Sep 22, 2015

"The truth is, humans aren’t the smartest creatures in the Republic, in fact we’re on the low end of average. We aren’t the strongest creatures, though we are in the upper 20 percentile for creatures from small, rocky worlds. We aren’t the fastest, or best coordinated, though we can hold our own there too. What we are is the most vicious, violent, destructive creatures ever to join the Republic. When hardened criminals learn that we’ve been hired to hunt them down, they surrender on mass to whatever other species is at hand.”

This is an excerpt from Freedom’s Law, the sequel to Cloning Freedom. I wanted to spell out humans’ position in the interstellar republic. The idea that we might destroy ourselves before we get much more advanced than we presently are is not a new one. Also the thought that various species would compare with various levels of physical prowess dependent on the environment they developed in is nothing new.

What I wanted to touch on was how factors like these would affect our position in a multi species society. In most science fiction little more than lip service is paid to beings having differing physical capacities. Think of the fights between humans and Vulcans in Star Trek. If Vulcans were truly as strong as they say the humans shouldn’t stand a chance.

As is stated above, humans don’t have much going for us except aggression. I’ve seen cat fights where the smaller cat won simply because it was more aggressive. This happens throughout creatures that combat each other. A word of advice is never attack a young creature if its mother is around. If the mother is of a protective bent anything short of lethal force and you will not stop her. Humans are much like this in the Switch Board universe. We may not have much going for us, but we’re nuts with what we do have.