I just love the “humans are space orcs” posts and this one by whereareyouguys about nuclear fallout is perfect. An alien named Xneork is talking to a human named Sarah about Earth’s inhospitable climates and she tells him about Chernobyl. Xneork listens in utter shock and awe:
(via: whereareyouguys)
I am so fucking sick of these things. Our ONLY advantages are intelligence and opposable thumbs. THAT’S IT. And there are other highly intelligent creatures on our planet, some of which ALSO have opposable thumbs. We’re not that fucking special!!
I’ll agree when a dolphin replies to this comment, James. Until then, those advantages will do just fine.
Also our dauntless endurance and super sweating. Only kangaroos can keep running under a tropical sun anywhere as long as we can, and that’s because they cheat by using pogo sticks. Plus we are resilient as fuck; few metazoa can even come close to our shock resistance or our tolerance to pain, and we can recover from pretty much any traumatic injury that doesn’t kill us on the spot.
Remember that we invented surgery long before we invented anesthesia.
Arguably, it’s not those factors that make us special. It’s a combination of human endurance (as a species, we are INCREDIBLY durable compared to pretty much any other species), adaptability (humans are VERY good at surviving in pretty much any condition, from scorched deserts to frigid polar climes), and perhaps most of all, mentality (humans are innovative, create unique and somewhat insane solutions to problems, and possess a near universal ability to pack bond)
Humans as a species have survived as long as we have because we developed a strong sense of community. The rest of the advantages were window dressing. Are we the only community species? No. But that trait is what allowed us to capitalize on all of the other advantages and survive in the face of disaster.
There’s a lot more than that, actually.
We have a simpler digestive tract than most other primates, because we cook our food. That’s actually a substantial difference, as it gives us a lot more nutritional access without needing lots of digesting time.
Our shoulders are vastly different than our primate kin. We can throw things. They can’t. Like, at all. A chimp may be physically stronger than us, but we can throw spears at them from quite a distance, and there’s not much they can do.
We can run for longer than literally anything else on earth. There are groups of humans that still hunt by chasing their prey to exhaustion.
And, oh yeah, we’re literally everywhere. Even in Antarctica, we have permanent presence. No other species has spread so far across so many biomes as us.
To think we’re not special when literally we’ve done what none other has, in so many ways, is just absurd.
Chernobyl is a thriving nature preserve primarily because most humans have left the area – a large human population is deadlier than radiation. A few humans do live there, though the Ukraine government tries to discourage it. If you don’t eat local plants and animals, and don’t dig trenches into the soil (Russian soldiers take note), then the dosages are pretty mild.
Fun fact, they did not take note. It’s funny.
>(Russian soldiers take note)
That’s why i love this place.
I’m 90% sure we created nuclear bombs before nuclear energy plants, and long before Chernobyl.
We did. In fact, the first time heat from a nuclear reactor was used to generate electricity was December 21, 1951. The first nuclear bomb was set off on July 16, 1945, six years and five months earlier. It was more like we saw the destructive power of fusion, and went “Cool! What else does it do?”
Not exactly – nuclear reactors for power as well as bombs were both theorised about the same time. The bomb was first because there was a war on and they were (rightly) worried the Nazis would invent it first. And it’s obviously easier to build a bomb because you don’t need to keep it running safely without it blowing up. In fact that’s the whole point of bombs.
You are right, we had the bombs before we had all the details of reactors figured out – but war will do that.
First sustained nuclear reactor was in 1942. Fermi’s Chicago Pile-1.