the most sublime arrogance of humanity is our insistence that among all sentient species in the universe we alone are exceptional in our self-loathing, narcissistic levels of guilt and bottomless talent for fucking uphttps://twitter.com/Kalshann/status/1218048820560519169 …
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Replying to @Nymphomachy
I told you about that old SF story The Stupid Little Boy with a grimdark take on this?
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
In a nutshell the title is about how if you took the world's greatest genius and put them on an island somewhere they'd have no way of knowing they weren't stupid They would have no basis for comparison and think only about all the things they don't know
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
And the story is just a human ambassador who's been chosen to speak to a coalition of alien species that's made first contact with us, talking about how he's always dreamed of meeting beings more advanced than us that can help us out of our benighted hatred and irrationality
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
And the big reveal the alien meeting with him drops on him is that he's wrong The aliens are worse in every way No sapient species has survived as long for as unbroken a history as human beings The evidence is almost all sapient species kill themselves as soon as they can
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Earth is notable not for how much natural bounty we had but how little The only species that make up the coalition are the few that started with such fecundity and wealth they still exist after apocalyptically nuking themselves over and over again
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
And even then, their coalition only exists after they were locked in a war of annihilation against each other and then their last second reprieve was discovering Earth, which pushed them all into a truce to discover our secret We ARE the utopian paradise of the galaxy
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
It's kind of double subversive, because it's exactly the kind of self regarding take shallow rah-rah humanity SF had, only from the POV of someone aware how fucked up that would actually be
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
You kind of had this idea with Alien Nation, where most of the action on Earth was about humans being asshole racists to the Newcomers And at one point the guy asks "I can't blame you for having a low opinion of our species looking at the first impression we made"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
And the response is this touching thing "Far from it, there is little our people find more admirable than your people's ideals Which is what makes it particularly disappointing when you fail to live up to them"
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And we eventually learn that the Newcomers' society is this horrifying dystopian slave empire, and they regard Earth as a miraculous utopian refuge from it, and they've all sworn never to talk about it so humans will never try to find their homeworld
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Same plot as Steven Universe in fact
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Alien Nation is one of those eighties movies I never got my chance to sit down and actually watch
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