You are the most influential and powerful person in the kingdom. Even the royals walk eggshells around you at risk of offending you. The thing is, you have no idea what you’re doing or how it has gotten to this point, but you’re in way too deep now and you have to keep the lie going to survive.
So I’m a big fan of the idea that humans are “space orcs”, and today it got me thinking about something else.
Human birth is pretty unique among mammals. Not only are our birth canals narrower than standard due to being bipeds, but we have a larger head to body ratio then any other mammal. As a result of this, the only way to fit a baby’s head through a person’s birth canal is for them to be born very early, and massively underdeveloped.
Other mammals are capable of walking and running within the first day of being born, where as a human baby doesn’t even have strong enough neck muscles to hold up their own head.
They can’t see, they can’t crawl, they don’t have the coordination to grab things, and they have a soft spot on the skull that leaves part of the brain incredibly vulnerable. And while an adult can adapt to a range of temperatures, babies have to be constantly monitored to make sure they aren’t chilled or over heating.
Can you imagine you’re an alien, who knows humans as these highly adaptable endurance machines that can eat almost anything and survive tremendous physical pain and injury, and you learn that their young are so fragile. That they emerge from the womb barely able to function biologically.
And suddenly you remember all those humans on your crew who get attached little creatures. The toughest, burliest people who will coo and coddle over fluffy little cats and call lizards babies. And you realise that their whole species developed to care for these tiny, vulnerable, defenceless babies, and that kind of attachment tends to spill over a little.
And now you understand that old adage, that the most dangerous humans are the ones whose young are in danger. Because if they’re going to stand a chance at surviving until adulthood then human parents have to be willing to defend their children with their lives, and that is exactly what they do.
Holy crap. That means that we’re like pouchless marsupials (though not as extreme in the underdeveloped infant department).
It fits that we’re called Space Australians.
OKay this is my favourite response so far
To be fair, the mammals “born able to run within hours” are the terrestrial ungulate mammals. They are newcomers and parvenus and they die when they step on a bee. They only showed up when grasslands became common, the meme-loving fucks - they’re all matcha lattes and YEET. Like, okay, we get it, hoofed ungulates: you’re vegan, you really like synthpop, you’ve “discovered” a “new” continent, you ran fifteen miles this morning, your baby walked within eight hours of birth, sure. Fine. You’re cute, diversity is important, you can stay. We need something to eat, after all.
But ungulate mammals are REALLY poor representation of Mammalia.The ancestral Mammal, rodentlike, that gave rise to Placentals and Marsupials, would have been more like - well, more like today’s Placentals and Marsupials. More like us. More like badgers and dogs and monkeys and hamsters. Born blind and naked, and hidden discreetly from polite society, until the horrible alien thing looks more like a Real Animal.
Consider the mouse: born completely naked, hairless, blind, deaf, helpless, only able to drag itself to a nipple with terrific effort. Consider the cat: born as a thinly furred sausage with eyes and ears glued shut for weeks. Consider the newborn dog. Big cats. Rats. Bears. Squirrels. Sure, consider the marsupials; also, weasels and rabbits and porcupines and pangolins. All the mammals that aren’t the bloody ungulates.
Rodents are born practically fetal, their limbs mere buds, their skin see-through, their eyes bulging in their transparent skulls. Their bones aren’t even opaque! You can see their dark livers, the white milk in their bellies! Their eyelids are welded shut, their heads too large to raise. They are a lot more alien than a human baby - a liminal animal indeed. Certainly, rodents grow quickly, because they die so young. Their helpless childhood is still proportionately a large chunk of their life - nearly the same proportion as ours, actually. But they are born like uncooked eggs. I would add a picture of a newborn rat pup here, but young and impressionable children read this blog.
And we are not the weakest of the Furry Mammal clan, if we zoom out. It takes about two weeks for a kitten to open their eyes. It takes about four weeks for their hearing to come online. This is because these senses are still developing. They’re born undercooked, too!
By contrast with many mammals, human babies come out with their senses active (unless that specific baby is blind or deaf or has another sensory disability)*. It takes a while for human babies to focus their eyes, because we usually have a lot of apps installed (color vision, facial recognition) that take forever to boot up the first time, and focusing requires muscle control - but human babies are goggling at the world with open eyes, and processing what they see, as soon as they come out. Human babies come out able to hear, if hearing is included with that specific baby. We are born able to record and process sensory information, where our other mammalian cousins can’t.
I mean, I am so guilty of this trope too, I love it to pieces and use it all the time. Even more hypocritically, I personally agree with the “Fourth Trimester” theory, which is that human babies need about three months to adjust themselves to life outside the womb. Thus, the first three months are the “Fourth Trimester,” where you just carry the baby around, and it boggles helplessly at the world and goes “ugh!!” That is the part that makes sense when you look at the birth canal etc, and you go “oh, we’re so undeveloped,” and you mope because you can’t see yourself ever getting your life back. But the first three months is only a small piece of the longer story of human babyhood, and the “weak, helpless” stage is not particularly unusual among our mammalian family. It just seems so terribly long because we compare it to horses and rats, which is unfair on everyone. And at some point we get our lives back, and can’t remember where the time went. And it isn’t as bad as it could be. I mean, we can usually shit on our own. So that’s something!
No, it really is something. Many baby mammals cannot excrete on their own. Cats, for example; the mama cat must lick certain areas of the baby to stimulate it to poo and pee. They can’t do it by themselves. Mama cat must lick them religiously, to make their bowels and bladder work, or the waste will back up and the kitten/cub will die. This is relatively common among the Furry Mammals. Every kitten on Earth had to be forcibly poo’ed for the first three weeks of its life. Every tiger took six weeks (!!) before it could pee by itself. And that’s just the felids. Don’t talk to me about werewolf cubs unless you’re ready to make the decision on whether they need diapers, you cowards.
Humans, though, are born perfectly capable of shitting by ourselves. Which is rather nice, when you consider the alternative.
So if you take us in context of the other baffling and amazing animals on Earth, we are not really particularly “undeveloped,” taken as a whole. Not particularly in comparison to our cousins, whom an alien would find just as strange and foreign. We humans are simply hitting milestones at our own pace - sometimes faster, sometimes slower, always legitimate, always because an ancestor dodged death once by doing something slightly different. Our infants are for carrying in our arms, so it doesn’t matter that they can’t hold their heads up - but they are born shitting, and boggling with their enormous eyes.
Anyway, aliens would probably regard all this nonsense in the same way as the dinosaurs did - “Lord, what fools these mammals be,” at first, and then “OH FUCK THE MAMMALS DID WHAT?”
“Parenting is important,” reply the badgers and the bears and the humans, aggressively cuddling something they call a baby, although they might be taking the piss: “Really, we will bond with and nurture ANYTHING that meets our vague criteria. Isn’t cuteness just the best thing you’ve ever seen? Don’t your hormones just SQUISH when you see something with specific proportions? You know what’s inherently rewarding? HOLDING SMALL THINGS AND MAKING A SOUND ABOUT IT.”
“Erm, I guess?” replies the alien or the dinosaur. “I guess… I guess your baby…. thing…. is very …. important? To you??”
“YES I LOVE IT A LOT”
“I …. see that you do. It’s … cute.”
“Cuteness is a powerful weapon,” the mammal says seriously. “Oh, also? This is our planet now.”
* Many humans are born without the ability to hear, see, see in color, eliminate, socialize, process sensory information, etc. Or they may lose these abilities later. They are valid, human and loved. These “space Australian” posts are about generalising humans, so I generalise here, but I don’t want to make anyone feel bad.
2018 post I rediscovered by trying to find a different post. I appreciate how I did actually do the math - it wasn’t available anywhere, and nobody else on the internet seemed to have pointed it out anywhere, so I had to do MATH for you people - to find out that mice spend a similar proportion of their lives in “helpless babyhood” as we do. That was MATH. WHERE are my citations
I actually like that all media is now created to be thoughtlessly consumed within a single alloted month before it’s destroyed by business guys whose stated favourite book is a dingy unread copy of The Art of War they left on their bedside to “reference”. it’s cool that everything is just one middling budget twelve episode season and half of it is dropped all at once directly onto streaming services so you have to sit down for six miserable hours to watch it in the most antisocial way possible. this is probably how art was meant to be consumed. this is how humans best process things, like death.
I let it all pass over me like a limp breeze. did I see the new show? oh no, and I suppose I will not, but that’s okay because I don’t feel much of anything at all about it. [pleasantly] I don’t feel much of anything at all.
messed up seed fact of the day is that even the ability for a ‘crop’ of plants to come up and flower and make fruit all at once is bred for. if you’re just some seed buried in wild uncolonized woods or prairie there is no such thing as a hard set emergence time even if all the other plants are doing it. it’s just when the vibes are correct and for some native plants that takes legitimately years and multiple winters. or you could do the opposite and try to grow all at once with everyone else right away in the first spring if it suits you but still, no guarantees. no point to this post it just weighs on me heavily
don’t know what you’re talking about specifically but my understanding of US agricultural policy in general is that being a farmer in capitalism sucks and has since colonization and for a long time the US government tried to make it suck less with subsidies which sometimes work (because people get paid predictably regardless of demand and its less like gambling with crops) but sometimes go over really badly (because then too many people grow it and the price per bushel goes down and then government has too much corn) and then a couple times they got rid of all the subsides and related regulations and that REALLY didnt work (because then the price just crashed hard and with nothing to compensate them a bunch of farmers, many of whom were in debt for other farming-related reasons, couldnt get paid and actually had to foreclose their farms, which accelerated the long-standing trend of farms getting foreclosed on and then being bought out by bigger farms that then ended up running INSANE multi million dollar operations, sometimes even on farms in other states where the owners do not live, in communities they do not contribute to) and they had to backpedal on it and then eventually they just started on the current system where you simply pass a farm bill every 10-12 years instead of yearly or biyearly and that way you simply dont have to think about it, and then when it is election time you go stand by a cornfield for a while for tv. it does not fix the huge enormous farms buying out smaller farms problem or any of the complicated related problems but it DOES put it off for longer which is more important.
sometimes also you (USAID for instance) can give the too-much-corn you have from farm subsidies to a foreign country as a ‘gift’ and say youre just being a helpful little guy, but in the process of doing so undercut the local farmers in that country because they cant compete with free stuff but that’s cool because then the foreign country can’t really survive as well without US agricultural aid and you can manipulate them to do imperialism better AND you have more demand for the corn which might raise the price per bushel in the US. also sometimes the corn is fed to livestock en masse because the meat is worth more and sometimes its made into gas or high fructose corn syrup, and sometimes the price is so low per bushel that the insurance on the field is worth more than the actual corn.
but. i CANNOT stress enough that the most important thing about corn is that you can stand next to it on tv and if you cant do that, maybe you can stand next to a guy who is around it a lot and say you are helping him.
in my relatively uneducated opinion the most epic way to solve this complex multi-century interdisciplinary push and pull of supply and demand would be to just pay farmers a salary through the state since youre already paying out massive state subsidies for crops you dont need anyway and the farmers are performing a vital service and that way you can guarantee people a consistent salary AND control how much of each thing gets planted so you dont have a massive stockpile at all times AND you reward individual people instead of paying out large amounts of money to whatever massive operation sells the most corn by virtue of being big, but if you dont want to do that then the second best thing is to just pass another mediocre farm bill whos inflexible 10-ish year lifespan makes it impossible for it to respond well to changes in market demand and that way you can just put off making tough decisions and instead stand next to a guy and a cornfield on tv again. which as we have covered is the most important part of american agriculture
i arrive at the gay bar in full butch getup and i look like super hot like trust me and i start buying chocolate milk for the femmes at the bar…..between my striking good looks and my generosity concerning tasteful dairy products i have impressed them greatly and after an hour of chatting I make my move. i reach into my pocket and remove a large, gorgeous lichen affixed to a piece of bark from its protective herbarium packet that I have concealed in my pants pocket. “it’s a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and an algae,” i begin,
you can improve literally any word by adding “girl” in front of it btw. girlscared. girlnormal. girlweird. girlsilly. etc. girl can be such a beautiful focal point of anyone’s vocabulary
the trick is though you can ALSO improve literally any word by adding girl behind it. scaredgirl. normalgirl. weirdgirl. sillygirl. girl can be such a beautiful focal point of ANYONES vocabulary
hey um chuckles nervously. what the fuck are they doing over on tiktok
coming soon : 5 days of unbearable heat, 1 day of unpleasant but bearable heat followed immediately by an INSANE 10°C drop in a single day. holy fuck. the climate has truly gone to shits
Literally that one ep of transformers prime where optimus fights nemesis prime in the middle of some government facility in nevada
I love when I make shit up to be funny and then actually I’m a prophet gifted by apollo
Not just that but he DID fight himself in the og cartoon! Like literally just another him. I think it also happened twice where one was controlled telepathically by megatron and the other was just starscream
we justifiably give Biden a lot of shit but I think “at least 3” is the funniest possible response to some right wing dipshit asking you how many genders there are
ALT
