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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Maxton1811 on 2025-06-25 02:55:14+00:00.

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August 28, 2025

Cracked asphalt crunched beneath the wheels of the bus as it dutifully carried its passengers along the Minnesota countryside. Beside me in a seat no one had bothered to occupy sat the backpack I purchased, with an open zipper I’d occasionally reach past to grab a bar of ‘chocolate’ or something else of the sort. On its cover, the book resting in my lap depicted a stylized image of their planet surrounded by discordant pictures—large stone structures with four triangular faces each, wooden vessels with cloth sails gliding across sparkling waters, and a bizarrely-shaped cloud that seemed to reach up to the sky in a plume. ‘From spears to satellites: a history of mankind’ proclaimed the cover in bold, golden text.

Opening the book and flipping to the first page, I found an index of events and eras that to me made very little sense. Resolving to start at the beginning, I flipped to the page marked as the beginning of this text’s first chapter and began to read.

Before the humans’ rise to planetary dominance, they were a humble species of hunter-gatherers. From what I could gather in the first chapter, they primarily made use of spear throwing and trapping to hunt their prey—relying on cunning, community, and their wrists uniquely structured for throwing. Another tactic these hunters made use of was persistence predation: using their apparently impressive endurance to chase down their prey until it could no longer continue. With these strategies in mind, I could see why this species was so unimpressive physically compared to the titanic beasts they supposedly killed for sustenance.

Despite their excellent performance within their niche, human society did not truly begin to advance until something like twelve thousand years prior to the modern day. This was when they began to not only survive within their environment, but to alter it. Fields of wild vegetation became farms for food, and around them the first large-scale cities were constructed. Humans possessed a natural social hierarchy in their family units, but with hundreds of such units living together, more robust hierarchies began to take shape among them.

Just as their bodies were stratified with different roles, so too did their societies embrace a form of power structure. Some humans served as producers of sustenance, whereas others—no longer burdened by simple survival—coordinated defenses or learned to make use of the written word. From here, early empires began to develop: the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians. Much like cultures of bacteria adapting over time to different circumstances, these human ‘cultures’ developed their own systems and beliefs, ranging from benign to baffling.

Without the tools required for objective understanding, the early humans resorted to one of their earliest tools in an effort to explain the world around them: they told stories. Tales of gods that created, evils that destroyed, and justifications for natural phenomena. Harmless, however, these beliefs were not. In an effort to appease their gods who, I will remind you, spoke only through symbols on clay, some human cultures practiced the ritualized killing of their own kind. It reminded me of how an organism might surrender a piece of themselves to escape a predator. Was that the essence of worship? A fear response against the unknown?

Old empires died. New ones arose. Some tore themselves apart like victims of autoimmune disease. Others still were consumed by more functional cultures. The Romans were apparently hailed even in the modern day as thinkers, artists, and administrators; yet just the same they conquered their neighbors and forced foreign cells to labor for the larger Roman body. Of course, given their empire’s current, no-longer-alive state, I saw no true purpose in casting judgment upon them beyond that which I could learn from. The violence of these empires seemed to be limited only by their external circumstances—in this era, any nation that could conquer most assuredly would. For them, it was subjugate or be subjugated.

Following the fall of the Roman Empire, human civilization (at least in the West) underwent a long period of stagnation and even at times regression. Empirical knowledge was tossed away in favor of superstition as the faith formerly adopted by the Romans became a dominant political force. Such times were not entirely devoid of invention, as it was during this era that the first ‘gun’ was made in the East. One thousand years after the beginning of this era, the Dark Ages would give way to the Enlightenment—a true rekindling of the fires of progress.

Once the humans acknowledged the value of empiricism, their civilization progressed rapidly. Their firearms went from simple contraptions that likely wouldn’t even hurt me to more complex, advanced weapons that could… Well, also not really hurt me. The development of steam engines allowed for the creation of far more advanced machines, and with these technologies, empires like the British and French expanded their influence to encompass much of the Earth’s landmass.

The bus jolted, momentarily shaking me from my focus. Grabbing another bat of sustenance from my bag, I quickly scarfed it down and continued to read.

From the Industrial Revolution to the American Revolution, each event I read about seemed to further complexify my viewpoint on humanity. Here was a species that advanced, but never fundamentally changed. For every declaration of liberty, there were chains; for every song of peace that echoed through the mountainsides, there was a ballad of war that responded from the valleys. These humans charged forth blindly, risking life and limb in pursuit of things that would outlast them.

It was not until their proposed ‘World Wars’ however, that the true destructive potential of mankind would be realized. Weapons that could mow down entire lines of soldiers became commonplace on their battlefields. When they mastered the creation of flying machines, the humans used them to drop explosives on each other. One particularly gruesome event that stuck with me were the actions of a nation during the second of these wars—one that engaged in the mass industrialized slaughter of their own kind. In some ways, it reminded me of the prior practices of ritual sacrifice. This occurrence, however, was not born of ignorance nor reverence, but instead from pure hate.

Near the war’s end, with only one holdout nation opposed to ‘The Allies’, the nation in which I now resided deployed a weapon of immense destructive power—a stunning crescendo to their symphony of violence. Regarding this device, I found myself of two minds. In one, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the raw might of such weaponry: a microcosm of the cosmos’ power. On the other side, however, I dreaded a species willing to unleash something of such terrifying power against their own.

Following the events of the Second World War, the body which had achieved this technology began a standoff with the other major power. Upon first glance, I found myself agreeing more with the other side—a nation dedicated to specialization without stratification, where all served a purpose but none were above the others. This was how a functional body was intended to be. However, the more reading I did on this side, the more I came to understand that their proposed ideals were ignored in favor of a deeply-oppressive hierarchy.

During the standoff between these two powers, the ‘Soviet Union’ developed their own weapons of annihilation, racing against the ‘United States’ for a technological edge. Though they referred to these events as ‘the Cold War’, the two main participants never entered full combat against each other, nor did they ever deploy their doomsday weapons—both fearing that the retaliation of the other side would be fatal.

Ironically, it was this planetbound conflict which led to humanity’s first foray into space, as both nations raced to be first. First human in space. First to orbit the Earth. First to set foot on their moon. All the while, they searched—called out into the void, hopeful yet simultaneously dreading the answer. They dreamed of life beyond their home, yet tossed and turned over the implications.

The book concluded with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, leaving me alone there on the bus to digest what I had learned. With each chapter of the history text I read, I saw the same patterns again and again. Death, division, dominion. Oppression gives way to liberty, which then itself becomes oppression. Yet for every warmonger, there was a philosopher. For every tyrant a revolutionary. In trying to diagnose humanity, I only found myself more puzzled. Capable though they were of immense cruelty, I discovered within the margins of that book a species that wanted so desperately to be better. To adapt and overcome—was that not the nature of life itself?

Setting aside my sense of kinship, however, I could not afford to ignore the potential threat they posed to me. Their nuclear weaponry held the potential to wipe out large portions of my neural network. In order to ensure contin…

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