>>149381881
That little thought experiment's always been kinda fun.
Most sci-fi just has humans as the base, the powerless nobody, but like, what if most spacefaring races are only in space because they got a head start via hyperintelligence, and the concept of being shot to survive another day and get revenge later is completely alien to them?
What if other alien species have been in space so long their actual bodies just acclimated to zero-g and have the fitness levels of a 90 year old grandma? Like sure, their ships can blow holes in moons, but a human (1) just managed to board their ship and is currently cutting into the cockpit after literally ripping the crew to pieces with its bare hands!
Maybe our centuries of subterfuge and spying and so on on Earth has made us pretty good at that shit with the other races out in space, and less than a century of being out there later, we've assimilated the incompatible tech of at least ten different alien races and all our shit is overpowered as fuck in no time.
Maybe most alien races are super long-living and it takes them a hundred years to mature to an adult stage, and so when a war eventually happens and they learn a colony ship with ONE MILLION humans is on it, they blow it up thinking that's some huge win, only to then realize that literally every human colony, every human planet has millions, billions, or trillions of humans on it and they're now all very mad and they've already bred replacements for those people you just killed without even thinking about it.
Or the constant clean-room atmosphere of all spacefaring races has made them all completely perfectly sterile, clean of every germ inside and out, and ANY interaction with anything human-related, even our wreckages ends up with a mass-outbreak of some nightmare illness that wipes out entire colonies effortlessly before they even have the chance to quarantine, and ironically their cleanliness means we don't get sick from them at all.
