I don’t think any of my people do.

Oh, sure, we hear the stories. And I have no doubt they’re true. I imagine what I know turned toward destruction and I shudder. But…

About thirty standard years ago my species got hit with the worst luck in the galaxy: a highly contagious, deadly, naturally evolved superplague. Multicellular micro-organism, so our standard drugs didn’t effect it. And so fast-mutating that our immune systems couldn’t get a grip on it. It didn’t look like anything would slow it down until it ran low on hosts.

We put out a general distress call, but not many responded. Our treaty-bound allies put up a military screen to keep out opportunistic raiders, but I doubt any would have crossed our quarantine warnings. A few of the more charitable high-tech civs space-dropped self contained water purifiers, power cells, home nanoassemblers and things like that. Useful stuff for the survivors of a civilization collapse – if there are any survivors. None of this stuff helped with that.

The humans sent a fleet.

I say “the humans”, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. Everybody “knows” that humans practice capitalism. And anybody who’s dealt with their merchants knows they’re good at it. And of course they have a government. But this fleet was neither government nor for-profit. It was from a human order called Healers Unstoppable (or at least that’s how my translator rendered it). It was a group of human healers who had declared that civilization-wrecking plagues were not going to happen and set out to enforce that.

They landed and starting setting up field hospitals. Now, that’s crazy for two reasons. First, nobody knew if the disease could jump species or not. Quarantine can’t really hold in those conditions. Every one of them could easily have died just from setting foot on our world. Second, who studies xenomedicine? Learning the biology of one species takes years of hard work. Two might be doable if you’re long-lived. But somehow human doctors are trained to provide basic medicine to every known sentient species. I asked one about it later, and she said “After the third or fourth, it gets easier.” Crazy.

Our infrastructure was pretty much in shambles by then – didn’t intimidate them at all. They just pulled out a checklist of things they needed, and either plugged into us or space-dropped it. They’d refined their procedures down to checklists. I almost asked how many crises they’d jumped into to get to that point, but I decided I didn’t want to know.

And they weren’t just treating patients. They were taking samples of the pathogen, sequencing them, and uploading to interstellar medical databases. A lot of us thought, “What’s the point? Ours is the only planet where life uses hydrocarbon polymer genomics, and our bio-informaticists are dead. Nobody can use this data.” Well, if you’ve read this far, you can probably guess it was the humans again.

Specifically, it was some human on Earth whose day job was database programming but did biostatistics as a hobby. He ran some machine learning over the sequences using his employer’s computers (apparently they didn’t care) and found some highly conserved surface receptors. He recognized surface transport codes because he’d studied our genetic systems. He’d studied dozens of different genetic systems. He said “they’re interesting”.

That was the insight the Healers Unstoppable folks needed. Within hours, they’d designed a cure and a vaccine.

There are species out there that are better at biostatistics than the humans. But they do what they need. Only the humans do it for fun. So only the humans do it on biochemistries they hardly ever deal with. And only the humans look at a plague devastating a far away world they have no ties to and say “we’re not letting that happen”.

We wouldn’t be here today without them. That’s what humanity means to my people.

Authors note: in case it wasn’t obvious, Healers Unstoppable is a crude translation of Médecins Sans Frontières, which exists and is basically this awesome.

by /u/dspeyer on /r/HFY