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Federation "science" is awesome

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Ted Nolan <tednolan>

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Mar 23, 2021, 11:24:21 PM3/23/21
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Just ran across this on a random comment thread (it's already been
repackaged from several other comment threads apparently):

=====


Prokopetz: Random Headcanon:

That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre
malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn't just an artefact
of the television serial format. Rather, it's because the Federation
as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles, tooling around
in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they don't really
understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight them, because
they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit space-magic
countermeasures out of their arses - but they're as likely as not
to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the process.
All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and
accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn't actually
happen to anyone else; it's literally just Federation vessels that
go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular
basis.

Getting a link to a whole thread on Tumblr seems to be an impossibility,
but these are some amusing replies:

So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc
Brown. Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally
don't realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They're just
like "yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in
my experience".

...
Vulcan Science Academy: Why do you need another warp core Humans:
We're going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as
fast

VSA: Last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to
see if the sun would go twice as fast

Humans: Hahaha yeah

Humans: It did tho

VSA: IT EXPLODED

Humans: It exploded twice as fast

...
Klingons: Okay we don't get it
Vulcan Science Academy: Get what

Klingons: You Vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you're also
tougher, stronger, and smarter than Humans in every single way

Klingons: Why do you let them run your Federation

Vulcan Science Academy: Look

Vulcan Science Academy: This is a species where if you give them
two warp cores they don't do experiments on one and save the other
for if the first one blows up

Vulcan Science Academy: This is a species where if you give them
two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all
three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where
humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system,
fight everyone in it because they're offended by that, steal their
warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then
try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their
initial scientific experiment was for and they didn't want to waste
a trip.

Vulcan Science Academy: They did that last week. We have the write-up
right here. it's getting published in about six hundred scientific
journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how
many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has
just called into question. Also, they did turn that sun into a
torus, and no one actually knows how.

Vulcan Science Academy: This is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.

Klingons: .... Can we be a part of your Federation

...
Let's talk about the USS Fucking Pegasus, testbed for the first
Starfleet cloaking device. Here we have a handful of humans working
in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation of a treaty
with the Romulans. They're playing catchup trying to develop a
technology other species have had for a century. And what do they
do? Do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely,
just see if they can match what other species have? Nope. They
decide, hey, while we're at it, while we're building our very first
one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, let's
see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we
can fly through planets while we're invisible. "But why" said the
one Vulcan in the room.

"Because that would fucking rule" said the Humans, high-fiving each
other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.

...
Humans get mildly offended by the way they are presented in non-human
media. Like: "Guys, we totally wouldn't do that!" But this always
fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say:
"You totally did."

"That was ONE TIME."

There's that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing
them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented
powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about
electricity.

And human historians go, "Oh, uh, this is historically accurate,
but also kind of boring."

...
But when the Vulcans made first contact with Earth - "what the hell
is that insane thing these aliens here have built, let's go look
at it" - humans didn't look at them as an enemy or a resource or
even an asset. No, the very first time humans met Vulcans, they
tried to do the Vulcan hand thingy and they couldn't do it so they
just offered a handshake, and then said "let's get drunk and party."
THIS IS ACTUAL LITERAL CANON, REMEMBER. Further in this vein:

I will never be over the fact that during first contact a human
offered their hand to a vulcan and the vulcan was just like "wow
humans are fucking wild" and took it

Note: Vulcan hand / finger touching is a sex thing.

...
My headcanon for startrek is that humans look, to vulcans, like a
dog frathouse. Like signing on to a human ship is exactly that
thrillingly loud and frustrating and fast and stupid and fun. The
humans are going to dash off to a new sector to see if there are
friends there and then they will jump up and down with delight and
stuff their faces up against their new friends' genital array. The
humans are going to bark for ten minutes at a rock. The humans want
to chase things they can't possibly catch just because they like
running around. The humans are madly passionate about their arbitrary
group identities. The humans can be divided into new arbitrary group
identities which they will then be passionate about. The humans
want to stick their heads out of the window of their starship and
go 'wheee!'. If you step on a human's paw they will act like you
just killed them for about thirty seconds and then want more headpats.
The humans can be immediately distracted from crucial duties by the
appearance of a small animal. If you howl all the humans in earshot
will howl louder just to show off. A human just humped your leg.
'Don't make it weird bro' the human says. Later the human will dig
a weird bug out of the ground and eat it.
--
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..

pete...@gmail.com

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Mar 23, 2021, 11:59:11 PM3/23/21
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This is an example of a fun little sub genre now called HFY, or "Humanity F*ck Yeah!",
which posits that humans are, compared to most civilized aliens, insanely durable
and adventurous. It posits that Earth is, on a Galactic scale, a Deathworld, and the
existence of a sapient species there is inconceivable.

A lot of this is fan fiction, but Campbell loved this stuff, and it's still popular.

Here's another thread of it:

https://old.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/69s1ki/text_humans_are_weird_found_on_tumblr/

Pt

Robert Carnegie

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Mar 24, 2021, 4:58:58 AM3/24/21
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I like "distracted by the appearance of a small animal"
which also is canon. Less keen about "stuff their faces
up against their new friends' genital array", but who
knows anyway.
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