Right.
I have 65% in Locksmith, plenty of Luck points, and a single digit SAN score. Lem, stand by with the tommygun, and Vicky, hold that lantern up high over that gas-soaked hay bale so we can see what’s inside when I open it up.
Stranger
sure … and we must do this at night … b/c that 300 year old coffin cant wait another 5 or so hours …
Well played!
In science we dod the terrible scientific thing of “poke it with a stick”.
In fairness to Kane, he was wearing an environmentally sealed industrial-grade space suit. He had a pretty reasonable expectation of safety from whatever was in that egg.
Kane—who, after all, is really just a Space Teamster—isn’t nearly as inept as these purported ‘scientists’:
Stranger
My head canon for that movie is that Weyland ruined his reputation building the spaceship, and the only “experts” he could convince to join his crew were the equivalent of that “I don’t want to say it’s aliens…” guy from the History Channel.
Human exceptionalism - You know how no matter how advanced alien an species is, they always find something deeply special about the human race.
The universe is run by a supernatural / extradimensional organization that appears to our eyes as an anachronistic bureaucracy - The Good Place, The Adjustment Bureau, Defending Your Life, Good Omens, the TVA from Loki.
As you might expect, someone’s already gotten there first, albeit in print, rather than on film: Falling Free, by Lois McMaster Bujold, is about a race of humans genetically engineered to live and work in zero-gee. Rather than legs, their lower limbs are a second pair of arms. Created by a giant corporation, but not evil, per se; the conflict comes when the project is deemed a failure, and the “quaddies” are considered “biological waste” by a company official, who wants to simply eliminate them all. The novel tells the way they rescue themselves, and establish their own society. They periodically pop up in later novels in Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga.
Bujold’s got that trope covered, as well - in the short story “Labyrinth”, her main character Miles Vorkosigan is tasked with rescuing a super soldier who’s eight feet tall, has enormous strength, endurance, and can see into the infrared and ultraviolet. And claws. Miles is aghast to find that someone tried to design a supersoldier by committee; the geneticist who created her says “I thought the fangs were a little over the top, myself.” She does turn out to be a good soldier, though, but that’s due more to her intelligence than her size or strength.
There actually was an alien called Bem in the animated Trek series (a nice guy, tho something of a PITA, but not something that will snack on your head).
Actually, considering that nature’s favorite trick is to be able to grab or sting you from further away than you thought, a good long stick should be a primary tool of xenobiologists.
The backstory of the webcomic Quantum Vibe includes the creation of multi-armed “Spiders” and handfooted “Beltapes” to live in micro or reduced gravity. And then a genius created synthetic gravity and mainstream humans dominated the solar system.
That’s exactly why the Quaddies in Falling Free were deemed a “failure”: someone invented artificial gravity, and the need for zero-g adaptable humans disappeared.
Which is why any proposal to create genetically specialized humans should be postponed at least another 500 years, to see what technological alternatives might be devised. Otherwise we might be like the novel Brave New World which depicted the creation of idiots who wouldn’t be bored operating manual elevators all day long.
Would ten feet do?
We did not at first understand these…emotions…that you humans possess. We thought they were a weakness, but now we understand that they are your best quality.
One trope that’s always bothered me is Aliens so in love with one Period in Human History/Human Fantasy World That They Copy It In Real Life
Really?
Can you imagine humans falling so much in love with the Zagorthian Age of Chivalry that they have an entire city where they dress up like Zagorthians, construct robotic Zagorthian animals (that have no Terran counterparts) to re-create Zagorthian jousting or whatever, speak ancient Zagorthian languages, and construct Zagorthian Age-of-Chivalry architecture? More likely they’'d expend all that effort on human historical reconstruction.
But this is the logic behind things like the Star Trek TOS episode “A Piece of the Action” (and others). or behind Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson’s Hoka stories or plenty of other examples. I can understand the attraction. For TV, you can re-use your Old West Props or REnaissance costumes of whatever. The Hoka stories immediately drop the reader into a somewhat familiar milieu. But it’s unlikely as heck.
TV Tropes has a page for Hoka, but no overall page for this particular trope. “Planet of Hats” or “Cargo Cult” come closest, but isn’t really the same thing.
Have you seen a Comic-Con?
That’s what happens when historical documents are broadcast into space.