Blogger Jonathan Wojcik made a post a while back about how sci-fi films tend to depict humans as weak victims and aliens as savage warmongers even though those roles would most likely be reversed should we actually have an encounter with an extra-terrestrial race.
Wojcik’s post references a short story by Terry Bisson called “They’re Made Out of Meat,” which notes several seemingly harmless human characteristics that may seem horrifying to aliens, such as our abilities to chew up other creatures with our teeth and physically move at rapid speeds.
A user who goes by spacepolicepoliceman commented on the post, pointing out many logical reasons as to why humans and not aliens should be perceived as the more intimidating race:
“It seems like in every space-faring science fiction setting there is always a big scary race of aliens that revel in war and conflict, What makes most writers think humans aren’t that species? [...]
We have almost doubled in height in 3000 years, pound for pound human bone is harder than concrete, there are recorded instances of humans falling out of planes or being struck by lightning and surviving with little to no lasting effects.
A form of plant life developed an adaptation to prevent us and other mammals from eating their seed pods by producing a substance that causes pain to creatures with tastebuds, we carefully cultivated them to make them more and more painful to eat and even hold contests.
The lion’s share of our technology is based on harnessing explosions or lethal levels of electricity, hell we have set off fission bombs within our only known sustainable biosphere without knowing what it’d do. In our religious texts our creator came down to visit with us and teach us to be nice to each other and we nailed him to a bit of wood and left him to die.
If you take a step back and view us with alien eyes we are far more likely to be the Space Ork/Krogan/Klingon/etc race than the middle of the road guys we’re usually cast in the role of.”
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