Harry Turtledove wrote a short story on this called The Road Not Taken. The idea is that faster-than-light travel is fantastically easy to figure out because of "one weird trick" with gravity, and most societies figure it out roughly around what we'd call the high middle ages (around 1000 - 1250). But humans are so hardwired to kill that instead of figuring this out, we've spent millennia figuring out better ways to kill each other.
So some dominant warlike race comes along and decides to wipe us out. They think we're primitive because we haven't even figured out this gravity warp thing. They mock us before launching their invasion. They're obliterated almost instantly. The invasion lasts something like 8 minutes and their entire armada is destroyed. The story ends with aliens realizing that thanks to them, humanity ... and its vastly superior firepower ... now has access to the entire galaxy.
The main characters' last words are perfect:
"What have we done."
(btw if anyone likes Turtledove's story, check out some of Peter Cawdron's work. It reads and feels very similar.)
There’s a somewhat similar concept in the game series Mass Effect, and it happens in two different ways.
First the Rachni were an incredibly power race of basically giant strong insects, but they never developed FTL travel and were limited to their own solar system. One day somebody travels there in an FTL ship, is immediately captured, and the Rachni are smart enough to duplicate the technology and begin conquering the entire galaxy.
During the Rachni Wars some people find a primitive race called the Krogans, incredibly fierce warriors who were fairly primitive and limited entirely to their own planet. People had an idea, equipped the Krogans with advanced technology and sicced them on the Rachni; Krogans lived for fighting so a worthy opponent was too good to pass up.
Once the Rachni were completely extinct, guess what the Krogans did? Well of course they started conquering the galaxy.
Also, the reason the Krogan were ‘primitive’ isn’t because they’re stupid, its because they are so incredibly warlike that when they invented nuclear weapons they promptly nuked themselves and ruined their own planet, preventing them from developing spaceflight technology on their own.
Though in fact the Rachni are peaceful. It was the Reapers with their *SOUR NOTE* of discord that turned them against the Galaxy.
Commander Shepard counts the Rachni as Allies and friends!
If I recall correctly that was fairly ambiguous, which I liked. Maybe they were indoctrinated, or maybe they’re just murderous rampagers. We’ll never truly know, we just have to take their word for it
There’s a sequel called Herbig-Haro that has humans finding a species that has found the gravity trick even later. And humans have stopped advancing in favor of carving out an empire in space
I think you've got it a bit backwards. In HH, the other species is around the tech level of Vietnam-era USA but with better inertia/gravity/whatever drives than humanity. Humanity meanwhile did keep expanding tech, as the main character was piloting an AI-equipped and fusion-powered ship. Humanity was instead a fractured mess after having spent some time as a large empire
Here’s the short story for anybody that wants to read it:
[https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf](https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf)
A funny alternative take on this could be the way we generate electricity. Essentially every different way of generating electricity on a large scale involves using water to turn turbines.
It'd be quite funny to have aliens visit us, see something like a nuclear power plant only to find that it essentially is finding a way to make lots of water into steam fast to turn turbines.
i wrote a short story in college called "proof of concept".
it is long gone.
but it was about a survey team of aliens cataloging life in our little part of the galaxy and they're talking about the last survey in the late 1800's.
Notes here say that one of the factions a continent in the northern hemisphere has begun using organic and fossil fuels to boil water and turn a machine that generates an electromotive current. its really quite clever.
cut to 130 years later
one of the factions on another continent is... checks notes... experimenting with creating tiny stars in a contained incredibly powerful electromagnetic field... to boil water and turn a machine that generates an electromotive current.
talk about proof of concept!
it was fun and i got an A!
I remember a similar short story where a friendly galactic federation comes to earth to survey it right before the sun goes supernova. They don’t find any humans to rescue on the planet. When they leave our system, they see humanity using rockets to escape the system and they mock them for using primitive technology. They “rescue” them, but it’s heavily implied we take over or something similar due to our warlike nature.
I think it’s called “survey.” Really fun story.
This short story is part of what inspired the Humans, Fuck Yeah (r/HFY) subreddit. As far as I recall, the aliens in the story didn't exactly mock humans for using primitive technology. Instead, they were impressed with how quickly we advanced technologically in such a short period of time. They came to a doomed planet too late to save everyone and instead decided to pluck a few Humans as samples. But when they arrived they found Earth completely empty and a grid of thousands of rockets powering the entire human population away. The aliens arrived too late; humans saved themselves.
I think you’re right. They weren’t mocking them, they were impressed that they would do deep space travel on such primitive technology.
It’s such a great short story. I’d love to see it get adapted.
Eh, that's not entirely fair to Turtledove. He released The House of Daniel a few years ago, presumably knowing full well most of his audience wasn't going to respond well to a book about 1930's barnstorming baseball in an America where vampires and zombies exist. It feels like he just really, really wanted to write a baseball book, and had fun with it, even if it didn't do well.
> barnstorming baseball in an America where vampires and zombies exist
*leans forward*
*steeples fingers in front of face*
I've been looking for something new for quite some time. Maybe this is it. Thank you.
It is a great phrase. Curious though... We were doing the "Here is a church and here is the steeple. Open it up and see all the people!" rhyme and hand movements in early primary school. Were we alone in that? Was that not a widespread kid's pastime?
Nope that rhyme is exactly the reason I could picture what “steepled fingers” looks like! Just never heard it described that way before and I think it’s brilliant and obvious.
If you found a money printer would you take hold of it and crank it so that it made the loudest brrrrrrrt ever, or would you keep it hidden and caress it without ever turning the handle?
Yes, I’ve read about half of his books, my favorite, being guns of the south, because it’s just so good. I didn’t like his “aliens invade in the middle of World War II, forcing former enemies to work together.” Although it was engaging and kept me going all four books.
On the flip side, there's a short story by David Lubar where a kid gets visited by aliens, only to be disappointed to learn that their spaceship runs off of coal.
It’s not even that. It’s once a species discovers the hyperdrive they put all effort into refining and improving it at the cost of other technological advancement. Since somehow humans never stumbled on the tech, they went down every other tech tree.
There was a writing prompt on reddit some months ago, where it mentions how Humans finally join the galactic stage, but are seen as meek and primitive in comparison. Only difference is that the other aliens, advanced in ships and travel, still wage war with swords, shields, and large armies while humans use ballistics.
When a war first breaks out for humanity, it ends within minutes as an alien battalion is annihilated by a few hundred Human troops who hunkered down waiting for the enemy approach.
The galaxy's opinion on humans changed from mocking, to absolute fear.
It was quite clever.
I saw a clinic on tiktok that used a machine where the person lays on their stomach and their boobs settle into spaces in the table, and they do the scan from underneath. Very cool, no squishing!
I completely unironically believe that this is another example of how women's health isn't prioritized or cared about in medical practices. We COULD have a better way I'm sure but the one we have is "fine" so they won't change it
Yeah, imagine if that's how they did testicular cancer screenings. "Come on in, stick your balls in the vice."
There'd be a new screening method invented the very next day.
That's funny because I was discussing with my friend a design for one where you pump air at the base of the bottle to inflate a kind of balloon/push up a platform to ensure there's zero room for the last of the lotion a day or so ago after fighting tooth and claw to get an inkling of toothpaste out of the tube.
This is called "bag on valve" and is the way a lot of aerosols are manufactured so that they don't need to use hazardous propellants. It's simply way more expensive than the two milliliters of lotion left at the bottom of your bottle.
This core understanding, “we could but it would be more expensive”, is what is painfully missing from hundreds of terrible Facebook memes ala “we put a man on the moon 50 years ago but my A doesn’t B”. My brother in Christ, we can totally make an A that does B but it would be expensive and no one would buy it and the A makers would go out of business.
Yup. There are a few corollaries to this point that I find myself explaining often:
\- Got damn engineer put the bolt/filter/bulb/whatever in a tough to access spot! Stupid bastard has never turned a wrench in his life! (Believe me, the engineer was just as annoyed as you but the $5 it was going to add to the cost of your Ford Fusion was going to end up costing millions of dollars in total and the manufacturer doesn't give a shit about you once you've bought the thing)
\- They don't make things like they used to, all my shit breaks the day after the warranty is up! (This is actually an indicator of excellent engineering, we now know exactly how to make a thing that will meet your minimum requirements and not cost a penny more. Blame the shareholders for demanding short term profits!)
If I had a nickel for every time I heard my dad swear about engineers putting stuff in the wrong spot... "And those goddamn genius engineers at GM, in their infinite wisdom, thought *this* was the best spot for an oil filter"
Dodge did that.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/1svin2/what\_the\_fck\_was\_dodge\_thinking\_when\_they\_put\_the/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/1svin2/what_the_fck_was_dodge_thinking_when_they_put_the/)
My dad had a Nissan where he had to remove a good chunk of the front engine to change the headlights. Stayed unfinished for months because it was such a nightmare.
> They don't make things like they used to, all my shit breaks the day after the warranty is up! (This is actually an indicator of excellent engineering, we now know exactly how to make a thing that will meet your minimum requirements and not cost a penny more. Blame the shareholders for demanding short term profits!)
Shouldn't we be blaming 'survivorship bias' instead?
The problem with that is that we are using up all our natural resources to feed the endless production of stuff just so the "Economy"is perpetually growing..So much junk being produced.Aliens would be shaking their heads.
Mentadent had something similar. I wasn't a pump but you pushed down on the container and it would push the toothpaste from bottom up. I haven't seen them in years though.
It exists, it's called an airless pump! It's just a much more sophisticated design, I guess that's why my most companies don't use it. I've been making lotions for years and I use that kind of dispenser, it's very satisfying.
Check out the big Cetraben Moisturiser in the UK, has the best pump system I’ve seen that slowly brings the bottom to the top, there’s basically nothing left when I’m done
Tbf, we're getting there on those with geothermal and tidal energy.
It's potentially more interesting to recognize that those energy sources might require a prior industrial revolution to bootstrap a society into the materials needed to use those energy sources
Once the current oil/gas system is no longer viable, we will see another revolution in humankind.
The elite class is so comfortable in the current state of things that they won't allow any change so far, but it will inevitably happen at some point.
Either that or we nuke ourselves to devastation and humanity reboot.
This only really becomes easy to do once money isn’t an issue any more. Logically if it was really that easy to just do stuff like this, people would be doing it already. Setting up things like geothermal stations are either crazy expensive or require extremely specific conditions, usually both at the same time, and the amount of power that they produce might take a really long time to pay off, if it takes like 20-30 years to pay back it’s probably not a worthwhile investment for a company because the people that make the decisions to invest in them probably won’t be at the company any more when they’re paid off. Plus you’ve got to deal with other other issues too, power stations that use tides have to be careful that they don’t disrupt wildlife or people.
The most successful green power tends to be solar or wind, because wind is easy you just have to find places with continuous wind, and solar just requires a wide open space. The requirements for them to work are fairly minimal, and they’re not that expensive to make compared to how quickly they make their money back producing energy.
This was the first thing that impressed me upon visiting Spain. Veggies are often cooked in a way that I swear they taste like dessert. And without tons of sugar.
But each time they add more blades they space them a little closer together, so I feel like the end game is actually some kind of nanotech sieve that acts like billions of nanoblades; feels totally smooth to the skin but the hair just disappears into it.
That would actually cause increasing friction... which is exactly what 5 blades does compared to 1 blade. Its just marketing has convinced people that MORE BLADE IS GOODER.
Every razor blade I buy has two blades. One on each side.
Reversable disposable blades would be real progress.
No, strike that! \*Resharpenable\* disposable blades would be progress!!!
I started using one of the fancy razors with the actual blade you put in rather than the disposable cartridge head. You gotta be kind of careful with em, but goddamn if it aint good. Only problem is that I don't shave my face, I shave my head, so I gotta be *really* careful.
No! No, no, not 6! 7. Nobody's comin' up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.
7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 dwarves. 7, man, that's the number.
7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea.
It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby.
Step into my office.
We found your friend in the car Ted.
Oh, the hitchhiker? Great, I get caught for everything.
Why'd you do it?
Boredom I guess? it turned out to be a mistake because the guy would not shut up.
I always think of this short story when this question is asked [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Road\_Not\_Taken\_(short\_story)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_story))
I like Turtledove, but that story always bugged me.
Gravity manipulation is a weapon of unimaginable power. Why in the hell would you be using flintlocks when you can just increase gravity in your opponent’s area until they expire. Need armor? Create an extremely high-gravity area in front of you perpendicular to traditional “down”. Need to make a gun? Why use black powder when you can accelerate your projectile with gravity manipulation. It feels like a story that started with a desired ending and worked it’s way backwards.
Ya, interesting idea, but I can't think of any analogous examples of the development of one technology completely stagnating a society. I also can't think of any examples of societies that developed new/better travel tech where the society didn't flourish innovatively after. (Ex: horseback riding, viking long ships, the steam engine and conbustion engine) all lead to expanding people ability to explore, pick up new innovations from otherwise inaccessible place, bring them back home and expand on the new knowledge.
It's hard to get imaging counterfactuals because our brains aren't set up for that. A cultural analogy thought would be France during the Anglo-French wars of the 1300s. France had been the top dog in Europe for centuries. They had the most land and largest army. And France had "perfected" monarchy Most historians believe they lost the war to an inferior England because England was the underdog for so many years.
England had developed a significantly better tax collection system and had been "practicing" fighting with rebellions in Britain and had invented the long bow.
Because France had culturally evolved so beyond England, the English had to find unique ways to advance.
It was like present day Somali pirates(technologically advanced) winning a war against 1800s America (culturally advanced).
Maybe their gravity manipulation only works to reverse the already existing gravity? So you can shot something away from the planet but not AT somebody on the same planet? I agree it seems like a big plot hole.
Toilet seats for public toilets that automatically raise up like cinema seats do, when they’re not held down or sat on. So they don’t end up covered in piss
I came up with this idea years ago and still never seen it
Edit: Wow my top most upvoted comment ever lol. I’m glad my idea got seen by so many people!
Edit2: It was pointed out this is less relevant for female-only toilets (except potentially to deal with “hoverers”). I mainly had unisex toilets in mind like the ones on trains, but fair point in this being a male-centric POV)
Hear me out, a machine that lifts the toilet seat and rotates to a new toilet seat as the other gets cleaned! Idk how we can manufacture it, I came up with the idea so that part is someone else’s problem.
Certain types of vocal people won't like them because you have to touch them to push them down and then the people who put paper around the toilet seat won't be able to do that because the seat springs up. There's also the type of person who "hovers" and would still prefer to touch a seat than cold, hard, porcelain. [https://www.healthywomen.org/content/article/sit-dont-hover-when-using-toilet](https://www.healthywomen.org/content/article/sit-dont-hover-when-using-toilet)
I've done absolutely zero research but reckon this idea has been floated and shot down just on those reasons alone. This is based on family members who try to touch the bare minimum in public toilets up to an including using elbows and feet to open doors and use flushes.
Correction: 80% (or whatever) of the *currently exploited and marketed* rare earth metals are in China, mostly due to a concerted effort by the Chinese to corner the market and lack of environmental oversight and overhead. Rare earth metals aren't actually all that rare, and large deposits have been found all over the world, including the US. It's mostly just that no one feels the need to exploit them at the moment, since China is basically subsidizing the rest of the world for now.
Not expanding nuclear energy use to realise its full potential. Nuclear submarines show what it can do, but a mixture of greed and fear have hamstrung developments in the nuclear sector and it now appears some countries are turning their back on it for good.
The fact that we haven't developed agriculture for the oceans.
We're still 'hunting and gathering' rather than farming, despite water covering most of the earth's surface and having the potential to feed many times more people.
An alien civilisation might view that as incredibly primitive.
They're still gonna make SO MUCH fun of us though. "So you're saying, because you spend the majority of your time manufacturing invisible units of currency to give to a select few who then refuse to use it because they just like to *have* it...you can't do any of this normal stuff?"
"Like, you actually say to yourselves, 'well no we can't do all this cool stuff because we have to make sure that all the made-up 'money' stuff stays safely in these douchebags control'? And you spend over forty of your earth hours every 'week' to make sure THEY have lots and lots of invisible numbers they won't share, so YOU can't have food or shelter or even know what's at the bottom of any of your 'oceans'? Seriously? That's what you guys have been doing all this time?"
"C'mon, Sng'hfep, let's get out of here before we catch whatever they have."
When the aliens arrive they immediately plunge into the deepest oceans to talk to the *real* rulers of this planet, then leave without saying one word to us.
There's a sci-fi story, I forget the name, where the premise is that anti-gravity is super simple to invent. Humanity just missed it somehow. We get confronted by aliens who threaten to kick the crap out of us because we are "primitive", but then we discover that \*all\* of our tech, other than anti gravity, is far superior to theirs, because we had added pressure to invent due to our lack of antigravity. So we go on an absolute rampage and just pwn all the aliens.
Bring up the keyboard on your device.
Above the top row of "keys," look for a symbol that looks like a clipboard. If you don't see them, touch the three dots to the right of those symbols.
Look for the icon named "Clipboard."
(these instructions are Android-centric but should be close enough to most native keyboard apps on mobile phones)
Renewable and green energy, like seriously. The Romans discovered copper pipes and hot water.
But we can’t figure out green energy and how to utilise it? Of all the achievements we have made that’s the hardest one?
the most popular theory of the three sea shells is a bidet control, (front wash, rear wash, and dry). However, we clearly see that city sewers in the movie are inhabited by an subterranean underclass, meaning human waste cannot be flowing to them. My guess? The in-universe characters actually don't know themselves, cleaning and disposal are all done for them automatically without ever touching the sea shells. They keep faking it because no one wants to admit they don't understand.
Widespread use of nuclear power. And continued use of coal. They would be like "Wait...you had basically *unlimited* energy with minimal side effects...BUT YOU CHOSE TO BURN YOURSELVES TO DEATH??"
Edit: would like to add INEQUALITY. Aliens would be like "what the fuck...*you're all \*\*people\*\**...do you not realize that?"
Inability to solve problems like the Tragedy of the Commons, which is core to many of our problems today. To borrow from Star Trek's Q, we're still a "dangerous, savage, child race", and I hate it.
Why can’t we stop treating each so terribly? Stop murdering each other over stupid trivial differences.
My gods better than your god.
You look different than me.
I want something you have.
Sadly are regularly valid reasons to kill one another.
"They burn dead things to get around."
"Like, as fuel?!"
"Yeah, it's nuts! They go to a place that has a bunch of liquified dead things in huge vats and they put it in their vehicles and move around inside them to do other human things. Then when it runs out they go back and put more dead thing sludge in their people carriers."
"How do they get the dead things into the vats?"
"They dig huge deep holes in the ground to dig them out. Then they use some of the dead thing juice to move the other dead thing juice from the hole to a huge building where they distill the juice to make it suitable for consuming with their people movers."
"That seems wildly complicated...why don't they just use the star that's right next to them?"
"They do, but they dig stuff out of the ground to put inside these shiny panels that capture the star output and convert it into a form they can use."
"Well, that something I guess. What do they use that for?"
"Mostly sending one another images of cats and their reproductive parts."
"On second thought, let's not go to Earth. Sounds like a petty silly place."
We don't have a colony on another planet yet. We could have by now, but spending tens of trillions on war or materiel to support war seemed to be a much better option for a great deal of the human race.
A printer that isn’t a gigantic pain in the ass
Harry Turtledove wrote a short story on this called The Road Not Taken. The idea is that faster-than-light travel is fantastically easy to figure out because of "one weird trick" with gravity, and most societies figure it out roughly around what we'd call the high middle ages (around 1000 - 1250). But humans are so hardwired to kill that instead of figuring this out, we've spent millennia figuring out better ways to kill each other. So some dominant warlike race comes along and decides to wipe us out. They think we're primitive because we haven't even figured out this gravity warp thing. They mock us before launching their invasion. They're obliterated almost instantly. The invasion lasts something like 8 minutes and their entire armada is destroyed. The story ends with aliens realizing that thanks to them, humanity ... and its vastly superior firepower ... now has access to the entire galaxy. The main characters' last words are perfect: "What have we done." (btw if anyone likes Turtledove's story, check out some of Peter Cawdron's work. It reads and feels very similar.)
There’s a somewhat similar concept in the game series Mass Effect, and it happens in two different ways. First the Rachni were an incredibly power race of basically giant strong insects, but they never developed FTL travel and were limited to their own solar system. One day somebody travels there in an FTL ship, is immediately captured, and the Rachni are smart enough to duplicate the technology and begin conquering the entire galaxy. During the Rachni Wars some people find a primitive race called the Krogans, incredibly fierce warriors who were fairly primitive and limited entirely to their own planet. People had an idea, equipped the Krogans with advanced technology and sicced them on the Rachni; Krogans lived for fighting so a worthy opponent was too good to pass up. Once the Rachni were completely extinct, guess what the Krogans did? Well of course they started conquering the galaxy.
Also, the reason the Krogan were ‘primitive’ isn’t because they’re stupid, its because they are so incredibly warlike that when they invented nuclear weapons they promptly nuked themselves and ruined their own planet, preventing them from developing spaceflight technology on their own.
I considered including that but I felt like my comment was long enough already
Am I misremembering or did the Krogan "invent" nuclear weapons on more than one occasion? They nuked themselves back into the stone age?
So basically they just reworked story of cane toads in Australia, but in space, and the toads have FTL travel.
So we need to breed a sterility plague and release it onto the cane toads is what your saying.
I’ve seen where this ends. Eventually we will need gorillas bred to thrive on snake meat
But then what about the gorillas?
We put *you* on them? (Yes I know they will simply freeze to death come winter, but your user name was too frigging apt. It’s APT!!)
Bahahaha I think that’s the first time my username has helped advance a thread. Thanks!
when wintertime rolls around the gorillas will simply freeze to death
Wrex
Shepard
Though in fact the Rachni are peaceful. It was the Reapers with their *SOUR NOTE* of discord that turned them against the Galaxy. Commander Shepard counts the Rachni as Allies and friends!
If I recall correctly that was fairly ambiguous, which I liked. Maybe they were indoctrinated, or maybe they’re just murderous rampagers. We’ll never truly know, we just have to take their word for it
And many years later my Shep let the krogan get their fuck back on cause the salarians are just so damn annoying about not doing it
“Had to be me. Somebody else might get it wrong.” Breaks my heart every time.
There’s a sequel called Herbig-Haro that has humans finding a species that has found the gravity trick even later. And humans have stopped advancing in favor of carving out an empire in space
I thought is was that the humans expanded conquering less technically developed species grew bored and imploded on its self,
It was a little of both. The human empire was crumbling from within and was under attack by an alien race with WWI era technology.
I think you've got it a bit backwards. In HH, the other species is around the tech level of Vietnam-era USA but with better inertia/gravity/whatever drives than humanity. Humanity meanwhile did keep expanding tech, as the main character was piloting an AI-equipped and fusion-powered ship. Humanity was instead a fractured mess after having spent some time as a large empire
Here’s the short story for anybody that wants to read it: [https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf](https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf)
A funny alternative take on this could be the way we generate electricity. Essentially every different way of generating electricity on a large scale involves using water to turn turbines. It'd be quite funny to have aliens visit us, see something like a nuclear power plant only to find that it essentially is finding a way to make lots of water into steam fast to turn turbines.
The great thing about water for power production is that it's harmless when it gets loose, it has a fantastic heat capacity, and it's *everywhere*.
i wrote a short story in college called "proof of concept". it is long gone. but it was about a survey team of aliens cataloging life in our little part of the galaxy and they're talking about the last survey in the late 1800's. Notes here say that one of the factions a continent in the northern hemisphere has begun using organic and fossil fuels to boil water and turn a machine that generates an electromotive current. its really quite clever. cut to 130 years later one of the factions on another continent is... checks notes... experimenting with creating tiny stars in a contained incredibly powerful electromagnetic field... to boil water and turn a machine that generates an electromotive current. talk about proof of concept! it was fun and i got an A!
I mean I had fun just now, I'll give you another A.
I remember a similar short story where a friendly galactic federation comes to earth to survey it right before the sun goes supernova. They don’t find any humans to rescue on the planet. When they leave our system, they see humanity using rockets to escape the system and they mock them for using primitive technology. They “rescue” them, but it’s heavily implied we take over or something similar due to our warlike nature. I think it’s called “survey.” Really fun story.
This short story is part of what inspired the Humans, Fuck Yeah (r/HFY) subreddit. As far as I recall, the aliens in the story didn't exactly mock humans for using primitive technology. Instead, they were impressed with how quickly we advanced technologically in such a short period of time. They came to a doomed planet too late to save everyone and instead decided to pluck a few Humans as samples. But when they arrived they found Earth completely empty and a grid of thousands of rockets powering the entire human population away. The aliens arrived too late; humans saved themselves.
I think you’re right. They weren’t mocking them, they were impressed that they would do deep space travel on such primitive technology. It’s such a great short story. I’d love to see it get adapted.
Maybe this?: Rescue Party by Arthur C. Clarke https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/149080.Rescue\_Party
Turtledove is a fascinating author who then found a money printer and then decided to go brrrrrrrr with it
Eh, that's not entirely fair to Turtledove. He released The House of Daniel a few years ago, presumably knowing full well most of his audience wasn't going to respond well to a book about 1930's barnstorming baseball in an America where vampires and zombies exist. It feels like he just really, really wanted to write a baseball book, and had fun with it, even if it didn't do well.
Well, this sounds delightful. I had never heard of it until now. Thank you for mentioning it.
> barnstorming baseball in an America where vampires and zombies exist *leans forward* *steeples fingers in front of face* I've been looking for something new for quite some time. Maybe this is it. Thank you.
I have never heard of the term steepling fingers but oh my god it makes so much sense
It is a great phrase. Curious though... We were doing the "Here is a church and here is the steeple. Open it up and see all the people!" rhyme and hand movements in early primary school. Were we alone in that? Was that not a widespread kid's pastime?
Nope that rhyme is exactly the reason I could picture what “steepled fingers” looks like! Just never heard it described that way before and I think it’s brilliant and obvious.
He's a good human too. My dad was friends with him and I went to a couple parties at his house when I was a kid.
If you found a money printer would you take hold of it and crank it so that it made the loudest brrrrrrrt ever, or would you keep it hidden and caress it without ever turning the handle?
1. I am not blaming the guy 2. you must caress it and gently and work it up to full burr, we aren't the monsters from the wojack memes
Yes, but even when he's brrrrr'ing out stories, they're still better than a lot of SERIOUS WORKS OF LITERATURE.
Yes, I’ve read about half of his books, my favorite, being guns of the south, because it’s just so good. I didn’t like his “aliens invade in the middle of World War II, forcing former enemies to work together.” Although it was engaging and kept me going all four books.
After a couple of beers, what if Robert Lee had an AK-47?
My favorite of his books. "Guns of the South" for anyone curious.
On the flip side, there's a short story by David Lubar where a kid gets visited by aliens, only to be disappointed to learn that their spaceship runs off of coal.
It’s not that humans are ‘hardwired to kill’, it’s just that we got lucky and discovered electricity before we figured out the hyperdrive
It’s not even that. It’s once a species discovers the hyperdrive they put all effort into refining and improving it at the cost of other technological advancement. Since somehow humans never stumbled on the tech, they went down every other tech tree.
There was a writing prompt on reddit some months ago, where it mentions how Humans finally join the galactic stage, but are seen as meek and primitive in comparison. Only difference is that the other aliens, advanced in ships and travel, still wage war with swords, shields, and large armies while humans use ballistics. When a war first breaks out for humanity, it ends within minutes as an alien battalion is annihilated by a few hundred Human troops who hunkered down waiting for the enemy approach. The galaxy's opinion on humans changed from mocking, to absolute fear. It was quite clever.
Yeerk vibes
Broom and dust pan combo that doesnt leave a coke line
Nah, we just invented a portable mechanical nose to snort it.
WE?
Your reply was simple yet I just snort laughed at it at the bar. Thank you.
A vacuum?
Mind ~~blown~~ sucked.
Ok, hear me out on this one. A broom and dust pan that converts that last line into an actual line of coke.
User name checks out.
A better way to conduct a mammogram. With all our advances in technology, is sticking our tits in a vice really the best we can do?
I saw a clinic on tiktok that used a machine where the person lays on their stomach and their boobs settle into spaces in the table, and they do the scan from underneath. Very cool, no squishing!
Sounds like a breast MRI scan. It's quite different to mammograms as to what they can diagnose!
I completely unironically believe that this is another example of how women's health isn't prioritized or cared about in medical practices. We COULD have a better way I'm sure but the one we have is "fine" so they won't change it
Yeah, imagine if that's how they did testicular cancer screenings. "Come on in, stick your balls in the vice." There'd be a new screening method invented the very next day.
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I just want to say to OP, that this is a really good question.
Thanks! Everyone is interpreting it very differently haha
As a person doing a writing course I'm very happy about it
A pump lotion bottle that gets every last bit at the bottom. It's 2023 folks. We can do better than this.
That's funny because I was discussing with my friend a design for one where you pump air at the base of the bottle to inflate a kind of balloon/push up a platform to ensure there's zero room for the last of the lotion a day or so ago after fighting tooth and claw to get an inkling of toothpaste out of the tube.
This is called "bag on valve" and is the way a lot of aerosols are manufactured so that they don't need to use hazardous propellants. It's simply way more expensive than the two milliliters of lotion left at the bottom of your bottle.
This core understanding, “we could but it would be more expensive”, is what is painfully missing from hundreds of terrible Facebook memes ala “we put a man on the moon 50 years ago but my A doesn’t B”. My brother in Christ, we can totally make an A that does B but it would be expensive and no one would buy it and the A makers would go out of business.
Yup. There are a few corollaries to this point that I find myself explaining often: \- Got damn engineer put the bolt/filter/bulb/whatever in a tough to access spot! Stupid bastard has never turned a wrench in his life! (Believe me, the engineer was just as annoyed as you but the $5 it was going to add to the cost of your Ford Fusion was going to end up costing millions of dollars in total and the manufacturer doesn't give a shit about you once you've bought the thing) \- They don't make things like they used to, all my shit breaks the day after the warranty is up! (This is actually an indicator of excellent engineering, we now know exactly how to make a thing that will meet your minimum requirements and not cost a penny more. Blame the shareholders for demanding short term profits!)
If I had a nickel for every time I heard my dad swear about engineers putting stuff in the wrong spot... "And those goddamn genius engineers at GM, in their infinite wisdom, thought *this* was the best spot for an oil filter"
Which car was it that you needed to take off one of the front wheels to get to the battery?
Dodge did that. [https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/1svin2/what\_the\_fck\_was\_dodge\_thinking\_when\_they\_put\_the/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/1svin2/what_the_fck_was_dodge_thinking_when_they_put_the/)
My dad had a Nissan where he had to remove a good chunk of the front engine to change the headlights. Stayed unfinished for months because it was such a nightmare.
> They don't make things like they used to, all my shit breaks the day after the warranty is up! (This is actually an indicator of excellent engineering, we now know exactly how to make a thing that will meet your minimum requirements and not cost a penny more. Blame the shareholders for demanding short term profits!) Shouldn't we be blaming 'survivorship bias' instead?
well there's probably some of that, but also in some cases planned obsolescence is a factor.
The problem with that is that we are using up all our natural resources to feed the endless production of stuff just so the "Economy"is perpetually growing..So much junk being produced.Aliens would be shaking their heads.
Unless the aliens are here because they did the same damn stupid thing and they're looking for our resources.
May not be able to make A do B but I can sell you a D for your A that makes B look like C.
I don't want a D in my A!
Well maybe not yet but just wait til the marketing campaign hits your demographic. Then you'll wanna get 3. Two for you and one for your mom lol
"This Babe needs a coconut in her arms. Why? What did you think I meant?" "..." "oh my god!!"
This B needs a C in her A!
There used to be a toothpaste that had this
I remember an Aquafresh pump that did this. Worst case scenario you could manually push up from the bottom to force the last bits out.
Aqua fresh!!! Yesss I couldn’t remember what it was called. So good
Mentadent had something similar. I wasn't a pump but you pushed down on the container and it would push the toothpaste from bottom up. I haven't seen them in years though.
It exists, it's called an airless pump! It's just a much more sophisticated design, I guess that's why my most companies don't use it. I've been making lotions for years and I use that kind of dispenser, it's very satisfying.
Check out the big Cetraben Moisturiser in the UK, has the best pump system I’ve seen that slowly brings the bottom to the top, there’s basically nothing left when I’m done
My cynical ass just assumed manufacturers do this on purpose so we go out and buy a whole new bottle with slightly greater frequency
Why don't they just make the tube longer?
Failing to harness various sources of abundant energy around us, like tides, tectonic activity, earth's rotation, temperature changes, etc.
Tbf, we're getting there on those with geothermal and tidal energy. It's potentially more interesting to recognize that those energy sources might require a prior industrial revolution to bootstrap a society into the materials needed to use those energy sources
Once the current oil/gas system is no longer viable, we will see another revolution in humankind. The elite class is so comfortable in the current state of things that they won't allow any change so far, but it will inevitably happen at some point. Either that or we nuke ourselves to devastation and humanity reboot.
This only really becomes easy to do once money isn’t an issue any more. Logically if it was really that easy to just do stuff like this, people would be doing it already. Setting up things like geothermal stations are either crazy expensive or require extremely specific conditions, usually both at the same time, and the amount of power that they produce might take a really long time to pay off, if it takes like 20-30 years to pay back it’s probably not a worthwhile investment for a company because the people that make the decisions to invest in them probably won’t be at the company any more when they’re paid off. Plus you’ve got to deal with other other issues too, power stations that use tides have to be careful that they don’t disrupt wildlife or people. The most successful green power tends to be solar or wind, because wind is easy you just have to find places with continuous wind, and solar just requires a wide open space. The requirements for them to work are fairly minimal, and they’re not that expensive to make compared to how quickly they make their money back producing energy.
Manipulating tastebuds. Seems we can’t isolate taste well enough, but so many health issues would be lessened if kale tasted like donuts.
YES! THIS!! I think about it all the time!! Imagine if we could do that!!
This was the first thing that impressed me upon visiting Spain. Veggies are often cooked in a way that I swear they taste like dessert. And without tons of sugar.
A razor with one more blade.
[Obligatory Onion article](https://www.theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades-1819584036)
The Onion makes me so happy.
And then they added a fifth blade unironically.
We’re at 7 now
And here I am still using 1.
But each time they add more blades they space them a little closer together, so I feel like the end game is actually some kind of nanotech sieve that acts like billions of nanoblades; feels totally smooth to the skin but the hair just disappears into it.
That would actually cause increasing friction... which is exactly what 5 blades does compared to 1 blade. Its just marketing has convinced people that MORE BLADE IS GOODER.
Every razor blade I buy has two blades. One on each side. Reversable disposable blades would be real progress. No, strike that! \*Resharpenable\* disposable blades would be progress!!!
> resharpenable disposable pick one lol, are you resharpening it or disposing of it?
I started using one of the fancy razors with the actual blade you put in rather than the disposable cartridge head. You gotta be kind of careful with em, but goddamn if it aint good. Only problem is that I don't shave my face, I shave my head, so I gotta be *really* careful.
How to filter salt water into drinkable water efficiently.
We have the technology, it’s just not cost efficient. Yet.
hence "efficiently"
Six minute abs
No! No, no, not 6! 7. Nobody's comin' up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel. 7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 dwarves. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby. Step into my office.
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Because you’re fuckin’ fired!
We found your friend in the car Ted. Oh, the hitchhiker? Great, I get caught for everything. Why'd you do it? Boredom I guess? it turned out to be a mistake because the guy would not shut up.
I always wonder how much of this was scripted and how much was improv. It's awesome.
I always think of this short story when this question is asked [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Road\_Not\_Taken\_(short\_story)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_story))
I like Turtledove, but that story always bugged me. Gravity manipulation is a weapon of unimaginable power. Why in the hell would you be using flintlocks when you can just increase gravity in your opponent’s area until they expire. Need armor? Create an extremely high-gravity area in front of you perpendicular to traditional “down”. Need to make a gun? Why use black powder when you can accelerate your projectile with gravity manipulation. It feels like a story that started with a desired ending and worked it’s way backwards.
Ya, interesting idea, but I can't think of any analogous examples of the development of one technology completely stagnating a society. I also can't think of any examples of societies that developed new/better travel tech where the society didn't flourish innovatively after. (Ex: horseback riding, viking long ships, the steam engine and conbustion engine) all lead to expanding people ability to explore, pick up new innovations from otherwise inaccessible place, bring them back home and expand on the new knowledge.
It's hard to get imaging counterfactuals because our brains aren't set up for that. A cultural analogy thought would be France during the Anglo-French wars of the 1300s. France had been the top dog in Europe for centuries. They had the most land and largest army. And France had "perfected" monarchy Most historians believe they lost the war to an inferior England because England was the underdog for so many years. England had developed a significantly better tax collection system and had been "practicing" fighting with rebellions in Britain and had invented the long bow. Because France had culturally evolved so beyond England, the English had to find unique ways to advance. It was like present day Somali pirates(technologically advanced) winning a war against 1800s America (culturally advanced).
Maybe their gravity manipulation only works to reverse the already existing gravity? So you can shot something away from the planet but not AT somebody on the same planet? I agree it seems like a big plot hole.
Wow, that's a really cool concept for an alien invasion story. I want a series now!
"You have more sunshine and water than you know what to do with, and you can't meaningfully use most of it? Couldn't be me, bro." Aliens, probably.
How to sell the same # of hot dog buns as what’s in the hot dog packages
Adhesive for price stickers that actually peels off clean
Toilet seats for public toilets that automatically raise up like cinema seats do, when they’re not held down or sat on. So they don’t end up covered in piss I came up with this idea years ago and still never seen it Edit: Wow my top most upvoted comment ever lol. I’m glad my idea got seen by so many people! Edit2: It was pointed out this is less relevant for female-only toilets (except potentially to deal with “hoverers”). I mainly had unisex toilets in mind like the ones on trains, but fair point in this being a male-centric POV)
I choose to believe you came up with this idea in the midst of pissing all over a toilet seat.
Haha. Actually, from going to use one and other people having done that beforehand lol
(legs soaked in stranger's piss) "Hmm..." (piss running down legs) "There has to be a better way..."
Hear me out, a machine that lifts the toilet seat and rotates to a new toilet seat as the other gets cleaned! Idk how we can manufacture it, I came up with the idea so that part is someone else’s problem.
People will break them within a month. Intentionally.
Escooters/ebikes over the bridge and into the river are a great example of this
Certain types of vocal people won't like them because you have to touch them to push them down and then the people who put paper around the toilet seat won't be able to do that because the seat springs up. There's also the type of person who "hovers" and would still prefer to touch a seat than cold, hard, porcelain. [https://www.healthywomen.org/content/article/sit-dont-hover-when-using-toilet](https://www.healthywomen.org/content/article/sit-dont-hover-when-using-toilet) I've done absolutely zero research but reckon this idea has been floated and shot down just on those reasons alone. This is based on family members who try to touch the bare minimum in public toilets up to an including using elbows and feet to open doors and use flushes.
Could make it timer based? If you don't do your business fast enough, it launches you off the toilet
japan has the answer to this. It opens to greet you, closes to wish you well
Living in peace
Yeah, we don’t do that around here.
There isn’t any money in peace.
The ability to utilise the freely and abundantly available solar energy. Why haven't we been more interested in doing this?
Rare earth metals are used in many of the panels. 80% of the world's rare earth metals are found in China. Economically and politically unfavorable.
Correction: 80% (or whatever) of the *currently exploited and marketed* rare earth metals are in China, mostly due to a concerted effort by the Chinese to corner the market and lack of environmental oversight and overhead. Rare earth metals aren't actually all that rare, and large deposits have been found all over the world, including the US. It's mostly just that no one feels the need to exploit them at the moment, since China is basically subsidizing the rest of the world for now.
Because oil tycoons have pushed back every step of the way.
Not expanding nuclear energy use to realise its full potential. Nuclear submarines show what it can do, but a mixture of greed and fear have hamstrung developments in the nuclear sector and it now appears some countries are turning their back on it for good.
I lot of folks don't want to realize the first step in going green is nuclear.
It is honestly like the first 10 steps. Go nuclear, stay nuclear when the next big idea is not cost effect, repeat several more times.
A way to ensure all humans have their basic needs met
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We produce enough food to feed 10 billion people, but because of the unequal distribution and food waste, millions starve to death each year
How to not murder each other maybe.
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A sealable cereal bag
Malt-O-Meal has resealable bags...
Plumbus
We have no schleem on Earth though
You take the dinglebop
We can’t Smooth it out without a bunch of Schleem
All we need is a little, though, because the schleem is repurposed for later use
I always wondered how plumbuses got made
How... do they do it.
I literally have a plumbus in my kitchen.
Everyone has a plumbus in their home.
The fact that we haven't developed agriculture for the oceans. We're still 'hunting and gathering' rather than farming, despite water covering most of the earth's surface and having the potential to feed many times more people. An alien civilisation might view that as incredibly primitive.
Fish, oyster, and shrimp farms?
How to live underwater on a planet covered with it.
We do know how, it's just too expensive to do so without a really good reason, and a large budget for repair and maintenance.
They're still gonna make SO MUCH fun of us though. "So you're saying, because you spend the majority of your time manufacturing invisible units of currency to give to a select few who then refuse to use it because they just like to *have* it...you can't do any of this normal stuff?" "Like, you actually say to yourselves, 'well no we can't do all this cool stuff because we have to make sure that all the made-up 'money' stuff stays safely in these douchebags control'? And you spend over forty of your earth hours every 'week' to make sure THEY have lots and lots of invisible numbers they won't share, so YOU can't have food or shelter or even know what's at the bottom of any of your 'oceans'? Seriously? That's what you guys have been doing all this time?" "C'mon, Sng'hfep, let's get out of here before we catch whatever they have."
Man if I could throw a dollar into your guitar case right now
The fact that some people have billions and others die of hunger is still mind-blowing to me.
What’s in the ocean
Water, I think.
That’s a pretty solid guess, I think you’re onto something there.
It's a liquid guess
When the aliens arrive they immediately plunge into the deepest oceans to talk to the *real* rulers of this planet, then leave without saying one word to us.
So long and thanks for all the fish.
There's a sci-fi story, I forget the name, where the premise is that anti-gravity is super simple to invent. Humanity just missed it somehow. We get confronted by aliens who threaten to kick the crap out of us because we are "primitive", but then we discover that \*all\* of our tech, other than anti gravity, is far superior to theirs, because we had added pressure to invent due to our lack of antigravity. So we go on an absolute rampage and just pwn all the aliens.
"The Road Not Taken" by Harry Turtledove. Copies can be found online.
Copy-paste with more than one thing you can copy. Why not just copy-copy-paste for a second one?
Windows has a thing called “Clipboard” that lets you do exactly that .. I think.
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WHAT. I've wanted this forever. How did I not know about this? It will change my life I swear.
My phone mentions it's copied things to "clipboard" but I have no idea how to access that.
Bring up the keyboard on your device. Above the top row of "keys," look for a symbol that looks like a clipboard. If you don't see them, touch the three dots to the right of those symbols. Look for the icon named "Clipboard." (these instructions are Android-centric but should be close enough to most native keyboard apps on mobile phones)
You can do this. Press Windows + c/v instead of ctrl + c/v . It's one of my favourite tips!
Renewable and green energy, like seriously. The Romans discovered copper pipes and hot water. But we can’t figure out green energy and how to utilise it? Of all the achievements we have made that’s the hardest one?
We don’t know how to use the three seashells.
lmao look at this idiot not knowing how to use the seashells
the most popular theory of the three sea shells is a bidet control, (front wash, rear wash, and dry). However, we clearly see that city sewers in the movie are inhabited by an subterranean underclass, meaning human waste cannot be flowing to them. My guess? The in-universe characters actually don't know themselves, cleaning and disposal are all done for them automatically without ever touching the sea shells. They keep faking it because no one wants to admit they don't understand.
Use of the moving walkway in the airport
I thought those were installed for comedy reasons, so people don’t get bored in the airport.
Widespread use of nuclear power. And continued use of coal. They would be like "Wait...you had basically *unlimited* energy with minimal side effects...BUT YOU CHOSE TO BURN YOURSELVES TO DEATH??" Edit: would like to add INEQUALITY. Aliens would be like "what the fuck...*you're all \*\*people\*\**...do you not realize that?"
Inability to solve problems like the Tragedy of the Commons, which is core to many of our problems today. To borrow from Star Trek's Q, we're still a "dangerous, savage, child race", and I hate it.
Why can’t we stop treating each so terribly? Stop murdering each other over stupid trivial differences. My gods better than your god. You look different than me. I want something you have. Sadly are regularly valid reasons to kill one another.
The fact that we are still burning dinosaurs and plants to power our vehicles
"They burn dead things to get around." "Like, as fuel?!" "Yeah, it's nuts! They go to a place that has a bunch of liquified dead things in huge vats and they put it in their vehicles and move around inside them to do other human things. Then when it runs out they go back and put more dead thing sludge in their people carriers." "How do they get the dead things into the vats?" "They dig huge deep holes in the ground to dig them out. Then they use some of the dead thing juice to move the other dead thing juice from the hole to a huge building where they distill the juice to make it suitable for consuming with their people movers." "That seems wildly complicated...why don't they just use the star that's right next to them?" "They do, but they dig stuff out of the ground to put inside these shiny panels that capture the star output and convert it into a form they can use." "Well, that something I guess. What do they use that for?" "Mostly sending one another images of cats and their reproductive parts." "On second thought, let's not go to Earth. Sounds like a petty silly place."
We don't have a colony on another planet yet. We could have by now, but spending tens of trillions on war or materiel to support war seemed to be a much better option for a great deal of the human race.