"Humans are the cockroaches of the galaxy, primitive, weak, and stupid but can work and fight for hours on end...

"Humans are the cockroaches of the galaxy, primitive, weak, and stupid but can work and fight for hours on end, lose limbs and suffer horrendous wounds without issue, breed exponentially, and can survive in almost any environment."

This is the best niche for humans to occupy in a Sci-Fi setting, prove me wrong. You can't.

depends on the setting

But we can't survive almost any environment, unless you mean through use of technology.

>"Humans are the cockroaches of the galaxy, primitive, weak, and stupid but can work and fight for hours on end, lose limbs and suffer horrendous wounds without issue, breed exponentially, and can survive in almost any environment - with proper guidance."

How's that. I've got a thing for aliens that "uplift" mankind to some symbiosis.

>hurr but why use humans when they can just do it themselves with their advanced technology?

Maybe the aliens are explorers and scientists mapping out the far reaches of space and have discovered some seriously bad shit, like intelligent genocidal lifeforms with stable civilizations, or berserker bots that have continued their war long after their creators went extinct - and they need soldiers to stop this threat right now.

>humanity, we come in peace. but in 140,593 years a swarm of berserking machine soldiers created by an unknown extinct culture will come to bring war to your planets. with our technology and your help we can stop this threat before it wipes out your biospheres.

>Maybe the aliens are explorers and scientists mapping out the far reaches of space and brought very few resources with them

I wrote that part a bit awkward.

I agree. Humans may not be the greatest scholars, engineers or warriors, but they are resilient, resourceful, and fucking persistent.

This is daft, art, poetry, music and cultural things are what humans do best. Even in times of war we create and I think that's amazing. Humans should be seen as a race of people that enjoy potentially "pointless" things. There is no need for music beyond a beat yet it's here, constantly evolving and changing

Short-lived and vain creatures. More interested in personal gain and entertainment than in any greater good. Easily manipulated.

That's the point of humanity. We aren't the smartest, strongest, or most advanced, but we have a culture like none other. In every human culture, EVERY SINGLE CULTURE, there has been music, art, and legends. It's part and parcel of who we are, just as much, if not more so than our endurance, adaptability, and tenacity. Just look at the Internet, I doubt an alien species would be able to create memes half as dank as ours.

>humanity is a culture of bards

I'm okay with this. In fact, I fucking love this.

>why does the crusher of worlds say we have to carry those weirdos along?
>intel says bringing those weirdos along cuts down fatal mental breakdowns of the crew in the space-beyond-space by 60%
>wow... wow... yeah, okay. that's pretty good.

>But we can't survive almost any environment, unless you mean through use of technology.
Neither can cockroaches!

>lose limbs and suffer horrendous wounds without issue
No we don't. Slit your wrist and see what happens.

>breed exponentially

grammereticly true but everything reproduces exponentially so please fuck off with the 'humans breed quickly meme'.


>and can survive in almost any environment.

Objectively false to an incredible degree. Earth is a cradle that life has adapted to fitting. Earth is shielded from radiation, temepture here is unfluxuating, we have a precisly tuned lung system for the exact type of air on earth, Jesus Christ this op is stupid.

I mean, as a setting I understand what you're going for and it could work.
As a belief, it's ubris at best and sheer stupidity at worst to think that us alone in the whole universe are the most creative.

what are cockroaches, then?

Every species with half brain can do this you fuck

Saying humans are any type of roll in the galaxy makes no fucking sense seeing as we have nothing to compare ourselves to, maybe humans are super artists, maybe we're the fuck Spocks of the galaxy and our creativity is fucking nothing. Maybe we breed like a plague compared to other species, maybe we're the dying elves compared to everyone.

Saying anything about humans like this is fucking retarded.

how does an alien know what a cockroach is?

>Humans are the cockroaches of the galaxy

I'm an alien to Earth, what is a cockroach?

>primitive, weak, and stupid

In relation to what?

>but can work and fight for hours on end, lose limbs and suffer horrendous wounds without issue,

Can you?

>breed exponentially, and can survive in almost any environment.

Like every other reasonably successful living thing?

>Short lifespans
>Lots of Spawn
>They can live on every planet in every Climate
>They consume everything on the planets they infest and pollutes them beyond recognition
>They eat everything
Human-Ex when?

Human Zerg rush when?

How about

>no matter what you are, there is a human who will gladly have sex with you.

He was threatened by Erdogan to support his totalitarian presidency referendum.

Humans should always be portrayed as overly emotional, illogical, arrogant, and persistent. It's their paradoxical nature that throws other races off, but we just think it's because we're awesome.

OP here.

>lose limbs and suffer horrendous wounds without issue
>No we don't. Slit your wrist and see what happens.

Pound for pound, we're the most durable animal on the planet. If you are well and truly pissed and have enough adrenalin in your system you can keep fighting long past the point almost any other animal would've keeled over. If you lose a limb and survive, you can adjust to prosthetics in a matter of days.

>breed exponentially
>grammereticly true but everything reproduces exponentially so please fuck off with the 'humans breed quickly meme'.

I won't discount your argument over it, but its grammatically, not grammeretically. That said, in third world nations and for almost all of recorded human history, humans have bred as much as possible, producing as many as ten children in as many years wasn't seen as strange, it was the ideal! But in modernized first world nations, the population growth rate barely breaks even. Compared to advanced alien species, with a ten thousand year head start, there's no reason to believe our reproduction rate wouldn't be much higher than theirs, by virtue of being less advanced.

>and can survive in almost any environment.
>Objectively false to an incredible degree. Earth is a cradle that life has adapted to fitting. Earth is shielded from radiation, temepture here is unfluxuating, we have a precisly tuned lung system for the exact type of air on earth, Jesus Christ this op is stupid.

I'll concede this point, but in the confines of our home planet, there's an extreme amount of diversity in nature, to the point that it's hard to believe it's all on the same planet, but we've colonized it all. The scorching deserts, colonized, the frigid tundra, colonized, the highest mountains, colonized, the depths of the deepest jungles, colonized. I think it's fair to say that in the future, humanity will find a way, and it will be no different.

> (1/2)

I know, I'm not talking about real life, I'm talking about interesting ways to implement humanity in fictional settings. I think humanity being primitive but tenacious is compelling.

>Humans are the cockroaches of the galaxy
>I'm an alien to Earth, what is a cockroach?

A small but nigh unkillable and extremely prolific insectoid parasite, or if one is browsing /pol/, a native of Turkey

>primitive, weak, and stupid
>In relation to what?

In relation to more advanced aliens in a fictional context.

>but can work and fight for hours on end, lose limbs and suffer horrendous wounds without issue,
>Can you?

I used to work at a lumber yard, it was fucking hard but I was definitely able to do it for 'hours on end,' and any physically fit human could do the same. I haven't lost any limbs, but I was attacked by a pit bull once and almost lost my hand, but, because I was freaking the fuck out, I didn't feel it at the moment. I damned sure felt it later, and it took weeks to recover, but I did, and now I don't have any problems.

>breed exponentially, and can survive in almost any environment.
>Like every other reasonably successful living thing?

Yes. Any species you'd care to mention breeds exponentially, I addressed it in an earlier post.

These are also interesting.

Just make humans normal for god's sake, jesus christ
Making humans special in any way is just making a different flavor of HFY, it's all cancer

For me it's not about exaggerating minor human traits, but contrasting humans with exaggerated aliens, and exploring what makes humans human.

>stop liking what I don't like!

Look, obviously you can do whatever you want, and you don't have much choice when you're trying to make humans differentiated from the aliens. As long as you know what you're making and get that even if you try and make the human species special in any way, you're just making HFY in a different way. There's no way we can know how different we'll be from aliens until we meet them, if we meet them. Maybe that's why I have trouble getting into scifi.

I get you.

So rate my idea:

In my sci-fi campaign, humans had to be certified/authorized to travel to places with Aliumz. Future !NASA and the !ESA had to make sure people weren't going to cause a galactic purge of humanity and that they had skills and training to interact with others.

Realistic, that's for sure, but I'm not sure how long that policy would last. Maybe 50-60 years, before the humans and aliens became acclimated to one another.

>Humans are the cockroaches
except we dont survive nuclear blasts, die of cancer, cannot eat everything, nor live in as extreme conditions
>primitive
we build tools to solve tasks automatically for us, we have written language, arts, science, that is not primitive in any sense of the word
>weak
we are actually the best long distance runners on Earth.
>stupid
no u
>work and fight for hours on end
no, we build tools to do that shit for us
>lose limbs ... with issue
doctor Veeky Forums being an idiot again I see
>breed exponentially
any creature which uses sex breeds exponentially
>survive in almost any environment
HAHAHA OP seriously??

How's the autism today?

Humanity is the most social species
Manages to intrigue even the species that are typically hermit like in behavior
Adapt other cultures into their own in order to acclimatize socially
mono culture / cultural mosaic allows for integrating multiple xeno cultures into a functioning society

Humanity are space canadians

I'd assume there be attempts at record keeping by any race. I can see Earth Gov trying to require and register all humans, and other species trying to do the same.


Another thing that Mass Effect and lots of HFY got me thinking about, would it still be reasonable to have anti-government people, the stereotypical 'muh rights', 'muh solidarity' to actually be allowed to go to other planets? It struck me as weird, and somewhat infuriating, when the folks on some human colony didn't listen to me when I warned them of danger and they blew me off like I was FEMA. It still costs tons of money to travel between planets, would these types of attitudes even be allowed to travel?

Humanity more than any species on earth or perhaps in the cosmos, is not formed by instinct, destiny or any other predetermination. It is the environments that they grow up in, the people they speak to that determines if they will become worthwhile members of our society, or just another drain on resources.

Creating a worthwhile human is a true challenge. Breeding is obviously incredibly important, but also developing the unique set of gauntlets necessary for that human to develop into something worthwhile will not be a simple science to perfect. Producing educational systems that hone their natural talents organically, and surrounding them with as many mentors and role models as possible will hopefully give them someone whose good example can be followed and imitated. It is a resource intensive process, but the humans that come out the other end will be welcome additions to our cultures cultural, political and scientific leadership. The rest, well, make decent conscripts and slave labor at best.

I can't tell if you are talking about raising humans as pets or equals.

Though I guess we have that in our favor. Humans can have a very wide policy for what it considers family. Even the Bible has a story about someone getting crazy mad that they stole someone else's sheep.

Humans are cyborg technobards. If a place exists, they'll dream of living there and make art about what it must be like. Then they'll create tech and modify themselves until they can live there. And once they live there they'll make art about what it's like to live there.

Fucking humans. Anywhere you go the bastards write poems and stories about -- when they don't already live there.

>breed exponentially

Okay this bothers me.

Humans, compared to the majority of the animal kingdom, breed incredibly slowly. Like, only elephants and whales have a longer gestation period and I honestly can't think of an animal that reaches sexual maturity faster than us. The only reason there are so many on the Earth right now is that we traded these long breeding cycles for the ability to pass complex information such as the best languages and tools in the animal kingdom on to our kids, and that worked incredibly well, from a Darwinian perspective.

Granted, this also means that anything as technologically advanced as us is probably going to spend a similar period of life learning before going on to reproduce. But that places humans as "breeds just as much as everyone else" rather than "breeds like rabbits".

Personally I feel like "humans are cockroaches" is just as human-centric as "humans are middle ground of everything" and "humans are heroes/champions/good guys" (a pretty dead trope tho).

The only way we can really judge humans is relative to whatever other races the author has created. If you want your sci-fi story to actually be hard rather than using misanthropism and reversing typical scientific tropes any alien species is just going to be too weird to compare in such a way. There's not gonna be Tolkien Races IN SPACE, and if there are, making the claim that one is better or more realistic is fucking dumb.

Not only is it good from a social cohesion sense - even if we have to project human traits onto other species, we can empathize well and really help with forming and maintaining bonds - the bard analogy also explains why we want to fuck every alien we come across.

HFY fags are insufferable, but anti-HFY are just about is bad.

Attempts to compare humans to alien creatures based on our planets biology is dumb. Humans are not especially tough or have a ton of endurance compared to most animals. Humans have good eyesight and intelligence. That's it. That's what balances humans.

If you haven't made a setting where humans are the only intelligent species or there are so many species with so many biological or cybernetic technologies that everybody is on the same level you already fucked up.

Alright, what if humans aren't the most anything, but we aren't right in the middle of all the other species either. That's the Reticulians, who ended up founding the Confederation.

We may be slightly more warlike/creative than most species, but the Tuvalians are more warlike, the Gorflaxians are more creative, and the Shee-am-[untranscribable hissing/spitting/clicking] are more creatively warlike than us.
We're basically unnotable on the galactic scale, the only reason people pay any attention is some pointless trivia. We're like space Tuvalu

It's hard to imagine how a sentient species would be compared to us, because we'd have to create their societal values as well.

Consider a race with a system of ethics that values strength above everything. A race much more willing to perform eugenics than us. A race where, instead of the strong caring for the disabled, the disabled sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the strong.

By the time we're amongst the stars, we could still be warring with ourselves. Other races might be more unified. Or less. There's a lot of factors. I think it's best to create your races one at a time and try to imagine their growth as organically as possible rather than simply trying to fill a niche like: Dicknoses are the emotionally detached race; they focus solely on logic.

I mean, you could work backwards too.
"I need proud warrior race guys, so under what conditions would such a society develop? What are the other implications of these conditions, which I could use to add more originality to the species?"

>we're the most durable animal
depends. a blue whale more likely survives a gunshot or an axe to the head yet can do nothing about being beached. cats can survive bigger falling distances

every species breeds exponentially when there's space, food and not too much predation going on

Ever think maybe they're so short-sighted because they don't live long enough to see the full consequences of their actions?

So we Krogan now?

I WANT THE HFY FAGGOTS TO LEAVE!

Your meme is old and tired

Sort of, but not exactly.

The key here is that humans are nearby and friendly. Not that humans are so fantastic at combat.

the Aliens setting begs to differ

Aren't humans really good at throwing things?

Depends on the context.

Compared to other species of humanoids, yes. But it's not really that useful beyond the neolithic. Perhaps our good throwing arms are why we're here, and neanderthals are extinct. Our ancestors killed prey at a distance, while neanderthals had to kill prey up close - right in the danger zone.

Throw a tantrum all you like, there are still people that enjoy HFY tropes.

We were more social and Intelligent, but also very sexually active. We fucked our way to the best Homo species, and made sure to stay in large groups, taking care of the weak. We were kick-ass hunters because our social skills were crazy good.

humans are also really good at long distance running. The ancestors of humans hunted primarily by chasing after animals until the animals were either too exhausted or overheated to keep running away.

How does an alien know what the fuck a cockroach is?

>The assumption that there isn't a species out there that out preforms humanity In nearly every aspect
>A universe of possibility and you choose HFY
Nice memes

You do realise chasing prey is something all homonids do?

What makes us special was using traps and throwing spears.

>Pound for pound, we're the most durable animal on the planet
Calling bullshit on that.
You cut off a man's leg and he will fall down and he will scream himself unconscious before bleeding out if not treated.
Cut off six of a cockroach's leg and it will fly away thinking "holy shit what the fuck"

>breeding
Even so, we're not special in how fast we breed. 9 months is actually a shitload of time for a single gestation period, and we rarely give birth to more than one at a time. Most animals have us beat in this regard.

>literally no existing intelligent race to compare humans too.
>assume the other races are automatically better than us at most things.

there were also the Neanderthals who very very good at these things do, at least until the humans killed them all. Though DNA analysis suggests that humans interbred with Neanderthals too, with some evidence saying that most humans alive today can trace their lineage back to a neanderthal somewhere. So you may have a point when it comes to humans fucking their way to the best homo

>parasite
vermin, pests sure, but cockroaches are not parasites
>nigh unkillable
my boot disagrees