all this stuff about "humanity is the X species" doesn't work for me taken as a conclusion about humanity because we simply do not have any other hnau to compare ourselves with
take any direction and you can imagine an alien species that is a bit in that direction from humans, and call humans the species embodying the opposite of that
yeah so the posts where this kind of makes sense are the ones that are space opera worldbuilding ideas. Like they're explicitly proposing, what if we discovered alien species and they were less X than humans.
one I remember that didn't invoke aliens was saying like, humans are the X species, and then said at the end, if you don't do this you're "broken". So the comparison really was within humans, some are more "human" than others. A dirty trick imo.
And that made me kind of suspicious of the worldbuilding posts. How do you treat the humans who are more like aliens?
I liked the post I made back when where we were the only sexually reproducing spacefaring species; our diversity encompassed and exceeded all others’ to a degree they found unsettling and threatening, because they were all whiptail lizards who got along p well within their sister-lines AND ascribed their rise to space to the fitness of their prevailing ‘type’. The different aliens were happy to accept each other, but had a lot of trouble accepting humans beyond specific, famously acceptable humans. I was trying to come up with a truly incomprehensible racism and wound up with “meritocratic phrenology” since to the aliens there would be no “eu” genics, all remixes and recombinations would be tragic and bad. Individual humans could be fine but their children would be uniformly deviant abominations. And then even when you clone us our clones sort of suck (nature vs nurture, etc)…
They’d be charmed and relieved by twins I suppose.
Gods, you could write SUCH hilarious scenes with this where all the aliens meet human babies and are just like "D:> D:> D:>" thinking they're weird reproduction-mutants XD XD
Also I don't actl think the sitch you're suggesting is THAT out there? Like: I seem to recall you once(might have been on discord instead of here) bringing up the accurate point that it'd be easier to send robot-ships equipped with cloning/artificial-womb facilities to explore space, creating "crew" if and when they need it/find a suitable environment for human habitation, and one could easily imagine THAT being the general strategy for space exploration?
So, by the time Humans encounter these other species, even the ones who DID have a sexually reproducing past, they've long ago shifted to artificial reproduction+Expedited Aging/Excised Adolescent Incapacity as the culturally acceptable method for reproduction, and they just find the whole live-birth thing various forms of unsightly. Some of them probably see it as some Sick Kink Thing like "Little BABIES running around??? UGH! I did NOT sign up to be a part in your SCENE you freak >:( >:(" XD