[ WP ] Humanity is the most powerful race in the galaxy . Every other race wants to win our respect . Even for ordinary humans , it 's become impossible to go off-world because our presence demands so much respect , awe , and asskissing .

The first human contact with aliens was awkward and distressing. 
 Best described as snail-like sentients, the Aluumu were slow-moving pseudo-molluscs who had developed a sort of organic technology that had allowed them to venture into space. They were old - about 10 billion years older than humanity - yet their technology was just barely beyond our own. 
 But the most astonishing fact was that they did n't understand the concept of *weapons*. 
 Human xenobiologists and xenoanthropologists who studied the Aluumu homeworld were stunned to find a culture and ecosystem that *did not have predators*. 
 This sort of biological harmony meant that the species shared genetics freely across various animals and the Aluumu were actually massive colonies of different species - similar to our terrestrial Chondrophores. At the very basic level, everything on the planet Aluu ingested only inorganic or decaying matter, the lowest organisms converting the matter through to the higher organisms in a beautiful chain of complex biochemistry that left many of our xenobiologists irritatingly excitable. 
 The other problem ( for the Aluumu ) was that they had no concept of *selfishness*. 
 Coming from a global system that only *benefited* from total altruism, they did not understand the human capacity for moral ambiguity - and were therefore easily taken advantage of. 
 Lacking any concept of conflict and finding the concept of war terrifyingly incomprehensible, they ignored our differences and tried to'integrate' us into their species by altruistically seeding us with genetic information; to not only bring about biological perfection by freeing us of disease, but to'soothe the savage beast' within us and remove our dominant, violent traits. 
 Humanity, of course, saw this as an attack. 
 
 The Aluumu had been in contact with many other sentient, space-faring species, as we discovered from their records. 
 What remained of the species after the Aluumu'wars' amounted to nothing more than a handful of individuals who were kept in research facilities and used for advanced genetic research. 
 From them, humanity learned to program itself into a biologically superior organism. 
 Like the Aluumu, most of the other alien species had no concept of war, or it had died out in their very ancient past. Organic life in the galaxy, it seemed, was far less like us and far more like the snail-creatures we had practically exterminated. 
 Primed by the terror of the Aluumu'wars', where vast portions of humanity had been'infected' with a'zombie virus' that made us slow-moving, affable and selflessly co-operative to the point of docility, the Earth corporations who controlled our resource-stripped planet saw an opportunity to demonstrate what would become the defining feature of our species - unbridled greed. 
 Behaving like mobile insect colonies, the Idri were the next to fall, then the Palacatalata - city-sized super organisms comprising of billions of trillions of cooperative single-celled entities. Both put up a token resistance, but both fell quickly to the scourge of humanity. 
 Panicking, the galactic community convened and elected the Rovak - the only other race with a vaguely war-like history - to head their battle fleets. 
 But humanity, having taken such pleasure in genetically engineering super-soldiers and reverse-engineering alien biotech, had built massive, unstoppable juggernauts in preparation for what we saw as an'inevitable' conflict with another species like ourselves. 
 To say the war was one-sided is being generous. 
 It was a massacre to make previous human genocides feel comforting and benign. 
 Aided by the hideous, arachnid appearance of the Rovak and an'insurmountable' language barrier, the human troops thought they were simply making pre-emptive strikes against an aggressor hell-bent on wiping us out. Certainly it looked that way to the average citizen - planet after planet of newly-built alien military outposts, strategically positioned against Earth and its colonies. 
 Fearing an end in the same manner as the Aluumu, the Idri and the Palacatalata, the galactic races surrendered to humanity and begged for their lives. 
 
 In the aftermath, we sit here, rulers of the galaxy, virtual Terror Gods to these gentle, placid aliens. 
 Aliens who learned the art of war far too late; just as we learned the art of *peace* far too late. 
 Humanity is treated with such deference and reverence on the alien populated worlds that it is *embarrassing* to step foot on whatever passes for their streets. Even the remnants of the Rovak species grovel, flip themselves on their back and present their furry, vulnerable underbellies to us, showing we are the dominant species. 
 Other races, like the Yu, will simply commit mass ritual suicide on sight of a human being, so we can not even set foot on their worlds. 
 The damage we have done to this galaxy is utterly beyond repair. 
 There is no way back from this; even should humanity become like the Yu and commit massive, galactic suicide, the other races will never recover what they once had. They are too frail, too fearful and too broken. 
 As we harness the last technologies of the elder races and our collective eye turns outward from the Milky Way, I fear for the rest of the universe. 
 
 *- Allison Hale, Xenobiologist*
