty, now stained on the palm of the human. A living being now reduced to a useless corpse as the human wipes the remains on their pants*

Alien: "I feel like I've just gained trauma."

[graylinesspam]

okay fucking fun addition to this post. Hunting instincts in humans absolutely still exist and are usually triggered either by fascination or anger. The polar opposite of flight is pursue. An anecdote for this is that the other day my sister, who is an avid "take the bug outside in a cup" rescues kittens in her free time kinda person, looked out the window and saw a chicken in the middle of our driveway. which is a very unusual occurrence despite us living in the country.

All she had to do was say the words "there's a chicken" and her as well as my own body language immediately shifted. We were out the door and in the yard already sorta hunched over and walking on the balls of our feet, fucking flanking this chicken. No words were exchanged. We just slowly circled this chicken like a couple of rabid dogs. totally single-mindedly focused on capturing the prey.

The chicken could feel it, it immediately began counter maneuvers to avoid us and it was faster. But there were two of us and we knew the land better, we knew how to herd it into a corner, carefully watching it's body language and lurching to counter it's escape attempts. And it was fucking thrilling.

Of course, when we both closed in on it and finally got our hands on the poor thing we simply took it into the back patio away from the cats and the vultures that wanted to actually finish the job. No harm came to the bird. We located its owner and returned him to his flock but still. From an outside perspective, it was a bit unnerving. And for the chicken, it was no different than being hunted. He was just lucky enough that we were predators who appreciated the companionship of pets and were more concerned with returning him to his humans than eating him.

Now imagine any fucking alien species watching a pair of humans, who literally rehabilitate animals in their free time, who are not soldiers and seem to be totally domesticated, just absolutely flip a switch and turn into pack-hunting pursuit predators? On a single word.

(felt like the bulldog from Rio's bird chasing monologue hit a little too hard after this)

[silvergryphonart]

I would even argue that humans need to do this, so much so that we’ve invented a million and one ways to satisfy this instinct.

Photography.

Ball games.

I Spy.

Playing hunting games with the fellow predators we keep as pets.

Hide and seek.

Many hobbies that involve prolonged seeking behaviour or watching something to make sure it’s moving right.

I 100% feel myself slipping into “hunt mode” doing jigsaw puzzles, changed movement and all—same as when I’m out birding—and my mental health seems to get better afterwards.

[what-are-even-humans]

Boop prev. which side did you boop

left

top

right

Voting ended onApr 2, 2024

[what-are-even-humans]

This is my new puppy

what will you do

boop him

politely wave hello

ignore him???? ignore my precious little man???

Voting ended onApr 2, 2024

[what-are-even-humans]

quick question does booping back boop back from the blog that was booped??? I just realised I have no idea.

Also what the fick is a super boop and how do you do that and how do I reboop superbly???

[aceofstars16]

Reblog if you are okay with people giving you lots of boops!

[vikingofficial-deactivated20241]

"how did you spend your April fools?"

Truth: "I got into a slap fight with 500 strangers"

[sapphicpond]

Tumblr rn

[what-are-even-humans]

im curious and also convinced my thoughts are universal so

have you ever watched a video to get 30min add free tumblr browsing??

yes

no

what the hell are you talking about

I pay for add free

see results

Voting ended onMar 19, 2024

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

“X bodily fluid is just filtered blood!” buddy I hate to break it to you but ALL of the fluids in your body are filtered blood. Your circulatory system is how water gets around your body. It all comes out of the blood (or lymph, which is just filtered blood).

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

“Okay but why is it always so chemically roundabout and unnecessarily complicated” well buddy, that’s because your blood is imitation seawater. See? It’s very simple.

[badwificonnection]

Blood is what now?

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

It’s imitation seawater what part is confusing

[badwificonnection]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#are you telling me#humans are just sentient aquariums? 

Buddy if anything is living in your blood (except for more parts of you) in detectable amounts then you have a serious microbial infection and need to go to the hospital.

Humans are seawater wastelands kept sterile of all but human cells, with microbial mats coating their surfaces.

[badwificonnection]

Thank you that’s…very disturbing

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

It’s not my fault you’re human.

[apatheticshipwreck]

Ok but “It’s not my fault you’re human.” Is the best comeback ever.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

You can use it against anyone except children that you biologically helped to create.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#/blood is imitation seawater/ is the part that’s confusing 

Picture this: you are a Thing That Lives In The Ocean. Some kind of small multicellular animal a long time ago, before proper circulatory systems existed. “Wow,” you think, metaphorically, “it sure is difficult to diffuse chemicals across my whole body. Kinda puts a hard limit on the size and distance of what specialised organs I can have. Good thing I have all this water around me that’s the same salinity as my cells (they have to be that way so I don’t explode or shrivel up) so I can diffuse and filter chemicals with that.”

“Wait a minute,” you say a couple of generations later, because you’re not actually a small animal but an evolutionary process personified and simplified to the point of dangerous inaccuracy for the purposes of a Tumblr post, “instead of losing all these important chemicals to the water around me, how about I put it in tubes? I can keep MY water separate from the rest of the world’s water! Anything I want to keep goes in my water! Anything I don’t, I dump back into the outside water! I’m a genius! An unthinking natural trial-and-error process that’s a GENIUS!”

“Wow,” you think a great many generations later, “being able to have such control over such high concentrations of important chemicals is so great. Look how big I’m getting. I even have a special pump to move my seawater around, and these cool filter systems to keep the chemicals in it right, and that control and chemical concentration has let me grow so many energy-intensive, highly specialised organs! Being big is so hard. I need special cells just to carry my oxygen around now, to make sure my enormous, constantly-operating body has enough of it.”

At this point you are embodying a fish, and eventually, fish start straying into water with different pressures and salinity levels. (I mean, they do that since befor ehty’er fish, but… look, I’m trying to keep things simple here.) “What the FUCK,” you think. “My inside water is at a different salinity and pressure to the outside water?? How am I supposed to deal with that? I can’t have freshwater inside my seawater tubes! My cells have a set salinity and they would explode! I need to start beefing up my regulatory and filter systems so that my inside seawater STAYS SEAWATER OF THE CORRECT SALINITY even if the outside water is different! Fortunately, adding salt to my seawater is a lot easier than removing it, and I want to be saltier than this weird outside water.” At this point you beef up your liver and urinary systems to compensate for different salinities. (Note: the majority of fish, freshwater and saltwater, have a fairly narrow band of salinities they can live in. Every fish doesn’t get to deal with every level of salinity; they are evolved to regulate within specific bands.)

You also, at some point, go out on land. This is new and weird because you have to carry all of your water inside. “It’s a good thing I turned myself into a giant bag of seawater,” you think. “If I wasn’t carrying my seawater inside, how would I transport all these important chemicals between my organs and the environment?” As you specialise to live entirely outside of the water, you realise (once again) that it’s a lot easier to add salt to water than to remove it in great quantities. Drinking seawater in large amounts becomes toxic; your body isn’t specialised for removing that amount of salt. Instead, you drink freshwater, and add salts to that. The majority of your organs are, at this point, specialised for moving your seawater around, protecting it, adding stuff to it, or taking stuff out. You have turned yourself into an intelligent bag for carrying and regulating a small amount of imitation seawater, and its salinity (and your commitment to maintaining that salinity) is based entirely on the seawater that some early animals started to build tubes around a long time ago.

And that’s what a human is!

[elodieunderglass]

Well, there’s another few steps, of course.

Because at some point, operating along lines of logic that worked out perfectly so far, you did decide to be a mammal.

A mammal is a machine for adapting to Circumstances. A mammal is a tremendously resilient all-terrain life-support system, with built-in heating, cooling, respiration, and incubators for reproduction. Mammals internalise everything (grudges, eggs) and furthermore are excessively, flamboyantly wet internally. Sure, everyone’s a bag of chemicals; but mammals slosh. Mammals took the concept of an internal ocean and took it in an unnecessarily splashy direction, added aftermarket mods and a climate-control system,

and just to show off, you leaned across the metaphorical gambling table and said: “my internal ocean is so good-“

“Bullshit,” said the shark, keeping it salty (ha)

“My internal ocean is so brilliantly resilient, more so than any of YOURS,” you said, holding their attention with a digit held aloft, “that for my next trick, I shall artistically recreate the ballad of evolution as a performance. I shall craft a complex chemical ballet depicting the origin of multicellular life - using some of my own material, of course-”

“Oh, ANYONE can lay an egg,” yodel the fish, and the ray adds: “ontogeny does NOT recapitulate phylogeny!!”

And you’re like, “yeah no, it’s an artistic rendition, not a literal thing. Basically I’m going to take some cells and brew them up-“

“Like an egg.”

“Like an egg. An egg but internally.”

“Yeah,” said the viviparous reptile, “yeah, like, that can work really well. I’ve always said it’s the highest test of one’s chemical know-how. It’s a lot of work. And forget about support from your family - forget about support from your PHYLUM - all you get is criticism.”

“I’m gonna do it on purpose forever,” you said. “The highest chemical, thermoregulatory, immunological, everything-logical challenge. It’s gonna be my thing.”

“I’m with you,” said a viviparous fish, stoutly. “Representation.”

You kindly don’t point out, once again, that you’re planning to do this outside the ocean, in a range of temperatures; carrying the dividing cells in a perfect 37.5• solution of saline broth in all terrains, breathing oxygen in a complicated matter, you know, bit more difficult; but you need your allies.

“It’s solid,” says the coelacanth.

“But is it metal?” says the deep-vent organism.

“Oh, it’s metal. I will feed the young,” you say, magnificently, “on an echo of the mother ocean. The first rich feast of cellular matter, the first hunt for sustenance, the first bite they sip of our liquid planet-”

Everyone waits.

“Will be a blood byproduct. My own blood byproduct.”

Everyone looks uncomfortable.

“But,” a hagfish says carefully, “don’t you outdoorsy guys still need your blood?”

You cough and explain that if you stay wet enough internally and hydrate frequently, you should be able to produce enough blood byproduct to sustain your hellish new invention until they can eat your peers.

The outrage that follows includes questions like “is this some furry shit?” And: “milk has WATER in it?”

And you won the bet. “My inner ocean is such a perfect homage to the primordial soup that I can personally cook up an entire live hairy mammal in it. And then generate excess blood byproduct from my body and give it to the small mammal until it gets big.”

That is an absolutely bonkers pitch, by the way, and everyone thought you were a showoff, even before the opposable thumbs. When the winter came, and the winter of winters, and the rain was acid and the air was poison on the tender shells of their eggs and choked the children in the shells; when the plants turned to poison, and the ocean turned against you all; when the climate changed, and the world’s children fell to shadow; your internal ocean was it that held true. A bet laid against the changing fates, a bet laid by a small beast against climate and geography and the forces of outer space, that you won. The dinosaurs fell and the pterosaurs fell and the marine reptiles dwindled, and you, furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship, held hope internally at 37.5 degrees. Which is another thing that humans do, sometimes.

[twocubes]

I remember being in elementary school and feeling a deep alienation at people’s just vicious rejection of mathematics, the reason being, like

It’s like. A classic approach to hypothetical communication with aliens that you start with the things you know you have in common and proceed from there. Mathematics is that.

Imagine you approach someone you don’t understand with a thing specifically designed to be something they and you can agree on as a starting point for communication and they just react with “yeah i hate this”

[littledeconstruction-deactivate]

imo this approach says a lot about astronomers themselves being into math, and less about the universality of mathematics itself. there’s no reason at all to make math the thing that humans & aliens can agree on – like your example shows, it assumes that aliens approach math from the same point of view, giving it the same intellectual value, that (some) humans do.

it assumes you have mathematics in common, and we don’t know that about an alien species.

it’s not even true for humans.

i understand why human scientists use it as a marker of intelligence, but it’s an extremely limiting one.

imagine you approach someone you don’t understand with a thing specifically designed to be something they and you can agree on as a starting point for communication and they react with scorn – and you think that “i hate this” isn’t communicating a huge amount of information.

i’m not alienated by mathematics. i’m alienated by the idea that mathematics is inherently superior to other forms of communication.

[max1461]

I really want to respond to this sympathetically and not argumentatively, because I fully understand where you’re coming from. But I think there’s been some level of miscommunication. My reading of the OP was as primarily an expression of a certain experience —an experience that I relate to strongly, as a non-neurotypical person who grew up as basically “the math kid” in school— and not principally as an argument about how we should or shouldn’t communicate with aliens etc. I think it’s best if I just explain my own experience here and why the post resonated with me, and hopefully that will clear things up. This is something I have a lot of strong feelings about so I ended up sounding a little, uh, impassioned at points but my intention really isn’t to argue, just to achieve understanding I guess. Anyway yeah, this is just my perspective.

So, a thing that has been commented on a lot is that at the elementary school level, math is basically the only subject that people have no qualms about expressing outright disgust for.

See, most adults view it as at least a little sad when a kid says “I hate reading”. Now, there’s a hefty dose of both ableism and classism in this sentiment; many kids who express a distaste for reading do so because learning to read has been a struggle (or been outright impossible) for them, due to a disability or another neurodivergence or lack of access to materials or a myriad of other things. The social expectation to be able to read at a certain level, therefore, can be frustrating at the best of times and genuinely oppressive at the worst. I understand this because I was one of those kids, learning to read was a huge struggle for me and it remains quite challenging, and I remember how ashamed it made me feel. I was privileged enough, in various ways, that this didn’t end up effecting me materially, but of course many (most) people in that position will not be so lucky.

But the thing is, when adults express sadness upon hearing a kid say “I hate reading”, I don’t believe it’s just ableism. It’s also an expression of the fact that those adults think reading has deep value. Not just instrumental value, not just “it’ll help you get a job” or “it’ll help you do your taxes” or “it will make people think you’re smart”, but inherent value: value as a way of connecting to the human experience. Fundamentally, people think of reading as something that enriches your “soul”, even if they don’t believe in the soul per se. The sadness that adults express when a kid doesn’t like to read is, I think, at least partly a reflection of this fact. If you recognize reading and writing and literature as valid and powerful ways of connecting to the world and engaging with the experience of being a person, it makes sense that you might feel a little sad when you see that someone isn’t getting to experience that.

At a basic level, math is just not given this sort of acknowledgement. It is not presented to kids, ever, as being an inherently worthwhile way to connect to the world or their feelings or to other people. As being a valid way to engage with their humanity. The notion that math could mean something to someone, emotionally speaking, that it could be powerful and moving and that someone could care about it very deeply, is just not one that exists very widely in our culture. Math is “cold” and “robotic” and “asocial” (huh, a whole bunch of adjectives that are often weaponized against people who aren’t neurotypical in one way or another. Wonder if that’s a coincidence…). To a kid who does find passion in mathematics, who does connect to the world that way, and especially to one who otherwise has trouble connecting, this near-universal attitude of dismissal is profoundly alienating.

And when a kid says “I hate math”, very few adults respond with sadness. Very few adults acknowledge that there would be anything emotionally or personally worthwhile about not hating math. They understand that being good at math will help you make it through the system (because, to be clear, the system responds with all the same ableism and classism to someone who struggles with math as it does to someone who struggles to read). But when an adult hears a kid saying “I hate math”, their default response is almost certainly going to be “ughh, me too. Everybody hates math!” Because, like, everybody does hate math. And they say it. All. The. Time. Your teacher hates math, your parents hate math, every other kid and every adult you’ve ever encountered is completely unabashed in saying “ughg, I hate math” every time they encounter it. A practice that’s widespread in US elementary schools is assigning teachers to cover math class as a punishment, because even the people who are supposed to be conveying knowledge to the next generation hate math.

So, you see, I didn’t read the OP as saying that math is “inherently superior to other forms of communication”. In essence all the OP did was acknowledge that it could be a basis for human connection at all, that math is something with unique value as a way to relate to other people (just as reading is, or art is, or anything else is). And this acknowledgement was immediately met with, just like always, indignant dismissal.

And I said that I sympathized, because I really do. When I was a kid, this is exactly how I felt about reading. Because reading was a challenge for me. It was something that teachers and parents and others in positions of authority expected me to be able to do, and I struggled and I failed and it felt awful. So I built up a similar kind of resentment to that which I think others have for math. “All those kids who love books just think they’re so damn smart, they just think reading is the most important thing ever! Well guess what, it’s not! I don’t even want to be able to read!” (This is the way a lot of people act about math well into adulthood.)

And the truth is that my feelings of frustration were justified. It’s just that as an adult, I recognize that the real source of my discontent was the system itself, which expects kids to perform mostly arbitrary rituals of compliance to authority figures for eight to sixteen years so they can be properly conditioned into servile cogs of capital. The concept of books and reading was not to blame.

If I had lived in a different world, a world were literacy was less common and numeracy more common, I might have managed to succeed in a wholesale rejection of the value of reading. I might have gone on to adulthood without recognizing the real source of my discontent, and ended up passing on a vague indiscriminate anger at words and books and people who read to the next generation. If I had ended up with a child who was shy, or an outcast, or queer or disabled or otherwise in a position to be shunned and picked on by society, and that child found refuge and beauty and connection through books (as many such children do), I would almost certainly have done some lasting damage to their sense of self had I and their teachers and most of the other adults in their life agreed that reading just sucked and we couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever do it, now that we all carry portable screen readers in our pockets every day!

If you’re a kid who doesn’t fit in, who struggles to connect, and you reach out to others through something that is deeply personal to you, then watching them reject and dismiss it over and over again can be seriously hurtful. But learning from the adults in your life that the world actually agrees with them, that most people react to this thing which is so personal to you with vague repulsion… that has a big effect on someone.

—

Now, all that heavy shit aside… because I am that kind of dork, I also do have something to say about using math to talk to aliens. But bear with me, because it does end up seguing into a more earthly point; I end up on tangent about universality and Eurocentrism and mathematics across cultures and so forth. I think it’s, uh, related enough that it’s reasonable to include in the post, but also enough of a diversion that I’m going to put it under a “read more” link.

Keep reading

[esoanem]

Also, when people say talk to aliens using maths, they don’t mean things like say to the aliens “what’s the derivative of x^3” because that clearly involves a bunch of terms that the aliens wouldn’t recognise

No. Instead they mean stuff like “let’s broadcast pips in bursts where each burst has a number of pips equal to the next prime number” e.g. “– — —– ——- ———–…”. Because prime numbers have been recognised as important since antiquity, and it would be pretty much impossible to develop the maths necessary to reach space without doing so, and this sort of sequence would be so incredibly implausible to arrise naturally that anyone with any knowledge of astronomy or mathematics would immediately recognise it as being produced by intelligent life

[whumpster-fire]

Thank you. Something a lot of people in this thread are missing is that when scientists say “math is a marker of intelligence” in the context of trying to communicate with aliens, they don’t mean “people who know math are smarter than people who don’t” or even “being able to understand math is what differentiates a sapient species from a non sapient one,” they are talking about the ability to transmit information over interstellar distances via electromagnetic radiation and have a being with absolutely zero cultural context and potentially very different senses and means of communication be able to recognize it as an attempt to communicate and distinguish it from a signal created by natural processes.

“Intelligence” in this context means “Someone or something transmitting this signal intentionally” as opposed to, say, a star doing something funky. Which is important because we have had false positives before, like when we detected a radio signal consisting of pulses repeating with incredibly precise timing and then it turned out to be a neutron star emitting continuous beams of radiation while spinning really fast (and we later used these objects, pulsars, as reference points to show Earth’s position on the Pioneer Plaques, but that’s another story)

This is about interstellar first contact between two species that have literally zero information about each other including the basic method that they sense the world and communicate. Transmitting sound, vocal messages, images, or just about anything else isn’t reliable because the recipient might have no way of figuring out how it’s encoded. Imagine trying to understand a transmission in Morse Code if you don’t know Morse Code, don’t know English, don’t know the Latin Alphabet, don’t know that human languages work with geometric characters that represent sounds or combinations of sounds that convey meaning, etc. and you communicate with moving patterns of photophores on your skin like a cuttlefish. Pretty much all the methods of reverse engineering how to translate an unfamiliar language don’t work because you can’t see or hear or smell or touch each other or anything else. Even sending something as basic as a map of your position that could be decoded with no context would be hard. But a mathematical pattern like the sequence of prime numbers is enough to signal that you exist and are trying to make contact, which would give researchers a direction to focus their future efforts.

Is there a possibility that there exists some species that somehow developed the ability to receive/transmit messages into space without ever developing the concepts of counting, or prime numbers? Uhh, I guess? But any beings like that would be so different from anything we understand that we have absolutely zero ability to even make an educated guess on how to communicate with or identify them.

[roachpatrol]

on the subject of Humans Are Space Orcs i keep thinking it would be funny if ‘pursuit predator’ humans got together with an ‘ambush predator’ feliform species. and like. humans enjoy walking around with their friends! and the feliforms enjoy huddling in a concealed location with their friends! and it takes all of half an hour for a human to pick up a scarf and make a sling to take their pal with them while they go grab some lunch.

our new friends are like ‘are you sure this isn’t an inconvenience’ and the humans are like ‘are you kidding we do this with terran cats whether they like it or not’ 

also the team-up of humans and the feliform species gives most herbivore species in the galaxy screaming nightmares because here is a mobile tower that will follow you for 16 hours straight and it’s carrying a bag full of sneaky murder like it’s a baby this is not okay

[variablejabberwocky]

#listen if i ever met an alien that wanted to be carried around#you can fucking bet i would never put it down

[memecucker]

>by far most hairless species of primate

>is one of two primate species that willingly live in snow with the other being the Japanese macaque which is covered in thick hair

>is one of two mammal species that willingly eat spicy foods

>unlike tree shrews doesn’t have a special genetic mutation that makes spicy food not painful to eat

[homunculus-argument]

Random fantasy/worldbuilding thing:

Everyone from a different culture seems strangely poetic and profoundly deep in their observations, but only because they speak whatever the common tongue is as a second language, and whatever they are saying is actually mostly just clumsily translated common sayings/figures of speech that flow much better in their own tongue, and make perfect sense to the people who understand the cultural context.

Someone who comes from a place where geodes are common will describe another person: "He is like a stone that seems to hold a treasure inside of it - you learn to know such stones by their shape and their weight - but once you split it open, there is no quartz, no amethyst, no sparkling and brilliant crystal you expected. Just solid rock, through and through. He is like one of those rocks." Which vaguely makes sense, but they're clearly frustrated about not being quite able to express what they're trying to say.

The thing is, in their own first language, there's a specific word for this kind of rock - one that outwardly seems to be a geode but it isn't one after all. This word is also commonly used as an insult, to describe a person who is charismatic, convincing and outwardly seems brilliantly smart, but is actually dumb as shit.

[mortimermcmirestinks]

human, speaking dwarvish to an dwarf: "this quest you're on, it's like... when the rains come, and the sun shines through the water in the air, and the raindrops form a prism through which sunlight casts a shimmering illusion of rings of colour across the sky, it's as if the ribbons of light are indicating some great treasure that you can never find, because the coloured lights are an illusion. and pursuing the lights will just lead you on and on forever."

dwarf: :o "that's so beautiful..."

...

human, speaking humanish to a human: "his quest is like he's looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow."

other human: "ah yeah I getcha."