Humans Are Survivors

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In fiction, no matter how many other races are kicking around, if there's one species that seems to have a knack for avoiding extinction it's us. Genocidal aliens? We fortify our position and fight back with everything we have. Earth becomes uninhabitable? We either head into space to find somewhere new to live or artifically create enclosed environments that are habitable. Our planet gets blown up? Again, time to take to the stars. Global ice age? Been there, done that.

Differs from The Eternal Churchill in that while The Eternal Churchill is to do with humanity refusing to surrender even when the odds are heavily stacked against them, with the possibility of extinction not always being a factor, Human Are Survivors covers the way that humans as a species tend to be very, very hard to kill off, regardless of whether the ones attempting to do so are enemies, Mother Nature, the universe in general or even our own stupidity. There is a fair bit of overlap though. Can sometimes overlap with Humans Are Special.

Examples of Humans Are Survivors include:

Fan Fiction

• In Renegade (a Mass Effect//Command & Conquer Fusion Fic), mankind survived living on a planet where, thanks to the Scrin and their Green Rocks, the ground was trying to eat them. Naturally, this coupled with humans constantly being at war made humanity even tougher. Even the krogan respect humans.

Film

• Humanity in Titan A.E.. Aliens try to kill them off by blowing up Earth, years later those who were evacuated before said Earthshattering Kaboom are still hanging in there despite the loss of their planet, being on the bottom of the galactic totem pole and the fact that the nearest thing they have to a home is a bodged together space colony made out of old ships, not to mention that the aforementioned aliens are still out to get them.

Literature

• In Arthur C. Clarke's Rescue Party, aliens who've come to try and save as many as they can before the Sun goes nova are suprised to find that Earth's inhabitants have already managed to rescue themselves.
• The City of Ember: Humanity manages to survive both above and below ground.
• The Green Book by Jill Paton Walsh. Another "take to the stars" one.

Live Action TV

• In Doctor Who the human race not only outlasts the planet Earth, but manages to survive until the end of the Universe. Unfortunately things went downhill after that.
  • In "Evolution of the Daleks", Dalek Sec merges with a human to become a Half-Human Hybrid specifically because Humans Are Survivors and wants to impart that resilience to a new generation of Daleks. At first he believes this is because of humanity's ambition and "genius for war", but eventually thinks it's because of humanity's better qualities instead.
• Firefly. Like Titan A.E., we take to the stars.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition uses this trope as part of its (successful) attempt to take humans from being simply The Mario to being Humans Are Special, and it crops up all over the game's human-specific support material. In fact, it would not be far off base to wager that a full third or more of human specific feats, as well as the racial paragon path, are devoted to setting up human beings as hyper-adaptable, survival Determinators, either (read: usually) by adding bonuses to saving throws, or occasionally more directly by adding HP or defense bonuses. Seriously, some of the humans' most iconic feats have names like: Human Perseverance, Die Hard, Human Resolve, Frantic Recovery, Don't Count Me Out...you get the idea.

Truth in Television

• In the time that humans have been on this Earth, we have experienced global drought, Ice Ages, drastic changes in sea level and weather patterns, numerous global epidemics, natural disasters, and many, many, many wars.
  • And we're still here.
    • And for better or worse, there's more of us than ever before.
  • More noteworthy is the range of biomes - from deserts to tundra and from waves to icecaps. The only other thing so all-pervasive is cyanobacteria, and even then depending on how you count.