Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

Human Skin and the Sun

The Intergalactic Journal of Xenomedical Biology

Author: Dr. Krill

ID# 374622

Status: Revision Phase Not Cleared for Publication

Issues - Informal language

I think by this point my contribution to the scientific community is enough to openly acknowledge that I am the universe's number one leading nonhuman expert in human biology. I have been told it is presumptive to claim that I probably know more than the humans do, so I have been forced to put in "nonhuman expert" against my will.

Human skin is an object of some interest in the xenobiological community. It should hardly be so interesting, considering that every species in the galaxy has skin to some degree or another, but human skin has some interesting qualities I wish to discuss here.

Human skin is the soft outer layer most visible on the human body, skin tones on a human can range from almost white to almost black with brown and cream comprising the midtones, though despite the color variations the underlying structure remains the same. Now human skin is known, commonly, to have three layers, in its most simple model, as there are other models discussing the layers within the layers, but for the purpose of this paper, I will be discussing the Epidermis, the dermis and the hypodermis.

The skin in general, but especially the epidermis acts as protective barrier, specifically to keep out germs and bacteria from infecting the inner structures of the body. Now, while it is possible for a human to get a skin infection, the sheer fact that they don't spend their entire lives infected with all the nasty things that they insist on touching is beyond me. I mean humans put their own fingers in their mouths for architect's sake, and as you know from my previous paper, "A comprehensive analysis on the human mouth." The fact that they don't simply dissolve from flesh eating bacteria is a miracle in itself.

Furthermore, the outer layer creatures new skin cells at a rapid rate. Do not be surprised, when upon acquiring a human, your living space suddenly becomes more dusty. You will be interested to learn that this is the fault of your human companion who cannot help but shed the entirety of their outer dermal layer every thirty days, so if you have a human, and your ship is dusty, simply know that most of that is dead human skin just floating around, absolutely disgusting. Humans can't go anywhere without leaving little pieces of themselves behind.

Earth is a planet with an open atmosphere and dynamic cloud cover, which allows sunlight, and thus radiation down through its atmosphere and onto the ground. You would think after a thousand years of evolution human skin would do a bang up job of protecting the human in question from radiation burn.

And in fact it does a bang up job. In the same way your granny makes a banging noise as she falls down the stairs. Human skin is absolutely shit at resisting stellar radiation. Now don't you dare ask a human about this, because you are bound to hear a crock of bullshit come out of their mouths like, "Oh I don't burn, I tan!" or "My skin is too dark to burn, so I'm good."

All bullshit.

Human skin does indeed contain melanin, which is the structure that allows for skin color and tanning. On different parts of earth, different levels of light are allowed through the atmosphere, and over the years this has caused a varying degree of melanin to be distributed throughout the human population. Humans with ancestry that hails from the north, where effects of sunlight are lessened will have naturally pale skin, while humans with ancestry more towards the equator will have darker skin, which is an adaptive response to varying degrees of sunlight.

However, dark skin still does a shit job at protecting from the sun. Yeah sure pale skin is shittier, but shitty and shitteir are pedantic when it comes to the possibility of skin cancer. Research suggests that darker skin humans have a natural SPF (sun protection factor) of 13, while fair skinned people might have half of that.

This may seem like a boon, however, human experts recommend an SPF of at least 30 which is TWICE the amount of natural SPF provided by higher melanin content. But try telling that to a human! You can scream at the top of your lungs all day and the bastards will just insist that they will get a tan instead. Its this diabolical human belief that they are somehow IMMUNE TO THE SUN!!!!? So please, if you must, grab your human and marinade them in sunscreen, no matter how much melanin they happen to possess.

Because of the erroneous belief that darker skin is effective at blocking out UV radiation, Darker skinned humans may be more likely to die of skin cancer than light skinned humans. Light skinned humans are more aware of the dangers, due to their natural proclivity for burning instead of tanning, and the visibility of dermal abnormalities like moles, or freckles. In many cases cancer on darker skinned humans is caught later because of the erroneous belief by both civilians AND medical professionals in some cases, that darker skinned people are not susceptible to skin cancer.

So I don't care if your human insists they either don't like or don't need sunscreen. TO BAD! They are WRONG! And they deserve to be SMACKED. Even a SINGLE sunburn can increase a human's chance of getting cancer by FIFTY PERCENT. A SINGLE sunburn. Never in my life have I ever met a human who didn't have at least TWO OR MORE sunburns.

The "I don't get burned I just tan." humans are FULL OF SHIT, "Tanning comes as a direct result of SUN DAMAGE. I don't care how pretty it looks, it is NOT good for you. I had a light skinned human once who fell asleep in the sun and the skin BLISTERED. That is a SECOND degree burn from RADIATION.

Humans can get SUN POISONING.

MMMmmmmm

The worst part about all this is I can't even lock the humans under a rock somewhere because humans NEED sunlight in order to get their vitamin D, and without Vitamin D, they could be tired, sore, weak, and may fall into heavy depression. In fact some humans become depressed in seasonal cycles where the sun may not provide them with ENOUGH light.

So apparently humans are INCAPABLE of being happy without getting to stand in the CANCER RAY

I have been stuck with these monstrosities for almost a decade now a decade! And I thought maybe at some point in my life humans would stop making me angry, but it just keeps getting worse!