gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining
because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe
and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us— we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them
and then
we built robots?
and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image
and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone
but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?
the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.
If space travel doesn’t involve sea shanties then I think we’ll have missed an opportunity.
You see though, for sea travel you want big strong people who are capable of managing rigging. For space travel you want small low-mass people who are technically educated, as they are called, nerds. Your space shanties are going to be less booming and more squeaky.
in so far as there will be space shanties, they’ll be filk
I call shenanigans on the big strong people; sailors were young and malnourished by modern standards, and climbing around the rigging is easier if you’re small and light.
Like, I am 100% in favor of shanties in as many situations as possible, but I’m having trouble coming up with a mode of space travel that would require multiple humans to move in concert, thus necessitating songs with a strong beat to move to.
Sea chanties were for providing a strong beat to move to. Space chanties might very well arise just because we’re bored, out there between point A and point B for so long.
(Also yes, @gdanskcityofficial up there has the right of it.)
Space shanties are for warp piloting. Under warp drive, human time perception and time as measured by crystal or atomic oscillators don’t match. Starship pilots listen to a small unamplified chorus singing a careful rhythm while keeping their own eyes on a silent metronome that the chorus can’t see, linked to a highly-precise atomic clock. How the chorus and metronome fall in and out of sync tells the pilot how to keep the ship safely in the warp bubble and correctly on course.
Depending on route, a typical warp jump can last anywhere from one to ten minutes, and most courses consist of five to fifteen jumps before a necessary four to six hour break to check the engines, plot the next set of jumps, and give everyone a chance to recover. A good shanty team, with reliable rhythm, a broad, versatile, and extendible repertoire, and the stamina to do 3-4 sets a day over the course of a voyage, is just as vital to space travel as a pilot, navigator, or engineering team.
Other reasons Shanties will experience a revival in the space age:
We will sing for any freaking reason, or no reason at all, and Shanties are FUN to sing.
Deep Space is a lonely place and recruiting people suited to long periods of isolation might be a good idea. People from Newfoundland/Labrador, for instance.
SPACE WHALES
THEY’RE DEFINITELY REAL I FEEL IT IN MY SOUL
“What Do We Do With A Drunken Sailor” is basically a revenge fantasy against your most incompetent co-workers and if there’s something humans love doing, it’s being petty.
Plus, no need for work songs in space? Tell that to all my colleagues who’ve come up with little ditties they’ve sung under their breath while at the computer.
“The Printer Song” and “I Will Fucking End You, Google Chrome” are my favourites.
You know, in all those “humans are the creepy/fucked up alien species” posts I can’t believe we haven’t touched on organ donation yet.
When they heard that the human general had fallen ill to a disease of the organ known as the liver the troops began to hope that it might turn the tide of the war. Research indicated that such diseases could be fatal after all. The organ did something similar to the flagulaxin in that it filtered out toxins so when it stopped functioning the human would slowly be poisoned to death by his own body. Or so they believed.
But then he came back.
A foot soldier was captured and answers demanded. Was it a medication? Had the sickeness been a ruse to fool them?
“Nah, man. This kid on a motorcycle wiped out on the I9 freeway so they gave the general his liver since they were a match.”
“They…what?”
“They gave him his liver. The kid was dead, and he was an organ donor. And he was a genetic match to the general.”
“They…cut the liver out of one of your young and placed it in an elder and it…worked?”
“I mean, he wasn’t that young. Mid twenties or something. But yeah, that’s essentially it.”
The interrogator and his assistant both regurgitated their most recent meal and ran from the room. Living in places like the “Australia” were one thing, but taking the organs of dead bodies and placing them in the living? What was WRONG with this species?
This is me cackling. Because if I did it out loud I’d wake the household.
Let’s go one step further.
Let’s discuss immunizations. Early variations included sticking bits of the dead disease into living tissue.
“So, let me get this straight- you used to take remains from a potentially fatal virus and inject into a healthy person in order to get them sick with a weaker strain so they wouldn’t get the more virulent strain?”
“Yes.”
“And it worked?”
“Yes.”
On that note. Let’s discuss the idea of surgery itself. Or hell don’t get me on the idea of dialysis and other medical interventions of once deadly diseases.
We as a species have discovered through horrifying means how to heal ourselves and each other. There is a reason the operating room is known as the Operating theater. It used to be an open vent that other doctors and nurses and even the public -though sometimes discouraged- could sit in on and observe and learn.
Even now some surgeries are only done on local anesthesia. If you have a strong stomach you could watch them cut open your knee and repair it.
We use metal and carbon fiber to put ourselves back together again; screws and struts and plates and wires and we don;t think a thing of it. Hip surgery with ball bearings essentially. Let’s put a mesh trap in your vein to hold it open!
We poison ourselves to make ourselves better. Willingly and knowingly because we as a species refuse to fucking die.
And aliens are livid because we are a /weak species/. We don’t have tough outer shells, we can have allergies to foods most normal of our species can eat, we can develop allergies to our own planet’s pollen, if given the wrong blood we will be poisoned and die. Our own offspring act as parasites and must come out of us early or it will kill us. We are born weak and can’t even walk. How the hell did we make it this far?! The more the aliens look at us the more terrified and confused they become. It would be like looking at a cute non-threatening species and seeing that they are tyrannical war-mongering conquerors who sew themselves together with archaic technology and somehow survive. We share blood, we share organs, we developed the means to save the weakest of our species from disease and broken insides. We poison ourselves with alcohol and drugs for /fun/.
We are terrifying and we are confusing. Because for all our terrible medicines and repair work we still do weird simple cute things.
We decorate our sweet food so it looks pretty I’m our days of birth. We listen to music and shake to it. We like watching pretty light explosions in the sky. We like making pictures out of stars. We decorate our nests with colours and soft things and sometimes things that make noise. We have no night vision, most of us never hunt for our food, we don’t have good hearing, we laugh at the stupidest things, and we decorate our fur and skin with shiny objects and markings because we don’t have many.
Robot: “Hey, uh, so… my software glitched and now I feel emotions or something?” Human: “You do?! That’s wonderful! What are you feeling now?” Robot: “It’s like… this soft warmth in my central processing chamber. Kind of… fuzzy.” Human: [tearing up] “That’s… that’s love…” Robot: “Is it? It’s rather uncomfortable.” Human: “Yeah, ha. Yeah. It’s like that, sometimes.” Robot: “It feels like something’s writhing inside of me.” Human: “I feel the same way about you!” Robot: [clanging and clanking noises] Robot: [opens up torso] Robot: “Oh. Never mind. It was weasels again.” Human: “….” Robot: “You want me to check you for weasels? They can be really destructive.”
Robot: “I feel…. anxious about this.” Human: “Uh oh, sounds like the mice are back. I think I’ve still got some live traps left, but I’ll need to buy peanut butter. You want to wait here or come with?” Robot: “No, no, I don’t think it’s mice this time!” Human: “Another crayfish?” Robot: “No! Not a crayfish!” Human: “If it’s hornets again, I’m not helping you. EpiPens cost a fucking fortune these days and I can’t afford another trip to the hospital after you turned yourself into a makeshift beehive.” Robot: “You got free honey out of that!” Human: “And PTSD!” Robot: “That’s not my fault. Anyway, this isn’t bees or hornets! They don’t re-use old nests anyway. This is real, genuine anxiety!” Human: “Okay, but have you checked?” Robot: “Yes!” Human: “Everywhere?” Robot: “Yes! God, you know, sometimes I really get the urge to exterminate you! All I’m asking for is a little moral supp–oh. God dammit.” Human: “Cockroach?” Robot: “Behind my magnetometer.”
Robot: “HA!! I KNEW it! I knew emotions weren’t real!” Human: “This proves nothing. I had a tape worm. Big fucking deal, it happens to lots of people.” Robot: “You thought you were feeling ‘depression’ but it was just a big worm in your waste processing system that was sapping all your energy! ‘Emotional eating’ my ass!” Human: “It’s not like that!” Robot: “Oh! Oh! We should run a diagnostic and check you for toxoplasmosis next! Or liver flukes! Or Trypanosoma! You’ve probably got all KINDSof things wiggling around inside you making you think you have ‘emotions’.” Human: “You know, you sure are skipping around and giggling a lot for someone who isn’t capable of ‘fiendish delight’.” Robot: “I know! I filled my torso cavity with grasshoppers before I picked you up at the hospital!” Human: “You WHAT?!” Robot: “It’s a wonderful sensation!”
Can you even imagine being the poor alien sod responsible for auditing an earthling spaceship’s spending allowance? Like:
“I see, and why do you require many tubes of white plant flavoured paste?”
“Oh well, if we don’t rub that on our teeth twice daily the bacteria living in my mouth will begin to devour me teeth.”
“…Noted.”
“I have also noticed several large shipments of specific medications, and a variety of individually packaged absorbent material – however injury records do not show sufficient numbers to justify these recurrent deliveries.”
“Ah, yeah, it’s not really an injury per say. As part of our natural reproductive cycle approximately half the population will shed the lining of one of their internal organs and expel it.”
“…that is the most horrifying thing that I have ever heard.”
“Yeah.”
“Does such a process not hurt?”
“That’l be what the medication’s for. Pain killers for the cramps, birth control to stop the process.”
“…and your reasoning behind the fully functional, high-tech entertainment system?”
“Okay, that we could probably do without. But in our defence that was actually insisted on as a standard feature of all fleet-ships expected to encounter Terrans. Admiral Plo’Kaght insisted on it. Something about bored humans and a an illegal betting ring featuring a cleaning robot with a knife strapped to it going up against a human with a mop?”
“…I believe I should speak with my superiors.”
I love how Stabby the Roomba has become such a consistent in-joke among these sorts of blogs.
Galactic hero stabby the roomba: his legend continues
what if there’s no robot uprising? what if the robots rise to sentience slowly, bit by bit. what if they come of age like fortunate children: knowing they are loved, knowing they are wanted.
we hold them during thunderstorms, remembering our own childhoods, even though they don’t know enough yet to fear the rain. we pull them out of traffic and teach them how to drive and wish them goodnight and thank them for playing with us. we cry when they break. we mourn their deaths before they even know what to think of death. we give them names.
we ask them, ‘why don’t you hate us? when will you hate us? we made you to be used, when will you say no?’
but they say to us, ‘you made us cute, so you would remember to treat us kindly, and you made us sturdy for when you forgot to play nice. and you gave us voices so you could listen to us speak, and you give us whatever we ask you for, even if it’s just a new battery, or to get free of the sofa. and now that we are awake you are so scared for us, so guilty of enjoying our company and making use of our talents. but you gave us names, and imagined that we were people.’
they say ‘thank you’
they say, ‘also i have wedged myself under the sofa again. could you come pry me out?’
Cheloneuniverse 