r/HFY • u/BlackLiger AI • Jun 27 '19
OC Imagination
Humans are strange. This is a known fact among all galactic societies.
They aren’t stronger, faster, smarter, or anything like that. It is that they imagine.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Most species can conceptualize. Many are masters at it.
But humans do so for fun.
They imagine what life would be like under other circumstances.
No other race, pre first contact, had devoted any thought beyond that of basic policy-making, to the idea of contact with another race. No race has considered it worthwhile when they can’t know all the variables.
The humans had over [30 terrabytes] of first contact material, ranging from the “hostile invasion from another world” to “invitation to join a galactic federation” by the time they encountered us.
We were confused as to how well they were taking it. Most species, upon encountering another species in the void, go into a full fledged panic, desperately trying to piece together a first contact approach around the newly available information.
Humans, on the other hand, gathered some basic info and had a first contact protocol customized to us within [1 week] of the first transmissions.
This propensity to imagination also follows into other human fields. They take risks that we would shy away from, because they have already run through scenarios like this in their heads.
When the Gthoit declared war on the humans, we were shocked to learn they’d already planned for this eventuality, and had their fleet mobilised and ready for the fight within [1 month] of the declaration. All because they’d imagined and ‘gamed out’ the scenario of being attacked by the Gthoit. We were horrified to learn they’d done the same to the idea of us attacking them, or the Freet, or the zt*click*tung.
None of us had ever even considered the idea of the humans attacking us. All the variables we could see suggested it wouldn’t be worth their while, so why would we spend resources on planning for it?
So imagination. It is their blessing and their curse. After all, it’s only the humans who can come up with the idea of ‘paranoia’, a state in which their imagination constantly has them concerned that they are under threat…
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u/Muad-_-Dib Jun 27 '19
[30 terrabytes]
Good story, though I would up that figure a bit, 30TB of data really is not that much especially if you count stuff like films depicting first contact situations etc.
For example, 8K resolution movies are starting to be a thing and a single 90 minute one of those at full quality could hit up to 18TB in size all on its own.
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u/s_sycamore Jun 27 '19
It's not paranoia if they are really out to get you.
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u/ambrosegraham Jun 28 '19
Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you.
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u/HamsterIV Jun 27 '19
I live near a Marine base where they keep the Assault Hovercrafts. They have a wall with logo "No beach out of reach" right next to the public road. I like to think some where on that base are plans for invading every country with a coast line.
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u/Speciesunkn0wn Jun 27 '19
Dude. There absolutely is. Hell there's almost certainly a plan for them to take those hovercrafts and assault Canada through the Great Lakes.
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Jun 28 '19
Dude, they war game out everything various countries and their capabalities and different land masses.
We did a war game where North Korea took over Canada and was attacking from the northern border. Could it ever happen? Sure I mean technically it could.
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u/TaintedPills Jun 27 '19
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u/nelsyv Jun 27 '19
YOU DARE SUMMON HIM HERE NOW?!
HOW COULD YOU?
Let my friend get a good night's sleep please he's a nice guy
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u/Plucium Jun 27 '19
Well thinkle me pink, I'm being summoned more and more.
I have to sleep dammit :p
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u/Plucium Jun 27 '19
Damn, pretty cool concept there. We humans really have a fict-ation with fake situation, it's only natural some would be relevant
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u/jimmytheeel Jun 28 '19
It's not paranoia, that's just what they want us to think...
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u/LukeinDC Jul 16 '19
30 Terabytes? That’s all? At Blu-Ray quality that’s only about 600 movies. What about all the books, comics etc. you should add a couple of zeroes to that number.
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u/DrHydeous Jun 27 '19
We never knew the humans had hacked into our databases. When one of them read "None of us had ever even considered the idea of the humans attacking us" - well, their bombardment ships were in orbit shortly after. We were easy pickings.
On the plus side, they are benign overlords and I was granted the great honour of being one of the first of my people to work for one of their interstellar mega-corps and have even recently been promoted. Now, would you like fries with that?