The Universe

In short, by getting really fricking lucky.

Andromeda isn’t really in that plane.

That means that not only did Nine get a boost to galactic escape velocity, Nine’s orbit changed planes. In typical spaceflight, plane change maneuvers are really expensive in energy expended. But compared to achieving the local galactic escape velocity of roughly 537 km/s, they’re pretty cheap.

Pioneer had no maneuvering fuel, nor an engine to burn it with.

When Pioneer went offline in May 1983, I’m willing to bet a day’s convention time in a Nine cosplay* that Nine wasn’t near any object large enough to give it that gravitational slingshot.

That means it got pulled or it got pushed, and getting pushed by being hit with something seems most likely.

What we need to disprove the gravitational-slingshot encounter:

orbital locations of Earth, Venus, and Pioneer 9 during May of 1983

actual date of last transmission received from Pioneer 9

actual date of last transmission attempt to/from Pioneer 9

The Lobster Nebula - NGC6357

Hallucigenia was about an inch long (most life back then was tiny, they were only a few eras removed from being single celled after all) and it had sixteen clawed legs, hard spines coming out of its back, and a wicked tentacle neckbeard. 

Opabinia was between two to three inches long and it had thirty fins along the side of its body, along with five mushroom shaped eyes on top of its head. By far though, its most interesting feature was its strange proboscis. Like a Dr. Moreau style mashup of an elephant and a lobster, the long nose terminated in a large claw that it used to grab prey and bring it to its backward facing mouth.

Finally, this is wiwaxia. This danger-artichoke was a two inch long armored slug-like creature with no head. In fact, its actual body was largely just its one massive foot. 

But how could you not mention my favorite one?  

Meet anomalocaris:

Its name means “strange shrimp”.  This is because it was first identified via its mandibles, which looked like a weird shrimp.  Later, someone realized “oh wait no all these parts we thought were different animals were actually the same one”.  The most beautiful origin story, in my opinion.  Anomalocaris was one of the first predators ever, and is my beautiful strange son.  Here’s what the mouthparts look like.

Yep.  That’s definitely a strange shrimp.

Also, if you want other weird-ass things to look at, look up things from the Ediacaran (aka before the Cambrian).  They’re so damn strange that they have their own phylum, Vendobionta.  They have forms of symmetry that we literally have never seen in anything else.  They look like plants but are animals.  I love them and they are all my children.

This just in, an Ivy League School is a “community college” if you’re friendly to The Gayz.

and secondly (ie, what I actually meant in the above) IT ALL TURNS TO GOO ANYWAY so the brain along with the rest of the internal organs is dissolved and remade

….

……

…… AND YET THEY REMEMBER THE THING 

and we make boggling faces.

Because one time the professor I was interning for got punched in the face by another professor, because mine got the funding, and told the other professor his theory was stupid.

This same professor told me to throw rocks to scare the “stupid fucking crabs” into moving so we could count them properly.

Two professors hiding around a corner and snickering, “Shhh, here she comes!” While a female professor approached and, when she finally found them, she proceeded to scream while pointing from one to the other, “You! I called your office but you weren’t there! So I tried to call YOUR office to figure out where HE was but YOU weren’t there!”

Two grad students standing outside a closed and locked door yelling, “Come out of the damn office. You haven’t left for days. If you didn’t have a couch in there I’d be concerned as to where you were sleeping!”

A religious studies professor apologizing for being late to class because, “security stopped me because I’m dressed like a hobbit”

Watched a professor snort the results of my experiment to determine if I had the right final compound.

Two archeology professors toss priceless fossilized teeth back and forth in an attempt to figure out who is smarter by “guessing the type of tooth and species of animal before it lands”

Multiple fully degreed individuals throw dry ice at one another in an attempt to be first to use the lab/get that piece of equipment/or change the iPod song.

A genetics professor build furniture out of stacks of paper and planks of wood because she is that far behind in grading papers/responding. One of the impromptu furniture pieces housed a fish tank.

- Same professor hung a bat from her headlamp and wore it as a decoration for an entire night. 

- A whole swarm of older women - and these are women with PhDs and world-renown bat experts, the bigwigs - all, to a woman, go to the formal charity dinner at an international research symposium in Toronto in late October dressed in skimpy Batgirl costumes. Because Halloween was that weekend, you see.

- At a different conference, a professor get blackout drunk and pass out on the side of the road. 

- “Yeah, we have to say we did it properly for the grant but to be really honest, Miracle-gro works better.”

More behind the scenes on Sherlock Series 1 [x x] . Not sure what Martin’s doing with his face in the 2nd one though! 

I want to see a sci fi universe where we’re actually considered one of the more hideous and terrifying species.

How do we know our saliva and skin oils wouldn’t be ultra-corrosive to most other sapient races? What if we actually have the strongest vocal chords and can paralyze or kill the inhabitants of other worlds just by screaming at them? What if most sentient life in the universe turns out to be vegetable-like and lives in fear of us rare “animal” races who can move so quickly and chew shit up with our teeth?

(The only other animal that can sort of keep up with us? Dogs. That’s why we use them for hunting. And even then, it’s only “sort of”.)

Now extrapolate that to a galaxy in which most sapient life did not evolve from hyper-specialised pursuit predators:

Our strength and speed is nothing to write home about, but we don’t need to overpower or outrun you. We just need to outlast you - and by any other species’ standards, we just plain don’t get tired.

Where a simple broken leg will cause most species to go into shock and die, we can recover from virtually any injury that’s not immediately fatal. Even traumatic dismemberment isn’t necessarily a career-ending injury for a human.

We heal from injuries with extreme rapidity, recovering in weeks from wounds that would take others months or years to heal. The results aren’t pretty - humans have hyperactive scar tissue, among our other survival-oriented traits - but they’re highly functional.

Speaking of scarring, look at our medical science. We developed surgery centuries before developing even the most rudimentary anesthetics or life support. In extermis, humans have been known to perform surgery on themselves - and survive. Thanks to our extreme heartiness, we regard as routine medical procedures what most other species would regard as inventive forms of murder. We even perform radical surgery on ourselves for purely cosmetic reasons.

We formed cohabitative relationships with tiny mammals and insects we keep at bay from bothering us by death, often using little analouge traps. 

We expose ourselves to potentially lethal solar radiation in the pursuit of darkening our skin. 

We risk hearing loss for the opportunity to see our favorite musicians live. 

We have a game where two people get into an enclosed area and hit each other until time runs out/one of them pass out

We willingly jump out of planes with only a flimsy piece of cloth to prevent us from splattering against the ground. 

Our response to natural disasters is to just rebuild our buildings in the exact same places. 

We climb mountains and risk freezing to death for bragging rights

We invented dogs. We took our one time predators and completely domesticated them. 

On a planet full of lions, tigers and bears, we managed to advance further and faster than any other species on the planet. 

Breeding does not kill them. A single human can mate dozens or hundreds of times in a lifetime. They often do so as recreation. Xenobiology team six believes they do not have a mating season but this is too strange to be true.

Their appendages are not designed for hitting, so they developed special training to make them very good at hitting anyhow. 

The proteins making up their bodies are toxic and cause prion disease. Do not touch anything humans have touched. Do not consume earth foods. Fire does not adequately remove this contamination.

Humans perceive sixteen times the colors we do. Do not hide in bushes or vines from humans. They can distinguish your pelt from the foliage with ease.

We tried venting waste gas into the tunnels to kill the humans when they attacked. Turns out they breathe it. 

Everything on their planet came from a single biological strain. They developed comprehensive genetics BEFORE they developed space travel. 

Much facts 

Humans seem to have a propensity for eating things that are poisonous to a lot of other animals, and it’s almost like we develop a symbiotic relationship with these foods and spices:

garlic and onions. these kill bacteria and yet we eat them in so many different cultures around the globe.  garlic and onions are poisonous to cats and dogs.

tea and coffee, caffeine kills insects but it energizes us, also the polyphenols in tea kill a lot of bacteria, but they seem to do so selectively, so like when we drink tea it makes our gut more hospitable to the bacteria that benefit us but kills off a lot of other bacteria. oh chocolate too, poisonous to a lot of animals.