Every Monday, for as long as I feel like it, I'll pitch a new idea.
I've long loved my race. We're omnivorous, submersible, dexterous, and smart. We can [perceive a healthy portion of gamma wavelengths], [discern enough frequencies of compressed air] with enough skill to link a subset of those to [each person we meet], feel just about every inch of our body, perform a delicate chemical analysis of everything we put into [our mouth] and [dispersed in the air around us], discern our [physical orientation] and [acceleration] with none of those senses at all. We're silly adaptable, with [eyes that can see underwater], ears that get better when we're blind, and eyes that get better when we're deaf. The external genitalia aren't so great, and there's that crazy sleep thing, plus other stuff, but we can live in almost any environment our planet can cook up, heal wounds, adapt to viruses, communicate with each other in thousands of limitless different ways, identify patterns, reign in any number of voluntary biological functions, become stronger by using muscles, and train our reflexes. That's all before getting to the basics of empathy, unconscious ballistic trajectory calculation, and developing calluses.
It's probably because our planet is a teeming wasteland of life and water/heat systems just itching to devour everything else that sits around for too long. If there was life on other planets, I don' t think they'd visit us because A) We're covered in stuff, and B) We are the galaxy's Australia. Everything here can and will be eaten by something else, or buried and forgotten about. The exceptions to that rule are remarkable because of it.
Take away any one or two of these things and suddenly everything changes; tough, regenerating skin, short-term, unconscious audio recall, that thing where we can get each other pregnant without even having sex because of motile, haploid reproductive cells. Motile reproductive cells. Yeah, lots of things on Earth have these characteristics. Some even have them better (I've seen the heartbreaking YouTube videos of two-legged dogs; I know the score.), and in all likelihood, life forms on other planets have very similar paradigms; life thrives wherever it can, however it must.
But given so many sci-fi/fantasy settings where aliens are badass and humans get the twin advantages of being the protagonist and not being a two-dimensional race of caricatures, it would be nice to have a setting where we can explore the rightfully badass qualities of humanity in a sea of aliens who just don't have that bizarre, amped-up Terran biology in their corner.
It's probably because our planet is a teeming wasteland of life and water/heat systems just itching to devour everything else that sits around for too long. If there was life on other planets, I don' t think they'd visit us because A) We're covered in stuff, and B) We are the galaxy's Australia. Everything here can and will be eaten by something else, or buried and forgotten about. The exceptions to that rule are remarkable because of it.
Take away any one or two of these things and suddenly everything changes; tough, regenerating skin, short-term, unconscious audio recall, that thing where we can get each other pregnant without even having sex because of motile, haploid reproductive cells. Motile reproductive cells. Yeah, lots of things on Earth have these characteristics. Some even have them better (I've seen the heartbreaking YouTube videos of two-legged dogs; I know the score.), and in all likelihood, life forms on other planets have very similar paradigms; life thrives wherever it can, however it must.
But given so many sci-fi/fantasy settings where aliens are badass and humans get the twin advantages of being the protagonist and not being a two-dimensional race of caricatures, it would be nice to have a setting where we can explore the rightfully badass qualities of humanity in a sea of aliens who just don't have that bizarre, amped-up Terran biology in their corner.
