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This reminds me of a proposition put forth once (I think on tumblr of all places) that while humans are normally considered a "baseline" species in sci-fi, what would a sci-fi universe look like where humans were the superbeings?

There were dozens of replies along the lines of:

"I heard humans can survive losing a limb! Or even multiple limbs!"

"Their strength and tolerance for gravity far exceeds our own!"

"When one of their organs fails they can just swap it out with another compatible human that's died recently!"

It's pretty funny to imagine, and it's a perspective not often seen.

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One of my favorite SF stories flips this premise: What if human beings were the wise, moral, responsible galactic elders? And we discovered low-tech aliens who observed:

- "Humans have such good self-control! They can resist cannibalism and murder so easily!" - "Humans live for more than two years!" - "Humans have time to learn more than a thousand words!" - "But when you get right down to it, humans are remarkably dumb and unmotivated, compared to us."

…and most importantly:

- "Hey, can we get some life extension technology? If we lived longer, we could totally have an engineering degree by age 6."

Vernor Vinge, "Original Sin." http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Stories-Vernor-Vinge/dp/0312...

The thought's occurred to me that perhaps we are the ancient Galactic intelligence.

> One of my favorite SF stories flips this premise: What if human beings were the wise, moral, responsible galactic elders? And we discovered low-tech aliens who observed:

http://www.amazon.com/Pandoras-Star-The-Commonwealth-Saga/dp...

A quick search turned up this:

http://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/57702943181/mikhailvladimir...

There’s mounting evidence that our primitive ancestors would hunt large prey simply by following it at a walking pace, without sleep or rest, until it died of exhaustion; it’s called pursuit predation. Basically, we’re the Terminator.

Isn't that how the bushman in The Gods must be Crazy hunted his prey?

That's how humans hunt their prey everywhere (before we had tools.)

It's called cursorial hunting; wolves do it as well.

"They can survive in an atmosphere that's TWENTY PERCENT PURE OXYGEN. They actually need it to function!"

"If you breach their outer surface, an aqueous solution squirts out. On top of that, the weather on their homeworld regularly involves pure water falling from the sky. They live on the surface anyway."

"They progressed from tool use to apex species in only about 100000 generations. They went from writing to spaceflight in less than 500. They are about to create artificial intelligences based upon their own."

"They are covered and filled with some form of microscopic biological material that completely overwhelms any compatible surface in a matter of days. Attempts to eradicate it result in rapid adaptation."

"They have some form of mental superpower that allows them to defy logic and reason. All of their recent technology has resulted from generating seemingly random propositions and then gathering the evidence necessary to prove those false, rather than generating only propositions that conform to existing evidence."

There was a recent prompt[1] in /r/writingprompts similar to this recently.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/2csvwk/wp_an...

I remember that. Here is the link by way of r/scifi : http://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/1kl5ly/tumblr_for_onc...

In Old Man's War there are aliens that are about 1 inch high. Their technology is roughly equal to ours, but when their biggest aircraft are about a foot or two long, it's not an even match.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu

That reminds me of this advertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smwd8b0ycBg

Which in turn reminds me of a 2000AD Tharg's Future Shock story from around 1980'ish.

See http://www.reddit.com/r/hfy for more stories with a similar tack

An interesting piece by the YouTuber Tom Scott, based on the conceit that humans are unique in having evolved through competitive natural selection:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcPqk-O-fD4

noblethrasher made a link to a reddit post where some examples of this are seen.

The Damned, by Alan Dean Foster, is a great series dedicated to this premise. At first, I thought you were quoting directly from one of the novels.

AE Van Vogt had a nice short story on those lines, "The Monster" . http://bookre.org/reader?file=292661

This would be any Earth-based story from the perspective of animals who interact with humans.

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