Humans are Horrific Space Orcs*

A patrol of Company F. 6th Ranger Battalion, investigating a native hut on Dinagat Island in the Philippines
(U.S. Army photograph)

I think that there are valid arguments for our species being some sort of inter-galactic bad asses.

I'm going to let Beans and Paweł write this post in an attempt to prove my assumption. (Their comments are usually entertaining and informative, well done guys.)

From Beans -

Humans doth be weird critters. Omnivores who do far better on a meat heavy diet than a meat light diet (our guts are really too short to do plant stuff well. Seriously. One of the indicators of whether an animal is a carnivore or not is gut length. Shorter guts mean more carnivorous. Dog guts are longer in proportion to their body than cat guts are. Dogs are scavengerious semi-carnivores (yeah, I made up a word, but dogs can scavenge like vultures or eat meat and stomachs full of veggies, while cats MUST eat meat only. Which makes the concept of vegetarian diets for both rather suspect at best, criminal at worst.)

Longer the guts, the more veggies one can digest, and the crappier the veggie one digests can be. Grazers can eat meat (a surprising number of mice, small birds, grasshoppers, larvae and such are consumed by grazing animals.) But not the other way around. Serious carnivores, like big cats, eat veggie material in order to help unblock blocks in their guts (furballs, the occasional bone fragment, etc.)

We humans do better, live longer, think faster, on animal fats and proteins, supplemented by plant carbs. The more meat and fat, the bigger and stronger the human body gets, and the better the human body is at storing energy (as fat.) The Mongols were noted for gorging on meat and being able to fight and ride for days, while their Chinese opponents were slower due to needing to eat more often and not being able to store food-energy due to their reliance on plants supplemented by meat.

Weird stuff, huh?

As to Herd/Pack, well, yeah. And herd/pack mentality doesn't like it very much when an individual appears who excels. Herd/pack mentality doesn't like being challenged. It gets the individual shunned or killed.

And from Paweł -

• humans are able to eat almost anything,
• they use alcohol, which is lethal poison if in excess, for fun and finding sexual partners
• they can survive broken limbs (try to do it as horse) and very early in history invented surgery
• in extreme some humans have been performing surgery on themselves, no anesthesia
• they can dive without equipment almost as good as seals
• they evolved as apex predators, almost-exterminating lions, tigers and bears, including totally giant cave species
• 14 year old human girl survived plane crash in Amazon jungle and emerged alive after 2 weeks of wandering
• they took wolves, their once predators and made their pets
• they made cats their mercenaries in fighting off rats and mice
• there are multiple stories of humans, mortally wounded still surviving long enough to kill multiple other humans
• they have been in state of near constant intra-species warfare for most of their history
• they are able to fly into space now and are looking for ways past speed of light
• they have exterminated many own cultures that happened to be either too weak or too fixed in their ways to adapt
• they are perfectly capable of destroying own planet with nukes, but managed to hold this capacity in check for 60+years
• once they spread into galaxy it will be all over for us

- From Galactic Council report on humans

Paweł also had an indirect link to *this.

After reading all of that, I have come to the conclusion that we are a very scary species. Perhaps if there are other civilizations out there among the cosmos, they won't contact us because they're terrified of letting us know that they exist. Of course, looking at human history itself leads one to believe that compared to humans, the rest of nature is pretty benign.

On the other hand, maybe those theoretical inter-galactic civilizations out there can't contact us because the speed of light really is unattainable and we're all adrift on our rocky homes speeding along through the universe until Time itself ends.

If it does.

Now my head hurts...