Eden Is Not Conducive To Sapience - Tumblr Posts

i think the thing that bugs me most about the "earth is a deathworld" genre as a whole, from a narrative structure sense, is that they almost always combine it with human exceptionalism. like humans are the dominant species on earth yes but that's because being a tool user is like going at evolution with console commands enabled.

even if all the aliens are super physically frail for whatever contrived reason, that's basically irrelevant to "your materials science must be this good to build spacecraft", and materials science trumps physicality for tool users.

aliens encountering earth for the first time wouldn't be like "whoa a planet of ubermenschen to save us from insert-evil-imperialist-species-here i'm glad someone found a way to make the noble savage narrative about white people" it would be "why are so many of their signals celebrating the eradication of another species shouldn't that be a traged-holy fuck I'm glad this variola thing is dead. what do you mean they sequenced its entire genome"