Out of Pod Experience

We humans like to see ourselves as the medium point - the standard, and we judge everything else by its level of variance from ourselves. It makes sense to do so when one lacks an understanding of natural boundaries and standard arrangements. But through much scientific study, we have begun to better understand what normal really is and just how strange we really are. So I'd like to share with you a few of the things that makes you stand out from the norm like a sore thumb:

I'll start with some of the basic adaptations in humans, especially since I see many extraterrestrial people depicted in works of science fiction as being very human-like in ways that they shouldn't be. First-off, our eyes--human eyes are well adapted for spotting food sources and threats that are well camouflaged. We have an excellent ability to discern shapes and color patterns with the information gathered by our robust array of retinal cone cells, and a large and well-developed visual cortex allows us to interpret this data in order to see camouflaged creatures as distinctly separate from their backgrounds. We also have good depth perception and target-tracking ability. We can spot movement quickly and sharply from anywhere in our field of vision and once we focus both eyes on it, we can quickly discern its distance, position relative to other things, speed and heading--and then we can, in an instant, compute an optimal interception or evasion path which we can update on the fly as the target changes its movements. Our eyes are very well adapted for both hunting and fleeing, especially in colorful environments with chaotic patterns that would confuse other animals. These eyes have some drawbacks, too. We can't see around ourselves very well due to our use of both eyes pointing forward so both can focus on a single object. We also have adaptations to improve day vision at the cost of night vision. With eyes like these, we are relegated to being a diurnal species.

Now our eyes are well-focused and streamlined into a concrete role, but our teeth and jaws are all messed up from conflicting evolutionary pressures. Our base teeth design is focused on grinding and crushing harsh plant fibers, which requires tremendous jaw strength--a feat that conflicts with our skull shape. Our ancestors and most of our relatives have developed a makeshift solution: increasing the size of the sagittal crest to brace the skull against the pressure while also giving the muscles something to attach to. Unfortunately for us, however, our need for larger brains forced our sagittal crests to shrink, which prevented us from being able to chew a lot of those plants that our teeth are built for. The end result is that without the use of our intelligence, sociality, and tool skills all working in tandem, large groups working as a team to generate food, we would be unable to feed ourselves. For this reason, a lone human in a wild environment rich in human food still has a good chance of starving.

Now I could go on and on about our specific biological makeup, but lets move on to bigger things. For instance this planet we are on is far from being a normal planet. It is on the large end of rocky worlds; it is rare for a planet to be larger or more massive than Earth and have an atmosphere thin enough that it does not liquefy and flood the surface in an atmospheric ocean--ie. a gas giant. The smallest "gas giants" would be about the same size and mass as Earth. Yet our atmosphere is particularly thin for a planet with the kind of gravity and magnetic field we have. Earth's magnetic field is being replenished by its giant moon--large enough to be a large planet--which orbits so close to the surface it shreds rock and warps that surface greatly with its immense tidal forces. This likely is very good for us. As we see with Venus and Mars, not having a giant moon to keep the mantle warm, it'll freeze after a few billion years. Venus and Mars may once have been temperate worlds with liquid water on the surface, but they are far from that now.

And what about our star? It is a "main sequence" class G2 yellow star, which is extremely abundant in this galaxy and probably throughout the universe. But its planetary system is much rarer. From what we have seen of other planetary systems, it seems it is common to find giant planets orbiting at just about any distance from the star. We've got a nice little area where life-supporting planets can form around our star which not only is devoid of giant planets but even has giants just outside that zone which clear the area and make those environments much safer.

Our galaxy is a giant spiral galaxy, one of the largest kinds of star formations we can see in the sky. Within our giant spiral galaxy is thousands of globular clusters and other smaller star formations, including what seems to be the remnants of other galaxies swallowed up by the monster we live in. This may not be so strange after all when you consider that a large percentage of all stars exist within spiral galaxies. There is a much larger percentage within the even larger elliptical galaxies though, and those stars may not support life very often. One thing that is pretty common in any grouping of billions of stars is supernovas. They are an extremely rare event but have a habit of briefly outshining their entire galaxy, so one supernova anywhere in the galaxy is blindingly obvious to that entire galaxy. This can cause problems when the supernova light irradiates planets hundreds of parsecs away--how does life have a chance to develop when it gets crushed every few centuries? Well in our galaxy there are many thick dust clouds in the inner section which obscure the light coming from some stars, and supernovas are most likely to occur towards the center. A blast well within range of completely destabilizing our environment usually is to us just a bright light in the sky.

I endorse this statement and/or opinion.

yeah, idk. i get winded/borderline exhaustion sometimes just trying to keep up with the dog on a walk/jog.

they also indulge themselves in life-threatening activities "just because".




actually, I was talking in a sense of keeping a steady pace. a human can cross quite a few km in a single go, transverse obstacles and continue to chase the prey with tracking skills alone.

very few other animals do this. Cheetahs can do amazing bursts of speed, but their actual reach is extremely limited compared to our own. And you compared yourself to dogs, which pretty much self-domesticated themselves to keep up with us.

Other predatorial animals will ambush or run down their prey. We, given good tracking skills, will pursue the prey for hours on end. Sure they are faster, but they will need to stop sometime, while we can still keep going, and, slowly but surely, we will get that prey.

stereoscopic vision is a given in land-based predators. each eye's field of vision needs to be overlapping as to kinda "triangulate" a position, so that you can have instant perception on range, size and depth, a capability that is pretty much mandatory when hunting. it's, probably, the only standard as far as land-based predators go.

as for the rest, well, we may not be born with claws, nor fangs, but we can forge them

"in a more general way, all life on earth evolved on the basis that it needs water. Chemically, water is a very interesting element, besides the fact that it has also capabilities on par with some industrial-level solvents"

Don't forget about that highly reactive gas in our atmosphere, it ruins just about any metal, and can also react with a lot of organic and non-organic materials. If the atmospheric make up would contain a few more % of this gas (forrest) fires would happen a lot more often.

And we die without it, hell we die if it drops just a few %. Oxygen, even more ridiculous then water

(edit: also, is water considered an element?)

You might get tired at first, trying to keep up with your dog. That's probably due to your dog being more interested in sprinting and getting good exercise than you are. Dogs are rambunctious. But if you and your dog were lost in the wilderness, your dog would likely tire before you would, and if neither of you had food, your dog would get grossly thin and verge on starvation while you were merely pale and it took willpower for you to walk. You'd have to carry your dog.

But dogs/wolves have very high stamina, among the highest of quadrupedal tetrapods.

And quadrupedal tetrapods sounds like a redundant statement, but in fact humans are bipedal tetrapods--we have four leg-limbs and we use two for walking.

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One of the things that makes us humans odd is that our eyes are built for predation on animals while our teeth are built for predation on plants. But our robust digestive systems help make up for it, as we are capable of processing into energy virtually all soft, non-poisonous organic matter we come across, as well as a wide variety of poisonous things. Some of the poisonous foods we can eat with impunity:
Potatoes (cooking them neutralizes the poison but we can eat them raw if we like)
Cocoa and Coffee - highly toxic to the point of being lethal for many animals
Milk - most adult humans have trouble with this but a growing number are able to process lactose beyond childhood
and probably many others

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Our planet may be unique among life-supporting planets. Research is showing that liquid water is most common underneath the surface of planets rather than on their surface, and these worlds may not only be able to support life, they may be ideal for life, as they can provide some of the hostile environments required for life to start, but with greater stability which life needs to have time to spread and develop defenses.

If ours is odd among life-supporting worlds, then we humans might be living in a rather rare biome: supermarine soil within a biosphere. Perhaps most people out there who develop advanced civilizations live underwater, and the ones who live in a gas medium perhaps live in a variety of possible environments, equally as strange as ours.

Nice post.

Our brain (and thumb) is really our only evolutionary assets.

I remember reading a great article that tried to debunk the idea of 'Intelligent design' by showing just how poorly designed the human body is when you really think about it.

I heard Hippo are actually some of the most badass creatures around.

I ..... uh ... you .... it .... oh goodness.