“Greetings, we’ve been trying to reach your civilization about the extended warranty on your Class 7 interstellar exploration cruiser…”
We noticed that your warp drive has been failing more frequently…
humans encountering an alien: wow show us the REPLICATOR tell us about your WARPCORE where is the STAR GATE
space trucker who left home 79 years ago and only comes out of cold storage for two days every 10 years: what the goddamn
Because of course they have shitty warp drives, they keep crashing on Earth, they almost never land smoothly on the planet.
The ones that crash are just the tip of the ice berg. The ones that land and abduct and evade our notice must be huge. Think how many flights there are around the world vs how many crashes. Earth must be a busy research/holiday destination for aliens.
Holiday. You think a civilization capable of FTL would need to physically probe an organism to study it? Hell no. Probing is a huge laugh. Heck, we do it to each other, constantly.
They might be doing it for research, trying to figure out why humans are doing it to each other. Here we are saying how weird they are for probing us when they’re just puzzled why we do it
Most of the more advanced (complicated? I don’t want to be too species-ist) life forms on Earth reproduce sexually. I wonder how much of that produces faster evolution and is therefore selected for, and how much is chance? Like, say asexual reproduction dominates on some planet such that the apex creatures reproduce asexually, and it’s only a minority of mostly uninteresting creatures that reproduce sexually. A lot of our behaviors would seem really strange; inexplicable, maybe. So much of our social interactions are ultimately originated in sex - and not just humans, but all sexually reproducing creatures. Birds. Cats. Other apes and our monkey cousins, of course. We get it; we recognize it, can sympathize with it. But if you’re intelligent and your entire civilization reproduces asexually, and most of the other higher life forms on your planet do too, so that you don’t have a huge biome of sexually reproducing, complex animals to study. I think it would be really weird to encounter humans.
I agree. Humans are weird from a human point of view. I couldn’t imagine how weird it would be for other intelligence building life forms.
So they’re not looking for eddies in the space-time continuum then?
Ah. Is he. Is he.
…
Er, who is Eddy, then, exactly, then?
I assumed €$ eddies
“the subspace equivalent of loud bangs and black smoke” ~Iain M. Banks
