On the topic of humans being everyone’s favorite Intergalactic versions of Gonzo the Great: Come on you guys, I’ve seen all the hilarious additions to my “humans are the friendly ones” post. We’re basically Steve Irwin meets Gonzo from the Muppets at this point. I love it.
But what if certain species of aliens have Rules for dealing with humans?
Don’t eat their food. If human food passes your lips/beak/membrane/other way of ingesting nutrients, you will never be satisfied with your ration bars again.
Don’t tell them your name. Humans can find you again once they know your name and this can be either life-saving or the absolute worst thing that could happen to you, depending on whether or not they favor you. Better to be on the safe side.
Winning a human’s favor will ensure that a great deal of luck is on your side, but if you anger them, they are wholly capable of wiping out everything you ever cared about. Do not anger them.
If you must anger them, carry a cage of X’arvizian bloodflies with you, for they resemble Earth mo-skee-toes and the human will avoid them.
This does not always work. Have a last will and testament ready.
Do not let them take you anywhere on your planet that you cannot fly a ship from. Beings who are spirited away to the human kingdom of Aria Fiv-Ti Won rarely return, and those that do are never quite the same.
Basically, humans are like the Fair Folk to some aliens and half of them are scared to death and the others are like alien teenagers who are like “I dare you to ask a human to take you to Earth”.
We knew about the planet called Earth for centuries before we made contact with its indigenous species, of course. We spent decades studying them from afar.
The first researchers had to fight for years to even get a grant, of course. They kept getting laughed out of the halls. A T-Class Death World that had not only produced sapient life, but a Stage Two civilization? It was a joke, obviously. It had to be a joke.
And then it wasn’t. And we all stopped laughing.Instead, we got very, very nervous.
We watched as the human civilizations not only survived, but grew, and thrived, and invented things that we had never even conceived of. Terrible things, weapons of war, implements of destruction as brutal and powerful as one would imagine a death world’s children to be. In the space of less than two thousand years, they had already produced implements of mass death that would have horrified the most callous dictators in the long, dark history of the galaxy.
Already, the children of Earth were the most terrifying creatures in the galaxy. They became the stuff of horror stories, nightly warnings told to children; huge, hulking, brutish things, that hacked and slashed and stabbed and shot and burned and survived, that built monstrous metal things that rumbled across the landscape and blasted buildings to ruin.
All that preserved us was their lack of space flight. In their obsession with murdering one another, the humans had locked themselves into a rigid framework of physics that thankfully omitted the equations necessary to achieve interstellar travel.
They became our bogeymen. Locked away in their prison planet, surrounded by a cordon of non-interference, prevented from ravaging the galaxy only by their own insatiable need to kill one another. Gruesome and terrible, yes - but at least we were safe.
Or so we thought.
The cities were called Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the moment of their destruction, the humans unlocked a destructive force greater than any of us could ever have believed possible. It was at that moment that those of us who studied their technology knew their escape to be inevitable, and that no force in the universe could have hoped to stand against them.
The first human spacecraft were… exactly what we should have expected them to be. There were no elegant solar wings, no sleek, silvered hulls plying the ocean of stars. They did not soar on the stellar currents. They did not even register their existence. Humanity flew in the only way it could: on all-consuming pillars of fire, pounding space itself into submission with explosion after explosion. Their ships were crude, ugly, bulky things, huge slabs of metal welded together, built to withstand the inconceivable forces necessary to propel themselves into space through violence alone.
It was almost comical. The huge, dumb brutes simply strapped an explosive to their backs and let it throw them off of the planet.
We would have laughed, if it hadn’t terrified us.
Humanity, at long last, was awake.
It was a slow process. It took them nearly a hundred years to reach their nearest planetary neighbor; a hundred more to conquer the rest of their solar system. The process of refining their explosive propulsion systems - now powered by the same force that had melted their cities into glass less than a thousand years before - was slow and haphazard. But it worked. Year by year, they inched outward, conquering and subduing world after world that we had deemed unfit for habitation. They burrowed into moons, built orbital colonies around gas giants, even crafted habitats that drifted in the hearts of blazing nebulas. They never stopped. Never slowed.
The no-contact cordon was generous, and was extended by the day. As human colonies pushed farther and farther outward, we retreated, gave them the space that they wanted in a desperate attempt at… stalling for time, perhaps. Or some sort of appeasement. Or sheer, abject terror. Debates were held daily, arguing about whether or not first contact should be initiated, and how, and by whom, and with what failsafes. No agreement was ever reached.
We were comically unprepared for the humans to initiate contact themselves.
It was almost an accident. The humans had achieved another breakthrough in propulsion physics, and took an unexpected leap of several hundred light years, coming into orbit around an inhabited world.
What ensued was the diplomatic equivalent of everyone staring awkwardly at one another for a few moments, and then turning around and walking slowly out of the room.
The human ship leapt away after some thirty minutes without initiating any sort of formal communications, but we knew that we had been discovered, and the message of our existence was being carried back to Terra.
The situation in the senate could only be described as “absolute, incoherent panic”. They had discovered us before our preparations were complete. What would they want? What demands would they make? What hope did we have against them if they chose to wage war against us and claim the galaxy for themselves? The most meager of human ships was beyond our capacity to engage militarily; even unarmed transport vessels were so thickly armored as to be functionally indestructible to our weapons.
We waited, every day, certain that we were on the brink of war. We hunkered in our homes, and stared.
Across the darkness of space, humanity stared back.
There were other instances of contact. Human ships - armed, now - entering colonized space for a few scant moments, and then leaving upon finding our meager defensive batteries pointed in their direction. They never initiated communications. We were too frightened to.
A few weeks later, the humans discovered Alphari-296.
It was a border world. A new colony, on an ocean planet that was proving to be less hospitable than initially thought. Its military garrison was pitifully small to begin with. We had been trying desperately to shore it up, afraid that the humans might sense weakness and attack, but things were made complicated by the disease - the medical staff of the colonies were unable to devise a cure, or even a treatment, and what pitifully small population remained on the planet were slowly vomiting themselves to death.
When the human fleet arrived in orbit, the rest of the galaxy wrote Alphari-296 off as lost.
I was there, on the surface, when the great gray ships came screaming down from the sky. Crude, inelegant things, all jagged metal and sharp edges, barely holding together. I sat there, on the balcony of the clinic full of patients that I did not have the resources or the expertise to help, and looked up with the blank, empty, numb stare of one who is certain that they are about to die.
I remember the symbols emblazoned on the sides of each ship, glaring in the sun as the ships landed inelegantly on the spaceport landing pads that had never been designed for anything so large. It was the same symbol that was painted on the helmets of every human that strode out of the ships, carrying huge black cases, their faces obscured by dark visors. It was the first flag that humans ever carried into our worlds.
It was a crude image of a human figure, rendered in simple, straight lines, with a dot for the head. It was painted in white, over a red cross.
The first human to approach me was a female, though I did not learn this until much later - it was impossible to ascertain gender through the bulky suit and the mask. But she strode up the stairs onto the balcony, carrying that black case that was nearly the size of my entire body, and paused as I stared blankly up at her. I was vaguely aware that I was witnessing history, and quite certain that I would not live to tell of it.
Then, to my amazement, she said, in halting, uncertain words, “You are the head doctor?”
I nodded.
The visor cleared. The human bared its teeth at me. I learned later that this was a “grin”, an expression of friendship and happiness among their species.
“We are The Doctors Without Borders,” she said, speaking slowly and carefully. “We are here to help.”
You can’t get this extremely good kind of content scrolling anywhere else.
Bolivia’s
Lake Poopo was once a fountain of life for local inhabitants, who
fished from its teeming waters and farmed along its banks. Now it is a
desert. Scientists
say the one-time lake, which sprawls across Bolivia’s sun-drenched,
high-altitude altiplano, has fallen victim to decades of water diversion
for regional irrigation needs. And a warmer, drier climate has made its
recovery increasingly unlikely.
“It’s like a perfect storm,” says Jorge Molina, a researcher with the Universidad Mayor de San Andres.
[…] The
lake, Bolivia’s second largest, is very shallow, and has traditionally
ebbed and flowed, according to both scientists and the lake’s long-time
Aymara inhabitants. Valerio
Rojas […] “In our
Aymara language it is said that: ‘Our mother earth is tired’.” […] “It
is no longer a functional lake. A lake that dries up too often is no
longer functional for fauna, flora and biodiversity,“ Molina told
Reuters. The
drought is also driving away the communities that once lived along its
banks, says Benedicta Uguera, an Indigenous woman from Untavi […]. “The families decided to leave the island, because we cannot survive without water and there is no more life,” she said
[Source: Reporting by Monica Machicao. Writing by Dave Sherwood. Editing by David Holmes. Published at: “Bolivia’s lake Poopo dries up and scientists fear refill unlikely.” Reuters. 3 August 2021.]
——-
Original post:
A huge lake in Bolivia has almost entirely disappeared.
Lake Poopó used
to be the country’s second largest, after Lake Titicaca [the largest freshwater lake on the South American continent], and just a few
decades ago in its wet season peak it would stretch almost 70km end to
end and cover an area of 3,000 sq km – the size of a small country like Luxembourg.
Today, the lake is largely a flat expanse of salty mud.
What happened? We’ve looked into this in various scientific studies over
the past few years, and the answer is a mix of both climate factors and
more direct human factors such as too much irrigation.
[…]
Lake Poopó, is found at nearly 3,700 meters above sea level in the
“Altiplano”, a large plateau in the centre of the Andes mountains. It is
an endorheic basin:
nothing flows out, and water is lost only through evaporation. Since
dissolved minerals stick around when water is evaporated, the lake is as
salty as the ocean – in some places considerably saltier.
Nonetheless, some decades ago Poopó was home to large communities of
plants and animals and was a source of resources for the region’s
inhabitants. Nowadays, the situation is drastically different. Water
levels have declined over the past two decades, and eventually the lake dried out entirely at the end of 2015 after the extreme weather phenomenon of El Niño.
This was ecological devastation. Many of the lake’s 200 or so animal
species disappeared, including reptiles, mammals, birds – it hosts a
huge community of flamingos – and of course fish. There was also an
exodus of rural people to the nearest big cities.
Worst affected of all
are the Urus-Muratos, an Indigenous community whose entire way of life was based around fishing Lake Poopó.
But during the past few decades, much of the Desaguadero was diverted
for irrigation, so there was less water left to top up the lake. As
Poopó is unusually shallow,
mostly just a few metres deep, relatively small changes in overall
water volume make a big difference to its surface area. Though the lake
has partially recovered due to above-average precipitation in the years
since 2015, the situation is still dire.
[…]
We found the highest increases in water losses took place in the area
around the city of Oruro, which lies to the north of the lake. This is
an area with lots of human activity, urban growth, new highways, and
where river water has been used for mining and agriculture. Bolivia is
the biggest producer of quinoa in the world and the crop increased by
45.5% from 1980 to 2011. As quinoa became more popular around the world
over the past decade, production increased a further 60% in just five years to meet global demand.
Headline, GIF animation, photos, captions, and text published by: Juan Torres-Battio and Belen Marti-Dardona. “Lake Poopo: why Bolivia’s second largest lake disappeared – and how to bring it back.” The Conversation. 11 January 2021.
I feel like this almost buries the lead…there seems to be a pretty direct correlation between the increased worldwide popularity of quinoa and the drying up of this lake
I will experiment, I will use chemical. I would be evil all night while drinking chemical with robot. I’ll have a robot that’s worth millon dollar. I would go to science fair. I am also more likely to meet monsters
