What makes humans terrifying? We're not the strongest or fastest animal, and we're definitely not the biggest. So what makes us scarier than anything in history? At first, I thought it was because we're smart. But after spending hours researching human nature and what humans have done, the horror of humans goes much deeper than I thought.
Let's take ancient humans for example. Ancient humans used persistent hunting to tire their prey out over a long period of time, until they simply couldn't run away anymore. Just the fact that we have two legs alone makes us prime for running, but we also sweat a lot more than other animals, which cools our body significantly, allowing us to run a lot further. Humans can eat just about anything for nutrients, but if we can't find food, that's okay as well, because the body will eat the fat inside itself to stay upright. to stay running at all costs.
But what's sad is usually at the end of these hunts, it ends with an animal just straight giving up. When an animal simply can't cool down by sweating or efficiently run like humans can, they get tired, and they eventually just stop and lay down, accepting that they have lost. This is horrifying. After the animal gives up, the human can simply just finish it off without a fight, because the animal cannot move. The animal frantically tries to run away, but its legs fail them.
And as the human gets closer, its fate is sealed. The human has won. This absolute relentlessness that humans portray when they hunt is so terrifying to me.
But humans aren't the only persistence hunters in the animal kingdom. However, our scariness goes far, far beyond persistent hunting. Because hunting was important in ancient times.
But now, we've brought humanity far past the times of fire and stones. And we've become very aware of the true atrocities of humankind. Humans have committed much of their own atrocities amongst themselves throughout history, in ways much more brutal than we could imagine.
But will we ever fully unite, and if so, how terrifying can we be? In the case of an alien invasion, aliens might not be ready for the destruction that humans could inflict on them. Imagine coming to an alien world called Earth, and being attacked straight away by a horde of small running creatures that are somehow smart enough to inherit the planet they live on, and to have manipulated metal and chemicals into weapons of mass destruction that can blow up entire lands of mass in seconds. And not only do humans manipulate things into weapons, our entire existence itself is owed to endurance and determination.
When we have a sight in mind, we do not stop until that goal is accomplished. Our actual fighting capacities are barbaric. We can take extreme damage to our insides and lose half our blood and live on. But we also fight with such tenacity and endurance that might not even be conceivable to an alien species.
That's a human for you. Purely brutish. But unfortunately, like I said, humans have, in their own special way, inflicted a lot of their own horrors on themselves.
But what were the worst things humans have ever been through? Massive war crimes like the Holocaust and many other smaller overlooked events have shown just how messed up humans can be towards themselves. I mean, at a certain point, at some times, the biggest threat to humanity wasn't a massive asteroid or earthquake, but instead- well ourselves. But our species has seriously endured unbelievable challenges.
For example, in medieval times, the Black Death casually just killed off roughly half of all humans on earth in just five years. years, which if you think about it is absolutely insane. Imagine living in that time where essentially everybody was dying. Other early human pandemics like the Plague of Justinian during 541 CE killed roughly 30% of the population at that time, and there has been a plethora of other major extinction plagues throughout history, all of which we endured and survived. Things like the Black Death seriously threatened humanity as a species.
If our ancestors didn't valiantly push through and survive these mass extinction events, we would not be here right now. But that's what makes us so scary, is the ability to come out and repopulate, or remake what we lost after it's done, over and over again. But as I said, humans'biggest threat is unfortunately ourselves, as our differences in ideals and beliefs leads to the biggest conflicts in history, which leads to creating terrifying machines of destruction that lead to more casualties than should be humanely possible.
And trust me when I say, humans just love creating machines of destruction. The Rods of God was a concept where we would launch 20 feet long massive rods of tungsten into orbit, and drop them from space onto a target at a massive speed forcing a collision that rivals the impact of nuclear bombs. I could only imagine seeing a massive tungsten bar falling from space towards me. And ridiculously enough, the concept was only dropped because it was too expensive and not practical. not because it was inhumane.
We are great at destruction, and we actively try our hardest to protect from and destroy, well, each other. Aliens would probably also realize just how fast humans have grown as a species. 200 years ago, humans didn't have railroads. 125 years ago, airplanes didn't exist either. 75 years ago, we didn't have spaceflight.
35 years ago, we didn't have the internet. We've already pretty much inherited the earth, and next it will be the stars and whatever comes after that, and if anything tries to get in our way, we will annihilate them. Our technological growth is nothing to sneeze at, because it's only growing more and more as time passes.
AI is now growing at exponential rates, spaceflight is resuming soon, and medical te- Our technology is so good we've increased our lifespan by almost 50 years since ancient times. Our growth is insane. While we might have the technology to drop asteroid-like attacks on ourselves, what happens when something like an asteroid really does come attacking Earth?
Well, fear not, because we somehow have that covered as well. Astonishingly, NASA just accomplished what I believe to be the most insane thing in a long time. I mean, I was seriously baffled when I saw this.
The first ever successful attempt at combating potentially dangerous asteroids was succeeded by NASA's DART mission in 2022 when NASA intentionally slammed a spacecraft into an asteroid as humanity's first planetary test of defense. The asteroid Dimorphos was roughly 6.8 million miles away from Earth at the time, and the spacecraft hit the asteroid at 13,000 miles per hour upon collision. The crater left on the asteroid in mid-space was about 33 feet across, and we as humans successfully directed an asteroid orbit period by an entire 32 minutes.
We shot something across the vast nothingness of space and altered an asteroid mid-orbit. That is confounding. Space is such an invisible boundary for humans.
Its sheer vastness and emptiness is something that I actually made a whole video on. But slowly, surely, us humans are poking at the veil. We are held back by a glass ceiling that is space travel. One day, we might even be able to make it to another planet or another star, because we are so mortifyingly growing that our potential will shatter the glass ceiling without looking back. And once this happens, the universe will truly be afraid of our potential.
But I've been holding back on talking about one specific thing because it truly is the most terrifying thing about humans. That one thing is our curiosity, our unwavering desire to explore pretty much anything. We want to conquer everything that we don't already have possession of. We want to con- mountains so we can climb every one that looks impossible and some of us die in the process simply for the sake of doing it. We travel to space because we feel claustrophobic on the already massive earth and want more, more to conquer, explore, and experience.
We find every nook and cranny of every possible spot bot that we can so we know we're not missing out, and we love every second doing it. If I were an alien that came to Earth, I would be afraid, as humans would likely uncover me by accident and find me interesting and take me in for human investigation. The human is a capsule of creativity, a capsule of spirit and courage, and we leave our mark in every possible way we can for the people that will be here after we are gone, because we feel that it is important to say hello.
And we will continue to explore and conquer until we have fully, and I mean fully, exhausted every last urge to conquer in our DNA. And until then, what else? Whatever stands in our way, will either have to move aside or be annihilated.
And we do this all, all under the conception that we have no idea why we are on a rock in the middle of space with a conscious mind. We were plopped onto this space rock and took control of it in a blink of an eye. We pushed forward in the name of our biology and as the only animal capable of self-reflection in complex consciousness.
But with this consciousness, we are cursed by our own minds to be forced against the unknown universe. Humans aren't just terrifying, we are lonely and terrified. We are forced against the scary void of the unknown world and the universe. universe as we try to survive every day.
We have every right to be afraid of the universe and want to give up. So then why do we continue no matter what? Why do we somehow pull through the most dire circumstances?
I'll say it again and again, because us humans are persistent. We are absurd and we are great. We persevere even in the face of the terrifying and unknown universe. In the face of absurdity, in the face of the unknown, we continue to strive and proceed to push forward regardless of the outcome.
Because we are relentless and we are terrifying. O universe, tremble, for Mother Earth has birthed an unforgiving force, and it looks upon you wanting. We are matter that decided to wake up one day. We are significant and beautiful, but no matter what stands in our way, we shall push forward in the name of humanity. To write one more story in this seemingly pointless tale of history.
We will continue to breathe our breaths and become a force so reckoning that not even the Mother Unification can stop us. universe could hold a candle to our grid. We will forge a new path throughout time and mark the name Homo sapien deep within the cosmos as a crucial point in history. As a species so terrifying that we forced our way through catastrophe and arose so valiantly, we cried aloud with passion and determination.
Humans are terrifying.