Don’t you ever wonder why so many Federation starships in Star Trek suffer weirdly-timed meltdowns? Sure, it’s television, but shouldn’t there be a real reason for all the shenanigans? For all that really weird engineering?

There is. And that reason is simple–humans are ridiculous. And wonderful. But also ridiculous.

It started as a harmless headcanon on Tumblr by prokopetz:

Which was magnified by a perfect shout-out to Back to the Future:

Then roachpatrol swooped in to explain why no one else wants the Chief Engineer spot on the Enterprise:

underscorex helpfully provided some context, pointing out humanity’s greatest strength/weakness:

Then the Vulcans explained to the Klingons why humans are given a weird free pass to run things:

To help elucidate the point, dragon-in-a-fez brought evidence from both Deep Space 9 and the USS Pegasus:

The sheer horror of MacGuyver was expounded upon:

And Captain Picard’s flawless (read: incredibly flawed but beautiful) plan in First Contact was put into perspective:

And there you have it. The reason why everything works the way it does on Star Trek. Because we’re constantly plugging warp cores into each other just to go have a fight with our alternate universe counterparts. It’s not our fault–it’s how humans get things done. We go where no sane person has gone before!

[Via Imgur]