aaaaaaaaaa-squirrel:

Humans and Deathworlds

Alright. so ‘humans are weird’ posts constantly say that Earth is a deathworld. I would just like to say.

Every single planet in the history of the universe is a deathworld.

Okay? Any planet will have something that’s normal for the inhabitants but deadly to visitors. Every one. Because of course we’ll get used to things that others haven’t developed an immunity to.

However.

Earth is strange to other planets because it’s a bunch of deathworlds stacked on top of each other. It has rainforests and oceans and mountains and deserts and no one can make sense of it. Planets with similar biomes will be tolerant to similar planets.

Earth is confusing because everyone in the universe can find something normal to them and something terrifying to them, usually quite close to each other.

I’ve often found it funny to imagine something like this. That the trope of aliens whose world is all the same climate, all the same culture, all the same everything – is because that’s just how most inhabited worlds are, and the thing that’s different about humans is simply that we’re different.

That we have so very much internal diversity, in the sorts of places our planet has, and the sorts of ways our societies have had to adapt to them.

Maybe it makes us especially adaptable to new and unfamiliar situations. Maybe it makes us better diplomats, because we can get good at learning to accept others very different from us.

Or maybe it doesn’t always have the same advantage, or any at all, it just makes us weird. But hey, we’re used to that. We’re FROM the place where everyone is weird from the viewpoint of most of the rest of the world.