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How does that make sense?

"I don't understand, Captain. Why do we fear humans? They live such short lives-"

"Exactly, Lieutenant," the Captain said. "For you and I, we can expect to live a couple thousand years-any injury we get, we have to deal with for the rest of that time. Any grudges we have, we have hundreds of years to get over it. We grow into maturity into our two hundreds and spend that entire time learning the basics."

"I...I am aware of how our species works, Captain," the Lieutenant said.

"Then understand that humans don't have that kind of time," the Captain said. "Within one year of life, most humans can talk and walk. Within five, they are developing most of their motor skills. At eighteen? Many have decided or are deciding what they will do for the rest of their lives."

"Which are only a hundred years if they're lucky-" the Lieutenant started.

"As for grudges and wars?" the Captain said. "We can last hundreds of years and don't have to act upon it. Humans?" The Captain fully faced the Lieutenant. "They don't have that, so they take care of it. Immediately. Usually with explosives, weapons, nukes."

"I-Immediately?" the Lieutenant asked, turning slightly pale.

"Yes," the Captain said with a nod. "We can live for thousands of years and spend time thinking decisions over. Humans don't have that time and instead use their power to grow fast to cut our lives short-so listen closely, Lieutenant. NEVER cross a human, for while they die soon to us, they can make it so you will die sooner and not have to live with the guilt."

When Krell had first heard about the humans of the Sol System, his first instinct had been one of pity. It seemed a cruel twist of fate that a species should evolve the necessary intelligence and understanding to leave their world behind and journey to the stars; yet be cursed with so short a lifespan they could never hope to see any of them.

He recalled double checking the datapds’s submission, certain as he was that some mistake must have been made, a zero left off somewhere. It had been at least a thousand years since a species had been encountered with a lifespan even as low as the high hundreds. Yet these humans seemed to struggle to achieve even their first century.

How could they possibly hope to take their place amongst the civilised species of the galaxy when their kind would wither away and die before making it to even a handful of their cosmic neighbours. Indeed the whole thing was a tragedy. Numerous thinkpieces clogged the datapads as the ‘tragedy of humanity’ became the latest cause celebre. Before too long, their novelty now gone, they were mostly forgotten. Why give any attention to so insignificant and ephemeral a people?

-

A few centuries later, Krell’s pity had matured into annoyance. Humans, it was well known, were impatient. They had no respect for the passage of time. While the other species of the galaxy were content to accept the realities of life on a galactic scale, humans seemed incapable of doing so. It was as if their limited lifespan had likewise limited their vision.

Rather than accepting for example that their paltry lifespan meant they were largely doomed to remain tethered to their home star; instead they had heedlessly ventured out into the galaxy regardless. Their so-called generational ships were considered quite distasteful to the other civilised species. A species living, breeding, dying, all sealed up inside one of their grotesquely large vessels. Simply awful.

Then once they did arrive somewhere, they were restless and rapacious in their growth. Humanity had established more colonies in the last fifty years than all of the other species of the galaxy combined. Twice over. There seemed to be no care or deliberation in their actions. They just did things. And kept on doing them while everyone else was taking the sensible precaution of deciding whether or not to do them at all.

Not to mention that their diplomacy left a great deal to be desired. They were insistent. Many found their communications to be downright rude. If they needed something from you they might send as many as two or three messages in a single decade, with no concern for decorum. Even when you did respond it was often a pointless endeavour. On numerous occasions Krell had replied to an enquiry, only to discover that the original questioner had apparently passed away. How were you ever supposed to work with such a people?

-

A few centuries after that, and Krell’s annoyance had transmuted into an appalled fascination. Despite their obvious and sad limitations, humans had been able to make some remarkable progress.

Their colony worlds had developed at a truly staggering pace. A standard colony belonging to any other species might see a handful of new arrivals over the course of decades. Adventurers or misfits who yearned to experience life in a small frontier community. Not so for humanity. Even without the seemingly endless stream of humans coming from Earth, their colonies would have been entirely self-populating. Some of their earlier colonies rivalled other species' actual homeworlds in population and expansion.

This galactic migration had been further spurred by their impatience with galactic travel. While the other species had been content to use the same methods that had served them well all their lives, humans insisted on pushing for something new. They seemed drawn to novelty, unable to appreciate what they already had. Not that Krell could argue with their results. There had been numerous advancements to the FTL drives that had otherwise remained unchanged since Krell’s youth.

Every year seemed to bring with it new technologies or theories that the humans had spearheaded. For so brief a species, they certainly managed to get a lot done in that time. It was almost endearing.

-

With a few more centuries of careful study under his belt, Krell’s fascination had evolved into a grudging respect.

Krell now realised that it had been a mistake to consider the lifespan of a single human in isolation. Some strange byproduct of their fleeting existence compelled them to achieve immortality through legacy and institutions. To live on beyond what few allotted years they had. While for the other species of the galaxy an individual had the time to see things through to their fruition; for humans they had to entrust that to others of their kind.

Humans even had a saying. That they “stood on the shoulders of giants.” No other species in the galaxy operated the same kind of long term collective operations that humans apparently considered routine. In fact Krell had a theory that humans were really best understood as some kind of hive mind. Or, in his more fanciful moments, what he liked to call a ‘meta-conscious’ species.

If you tried to focus on the individual human, well obviously they were dead and gone in the blink of an eye. Their institutions however, they lasted. When an individual human died, the baton would simply be picked up by the next. If you thought of a human as nothing more than the cell of a larger institution, and treated those institutions as beings in their own right, with personalities, motives and goals… Well then suddenly humanity became much easier to interact with and understand. You weren't really talking to a human, you were talking to an institution through its human agent. It wasn’t about what the human thought or wanted, it was what the institution wanted.

Yes a single human might be lucky to see one hundred years, but how long might an institution live? What might it accomplish in that time?

-

Even now, after all those years, Krell hadn’t lost his respect for humanity. It was simply tinged with what he might label as concern. With the benefit of time, some worrying trends had become clear.

Humans appeared to have a remarkable ability to adapt to the rapid pace of change they were inflicting on the rest of the galaxy. While they freely and happily shared their technological achievements with others, only humans seemed able to adopt them with any confidence. The other species of the galaxy were honestly overwhelmed by it all. Technology advancements that used to take millenia were now taking decades. It honestly felt like everyone else was being left behind, it seemed impossible to keep up with them and their frenetic pace.

There was also the issue of their sheer number. Humans had colonised nearly half of the known habitable planets in the galaxy. They were terraforming others. The last time a Galactic census was held, humanity had comprised nearly 64% of all sapient life. Krell didn’t get the feeling that number was likely to plateau anytime soon. What would happen when they couldn’t find anywhere new to expand into?

-

Case Study: The Journals Of Krell Tan’Bo - Critical Analysis by Professor James DeWitt - Mars University

It is a truly unique experience to be able to see the viewpoint of another species during the era of humanities ascendancy. To have access to their first-hand observations and conclusions is undoubtedly a gift.

Krell’s journals provide an intriguing insight into a fascinating period of galactic history. As with other non-human species his incredible lifespan allowed him to bear witness to vast tracts of time and provide a single, unbroken perspective which covered several distinct epochs.

With the benefit of hindsight we can see that Krell was not equipped to truly understand the macro-factors at play during this period. Though this atomised thinking, without recourse to structural analysis, is ubiquitous in non-human species; who seemed to operate as isolated bastions of personal/private knowledge. Nevertheless, despite their lack of academic rigour, they still retain a certain sense of wonder as they transport us back to a time when humanity was not alone in the cosmos.

Alarms blared as Avesi ran down the hallway. She looked out the viewport as five Warp Conduits opened into their solar system within near-light range. A cylindrical ship emerged from one, a glowing maw at the front ready to reclaim raw matter and energy for reprocessing, flanked by armored sides, and heavy weapon emplacements.

From another emerged a bright glowing streak of plasmic slag, a second ship reduced to raw materials by the raw energies present in The Warp, what a terrible fate those on board must have suffered.

Two more jets of slag emerged, and finally a second intact warship, with unmistakable Human engineering. They arrived mere weeks after their armada had been sent on its relatively short 20 year round trip to the nearest star.

Avesi scrambled into the Control Station as weapons fire lit up the orbital platform. She fired up the automated defenses, then took manual control of a High Energy Canon. It was too late. They could detect intruders coming from dozens of light-years away, and had configurable defenses to repel any manner of invasion, but Warp Armadas were... suicidal...

She looked at the jets of plasmic slag that had already moved significantly far away, 3/5ths of the Human Fleet was in ruin before they even arrived. That kind of sacrifice was unimaginable to Avesi, but she pushed her horror away as she saw pods raining onto the Orbital Platform.

Armored humans ran out, many of them dying as their suits suffered breached seals and died in the very vacuum brought in with their breaching pods. But the rest ran forward, weapons belching plasma, tearing through metal, tearing through flesh.

It wasn't long before Avesi and a small number of other survivors were rounded up in the control room, the a Human captain overseeing their security.

Aveesi spoke up in Veelan, "Why are you so horrible to your own kind? Throwing so many lives away in the pursuit of a fast victory?"

The man turned to her, glancing at a translator module. He gave her a Grim tight-lipped smile. "You can afford to travel between the stars in safety, decades at a time between neighbors."

He stepped forward towards her. "For us to cross into your system that way, it sacrifices all of us. Traveling through the Warp is the only way any of us will ever live to see our destination."

Outside the viewport, the two surviving warships positioned themselves to catch the streams of plasmic slag, processors converting the energetic stream of matter back into metal, back into plating, back into new ships for a new crew.

Darn, so the humans killed every other sentient race? That’s actually not surprising. This is really good!

Not kill, more like took up most of the available space of the other alien races, leaving them with little room to maintain their own population. Also probably the human race ended up outliving the other races as a species.

We're more willing to do The Crazy Shit™

Note to self: Losses to Warp entities high, invest in a Gellar Field

You should teach history course on a macro scale. Well done.

Last phrase gave me goosegumps. Perfect.

Damn, that ending though. You sorta expected it coming but the subtleness of it all got me.

+1 from me.

Excellent. Great prompt and great response.

Does that also mean the life expectancy of things around us that we know to be shorter is now longer than ours?

Like 80 year old ants?

Nothing in the rules that says you can't do that, as far as I'm aware.

I loved this!!

“Humans are so weak, can’t even accomplish one thing in their lifetime.” Lo snickers. “That’s what makes them so dangerous, we get millions of years to mature, it takes atleast 5000 years for us to simply choose our career.” the queen of the house explains. “They simply know how to choose their career already at 18 because they have such a short time.” “Yet they can’t even get out of their own solar system.” Lo shrugs. “I wouldn’t be so sure if I were you, in probably just a 10000 years, they’ll already be colonizing nearby planets.” the queen responds. “All because they have to work quickly and efficiently.” “THEY’LL WHAT!?” Lo questions. “THAT FAST!?”

The queen of the house turns from the orb and faces Lo on the metal floor. She reaches out her gold like tentacle so Lo can get up. Infact, what the queen just said is simply a sugarcoat for what the humans can actually do in 10000 years.

"Humans are spechul" prompt #583737

"A lifetime is of achievement in just under 100 years...." doctor Arkengarth said. Most cuil considered dying at 500 to be infant death. Most people called "earth" the "rock of infant death" since longevity seemed to only be present in some plants.

However here stood the fleet of 1000000 human warships full of humanity's best pilots and landing teams. They had "eaten" an entire resort planet, built a absorption spheres around 4 stars, and were tenfold bigger than when they were dismissed as a threat by the galactic war suppression effort. They did this in the time most would take a short vacation.

Dr arkengarth had been trailing the human conquest, originally sent ahead to warn other planets, but every one he got to had been completely conquered and altered to fit human design. It seemed that the humans learned how to travel past the speed of light (not that anyone else needed to go that fast, they were patient enough to wait 1000 years).

The humans were fast, faster than light, communication, lifespan, but just as expirenced

Isn’t this just Mass Effect? I feel like this exact concept was brought up in Mass Effect.

[removed]

You make humans sounds like more badass dwarves, why hold grudges for thousands of years if you can act immediately.

Happy cake day

So humans have a shorter life expectancy than butterflies and house flies?

Kinda how we did all the other hominids on this planet

Happy cake day McKnuckles "OldKittyGG" Goldtrickle!

I met a dying man for the first time when I was 4000 suns old, somewhere on the fringes of a forgotten galaxy. I remember it in brief flashes of colors and conversations; memories upon memories slip inevitably into the tides of time. Still, I remember it was a beautiful sky. Endlessly black, bruised by the bloodstreams of nebulas. He was sitting with a tasseled blanket on his lap.

I greeted him tentatively. He turned his faraway eyes to me, and for a moment I thought I saw stars in them; they were impossibly deep, impossibly old. A tiredness lingered around him, the kind that comes with the peace of a journey's end, the silence after a supernovae.

Cold, isn't it?

I startled. Yes, I replied. The last time I'd felt cold, truly cold, was on the coastlines of Old Europa - in the darkest corners of the known universe. And yet here on the balconies of a warm planet, I felt a sharpness in the air like the bite of a scythe. I hesitated, and after some deliberation took a seat beside him on the glazed tile.

I've never seen such a sight, he said, gesturing to the sky.

I glanced at him. You don't come here often, do you? I asked. They're always like that -something about this sliver of space. The stars are clearer.

He leaned forward a little, head tipped upwards. His scarf slipped from his shoulders. I noticed that his hair was a shock of white - a silvered, pure white I'd never seen on a human. Instinctively, I reached out to touch it.

Old age, he laughed shortly. Does that to you.

How old are you? I asked. The only humans I'd seen looked nothing like him - they were undoubtedly younger, with quick, dexterous limbs. This man had... weight to him, a tangible kind of gravity.

Still transfixed by space-dust and undulating star-clouds, he shrugged his shoulders. Eighty-seven, he said.

I sat there, digesting. 87 suns? Perhaps he was young, after all.

Oh - he smiled at me suddenly - Not suns. I forget that's the unit your kind use. Years.

Years. Not even a fraction on the timeline of a sun's life. It was - it was nothing. Nothing. 87 years was the time it took to travel between two of the closest home-planets - not even time, scarcely time.

I smiled, astonished. You've barely been alive.

He laughed again, and this time it was full and deep. No, no, no, no - he shook his head, for emphasis. No. I am old. Quite very old.

You can't be, I countered. Scoffed.

I'm dying, my friend. I'll be dead in four days.

I stared at him in horror.

He looked at me, a curious curve on his lips. You live for much longer, don't you? It must be odd. Mortality.

Mortality. Death. I'd known vaguely of death; read of it in old tomes where millennia had collected like the dust on its pages, heard it between snatches of priests' prayers. And yet I'd never seen it. Never had anyone say so blatantly and fearlessly the name of that dreaded god none I'd known had ever seen the face of.

I'm so sorry, I told him. There was a grief in my throat I found unexplainable.

He gathered the scarf around him. Don't be. It's all that it is.

Beyond us, with only a low steel barrier to hold us back, was absolute space. Spaceships drew a fine, delicate net between arms of galaxies. I watched the shadows of several moons as they circled each other in cosmic courtship - behind them celestial shades of indigo and reds shifting, melting into one.

Finally, I whispered: You're not afraid?

An enormous comet threw itself across the sky, tailed by fire and flame. It lit its small path through the void with a momentary glare. Then it was gone.

His answer was clear and sure. No, he said to me. I'm not afraid. I've lived long and well. I can't live forever.

In a small voice, like a child at the side of their grandfather, I spoke. But what if you could live forever?

He looked at me incredulously. Why would you want to live forever?

Light blazed across our faces in a violent, vivid wash of gold. I twisted and saw a world burn to ashes - a sun, collapsing in some far-flung stretch of the cosmos. Even from there, on this pioneer planet, I could feel the heat of the most glorious pyre that could ever be known.

The dying man gripped my arm; his face was full of wonder.

His hand was weathered like desert-stone, lines ran deep into his skin those handful of years have inexplicably carved. I held the hand of that dying man and felt a blinding awe and all-consuming terror rise in my throat.

Above us, the stars began to fall.

-

I began seeing his eyes everywhere - buried in the cores of passing star-fire, blinking from the windows of traveler's posts where rain left scorch marks on my skin. Humans became my obsession - that frail, fickle race which had only just begun to enter worlds beyond their own. This utter curiosity devoured me whole - some morbid fascination compelled me to find why they died as they did; an explanation for their undaunted departures and easy farewells.

I found that humans stank of death.

Death left black stains on their fingers, sharpened their tongue into bitter blades. I found brothers without brothers, fathers without sons, and saw how grief dragged them down into an abyssal sea even Europa could not claim. Along the Celestial Highway, I watched as a mother lay by the side of a child and scream, guttural and hoarse, until the earth wore away beneath her knees. There was a girl with hair the color of blood and fire who I watched grow into a woman. She died at the age of twenty-six - struck by a sickness that ate at her bones as hysteria clawed up my stomach. I watched as she stumbled, delirious, to my side on a stretch of grassland and marveled at constellations I knew she couldn't see. Some knew no graceful surrender, no quiet finale.

And yet they lived. Lived well. I saw in them a wondrous and dangerous instinct I associated with the implosion of suns, the same one I saw so long ago. They simply chose not to comprehend their own mortality - they chose instead to to dance wildly and paint, too, with equal ferociousness. Whatever would be the point? A woman with flowers in her hair had asked. There are greater things to do.

They flung themselves into the universe as comets did, with all abandon of reason and rationality. They bled with everything they could give, because they could only give once. And they loved with a love I'd never seen, one that I'm only just beginning to understand in all its complexity.

But it's not that complicated, is it? She spun dizzyingly on her heels, closing her eyes - offering herself to the heavens. We love this way because we will never love again.

They dream. They speak of centuries and millennia they will never reach - of lineages and legacies someone else will one day continue. Humanity, which remain the weakest and least defended, have ambition that blurs into audacity, a desperation to live with little compromise, and a love that burns, and burns, and burns.

She kissed me. Shyly, on the corner of my mouth. I felt, then, all those lifetimes fall away - all those nameless suns shatter like glass. Suddenly, I was young - so, so young, when the world was full of colors I'd yet to believe. I love you, she said softly. She tasted like ash.

I began to understand. And I began to fear.

-

I've seen a thousand suns birthed and broken. Time is nothing to me now; all it does is crawl on and on in some cyclic chase, and I'll witness it until its end. That is my destiny. That is my death.

How long have I been dying? I don't know that either. I was alive, a long time ago.

There are flowers here now, blossoming in the eternal springtime of this moon. They remind me of her in a way that invites the kinder contemplation; the one that holds me back from that cliffside. Sometimes I want that wound - it gives me the momentum to feel. I never thought I'd beg for that kind of salvation.

The days are becoming colder. There's an ache in my legs that wasn't there before, and a heaviness to my steps. Perhaps I'll head back to the balcony and look at the stars again. There's a planet in the Western Quarter that's entirely lit with rings of metal; next to it, a star-belt shielded by a near-mirage of pale spacecrafts. Human settlements, can you imagine?

I stand vigil over them. They remain feeble, fragile things - easily damaged, easily taken. They frightened me; now I feel only reverence touched by an unspeakable sorrow. Humans, I believe, are dangerous creatures. They have the utter passion of utter poets. In the austerity of space they are defiant, and that conviction in their defiance is what gives them their strength. From voids and nothingness they will rise, and rise, and rise.

Why would you want to live forever?

We stood there, two immortals on the brink of infinity. I began to weep.

That was amazing OP. The feelings are so beautifully conveyed. It makes me wonder if you aren’t human…

I'm speechless. Great story

History lesson (huge oversimplification): The Roman republic (which eventually evolved into the legendary Roman Empire) really didn't want any one person with too much power. So, instead of one single leader, they had two, called consuls. These consuls also could only serve for one year at a time.

They knew this, so they basically tried to get as much glory and honor as possible in only one year. And since the best way to gain glory and honor was military victories, Rome often would aggressively attack and conquer territory.

Because the consuls could only rule for a limited amount of time, they became very dangerous. The same principle applies here.

Nice

When I went to Earth for the first time, I was in the dawn stage of my life. My father had brought me on his little ship, and we landed late at night in a patchy field. As we sat there, he pointed at the tree-line in the distance.

"You see, son? This is a beautiful planet, beaming with life, and I wish it would remain that way. Unfortunately, it's inhabited by humans, incredibly stubborn creatures that live such short lives that they can't understand the consequences of their actions. They take from the Earth and then they die. I promise you, son, in our lifetimes this world will die at the hands of humans."

My father was right. I did witness the death of planet Earth in my lifetime. Unfortunately, my father wouldn't get to witness such an event, as he passed not long after our return home. For most of my dawn stage I stayed at home, pursuing study and living a normal life. Many, many solar rotations later, I returned to the solar system on a work assignment, and while en route to the sun, I remembered the trip I had taken with my father when I was young. I looked at my solar map, seeing the little blue dot on the page, "Earth", what a funny name. Following the instructions the map had set me on, I found myself upon the bizarre planet once more. This time, it was not a beautiful and lively blue-green biosphere, but a tan-grey world with only splotches of blue.

Confused, I wanted to stop and take a closer look, even despite the trouble I risked had my superiors found out I landed my ship on a foreign life-harboring planet without a grant. I had heard stories back home, devastating wars, humans committing massacres against each other, as well as wiping out much of the other life on the planet, the chemicals spewed into their atmosphere by their machines they used to churn out electrical energy, but now I witnessed it with my own eyes. I landed my ship near a body of water, so that there would be more to observe than just an empty desert.

My ship settled on the ground, if you could even call it that. Dust spewed up and covered my ship, as though the Earth was trying desperately to swallow me and take any material it could to survive. I slowly opened my door, and felt the blazing sun against me in that moment. Now, I'm no stranger to solar radiation, or radiation from any star for that matter. A large part of my job consists of studying stars up close, but this I wasn't prepared for. I had no protective gear as I didn't expect to be bombarded by this much radiation on a life-harboring planet. It was like I was trapped underneath a nuclear blanket, how did humans endure this? Well, short answer, they didn't.

I walked for a short time until I reached what looked like an abandoned city formed out of mound-like architecture. Beyond all the tiny mounds that surrounded me, there was a grand structure a short ways from me, and so curiosity got the best of me and I thought I might investigate. It was dark inside, as though not a soul had been here in ages. I took a light from my pocket, and what I saw I'll never forget, my answers.

There was a decomposed corpse slouched against the wall, the wall painted with the bodily fluids of humans, pictures of disaster, chaos, war, famine, death, written in fluids the words I couldn't translate at the time, so I copied them down and brought them home with me.

Upon returning home, I translated them, and they said as follows:

"We've lost. The siege has wreaked havoc on our grand city, and we must let in Merdisi and has army. The fool won't live. The sun has decided our fate already. Goodnight."

A chill had run down my spine the first time I read that note. How could a species destroy itself in such a brutal way? It still scratches my old mind every time I think of it.

People often misunderstand what makes humans so dangerous, they look at their weapons and say that is what makes them dangerous but every species has instruments of war of devastating power. They look at their ships and say that is what makes then dangerous but there are many species with much more advanced ships then humans who fear the humans just as much as everyone else does. They look at humans disposition and say it's their warlike temperament that makes them dangerous but we have dealt with many war races and none have survived long enough to be a real threat.

What makes humans dangerous is based around what most consider one of humans most glaring weakness, their lifespan. For the average species the 3 most common causes of death are; accident, homicide, and finally suicide. Most species are resilient enough against disease that it's a major news story when anyone in the galaxy dies from one and to the best of our knowledge humans are the only species without the gene that prevents telomere decay past maturity and is the cause of what humans call ageing.

For those unfamiliar with that term, due to the telomere continuing to break down it causes errors in transcription of DNA which manifests as muscles loosing strength and elasticity, weakened immune responses, slowed and limited ability to heal damage to the body, decreased mental capacity in both recollection and intake, and a unique category of disease called cancer where the error in replication that runs rampant and eventually kills the human. That last one is inevitable in all humans even if death through all other means is avoided through medical care due to how their DNA damages over time just by the act of cellular division.

You may wonder how something that only brings negatives and ultimately limits human to lifespans in the hundreds of years with the last 1/3 being in a state of extreme infirmity is a strength. The answer is simple birthrate, most species will have 1-2 children per millenia when they are actively trying to have kids. Humans can have a child and start incubating the next one in a single year and while they normally carry 1 child at a time they are capable of carrying multiple (2-3 seem to be the normal deviation but we have found records claiming up to 10 with medical assistance). Their gestation and development are also extremely fast. For most species the gestational period is around 10 years and developmental stage complete between 150-200 years; humans on the other hand have a gestational period of 9 months and developmental period of 16-20 years.

This rapid breeding is why all attempts to cull the human population have failed. War is rare in galactic civilizations because it's too easy to accidentally kill to many people for a species to recover when you can only add half your population again per 1000 years, a single planet wiped out is a major blow to any civilization but humans can recover from that in a fraction of the time it takes anyone else to. Humans can afford to fight wars of attrition without worrying about repopulation and they know that so they turn every war into a war of attrition. They will gladly take a 1000 to 1 losses in a battle knowing that they will have those deaths back within the year and the new soldiers fully trained and outfitted before their enemies have started to replenish their troops.

That was so beautiful... It made me feel young again. This is art. Truly art. Kudos to you. And thank you for writing this.

So post better prompts.

Just lovely.