Okay, I'm copping out on this. Sorry, I thought there was another weekend in there, and I've been spending most of my free time decluttering and cleaning the condo to put on the market. (HUGE amount of work!) But, I have thought about this topic and come up with a story idea. So as to not to be a complete let down, here's my concept.
Yes, the future. Far enough that there are viable means of space travel between solar systems, if not galaxies. I've not yet decided if the mode if space travel is linear, as in actual physical travel through space at high speeds, or some other method like folding space or extra dimensional.
Humanity hasn't changed too much since the announcement of no extra-terrestrial life. Withing the first couple decades after the announcement there was a noticeable though small surge in religion, especially those that proclaim humans as the ultimate creation of God or as the last step before spiritual enlightenment. Surprisingly it was the entertainment industry that took the biggest hit, as interest in alien stories and movies rapidly declined. But Hollywood and its counterparts are not to be kept down, and adapted to other drama sources for their stories. Science itself was pulled down at first, as dispelling the theory of life having evolved on other planets caused a widespread questioning of other generally accepted scientific principles, but it quickly adapted. Now scientists make sure they have evidence in support of a hypothesis before it is called theory, and lack of proof the hypothesis is wrong does not make it right enough to be acceptable. Advancements have been made in medicine, transportation, communications, convenience appliances, and of course weaponry. Still, overall the day to day life of people didn't change much. People still work to earn money, still go to school, still meet and marry and perhaps divorce, still try to find the meaning of life, and still go hungry or go to war.
This story focuses on the day one hundred years after the announcement, chosen specifically by the head scientist for its symbolism. Today is the day he launches a supposedly working prototype time vessel. Time machines have been made, travel to the future was achieved a whole lot easier than to the past since that's the way humans naturally progress through time. But the only kind that can send things to the past have been limited to data packets: information, messages, things that can be reduced to being transmitted via light or wave particles. And even those can only transmit back as far as when the machine accepting the arrival of the data was first created. It seems the idea of only being able to travel to a time in which whatever is traveling has already existed has won out over the idea of not being able to exist more than once at the same point in time.
Now this scientist believes he has a working machine that can transport a living being to the past using the powerful light and energy fields generated by stars, using the same technique current time machines use to send light to the past, and much in the same way except also shielding living matter from the strain of the journey. And since any given star, such as Earth's Sun, can be billions of years old it means a person could potentially travel billions of years back in time!
What could be done with this advancement in technology if it works? The possibilities are numerous. But our scientist has a special task in mind. After the initial test jump of one day to the past proving successful he intends to take genetic material with him, such as proteins and amino acids and whatnot, along with a lifetime of interstellar data he has amassed, back to the far past. Then he will travel the Milky Way galaxy to seed planets of the correct composition and state to allow for evolution like occurred on Earth. His desire a two-fold achievement: 1) prove evolution, 2) allow for the development of extra-terrestrial life in the same time frame as life on Earth, so that we're not alone.
The only hiccup in his plan, from his point of view, is when one of his assistants piece together what he's intending to do. The assistant has major concerns over the plan, and tries to convince the scientist to not go through with the plan. Firstly, no one knows how actions in the past might affect what is known to be the time line. If he succeeds - in creating other life elsewhere - he would change at least the past hundred years, possibly for the worst. Can time even change, or would the scientist be destroyed in the attempt? Or what if creating a temporal causality loop would unmake all of creation? If God exists, that would possibly bring in a whole other set of issues.
The assistant is not willing to take any of those risks, and definitely not willing to let the scientist do so either. The assistant tries to enlist help from the other assistants in stopping the scientist. Sabotage is decided on, though they know that will only delay the scientist. Ideally they would want to replace the scientist as the test subject, but getting a volunteer and one that is trusted to not attempt anything in the past, is hard. Some sort of government intervention or the creation of a group to oversee the ethics of time travel, if they - ironically - have the time to get such things established. The original assistant secretly considers murder as a last option.
That's all I've got so far. You know, I guess this isn't a cop out. After all the point of FLB is to write and get creative at least once a month, and I did that! People can comment if they want, but I know it is just an outline of a story.
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4 comments:
Once again, it's interesting to note the similarities in how we handled the topic. We evidently both feel that at least some of humanity would see our being alone in the universe as a bad thing and seek to correct it through artificial means. And we both anticipated that not everyone would necessarily go along with that line of thinking. I think yours is going to be a bit more in the realm of the scientificly plausable and mine uns a bit more pessimistic about what humanity would do knowing that they were the ultimate authority in the galaxy. But still, a lot of similarities.
My intial thought for turning this into a story is that you should start with the assistans discussing their options. I think the reader's natural inclination would be to sympathize with the main scientist, even if only because the creation of new alien life makes for a more interesting story than no new alien life being created. If you start by showing things from the assistant's point of view, it helps to tip the scales a little in their favor. Then when you reveal that the main assistant feels so strongly that this experiment would not take place that s/he would consider murdering the scientist to stop it, it could make the readers a little more unsure of their loyalties. Then maybe you could shift perspective to the scientist to give the reader a full look at everyone's side of the issue.
I think the big challenge of this story is going to be deciding how time travel works. I think the characters would know a little more about how it works than you indicate in the outline, since sending some things into the future and limited past is possible. Even sending a small bit of information back to a time during the time machine's existance would give some indication of how time travel effects the flow of time. And I 'd guess that this particular scientist has probably experimented with sending other things back in time to before the machine's creation to test it out if he's now willing to send himself back there.. Assuming these things are true, I'm not sure how much the potential hazards of time travel itself are going to figure into the central dilemna of the story, beyond the possibility that what this scientist wants to do could have serious reprecussions, assuming it is possible to change history.
This sounds like a good start and I hope you get to writing it at some point. I'll give you a chance to read and comment on my take before I put up the next topic.
I like the idea of starting with the assistants discussing their side of things. My only hesitation is that is a major critique I got on another story a few years ago - actually I think it was Bane of Death - which was that stories should start from the beginning and not in the middle of a scene. I suppose I could start with the head assistant calling the others together and revealing what he's figured out.
I actually already know how the time travel I'm thinking of works. It's based off a theory that is currently being tested in fact. Freaky, I know. But yeah, too involved to explain well in an outline.
Thanks for the words of wisdom! I'll be commenting on yours in the next few days.
-Jennifer
Personally, I think starting a scene at the "begining" can be a bit overreated. Life is not divided into clear cut scenes; there's always something that happens before the scene and something that happens after. And heck, even Shakespeare started some of his scenes in what could be termed "the middle", with characters already present and in mid-conversation. The trick is to start the scene at a point where it's interesting so the reader doesn't feel like you're just spending tme setting up the scene and moving everything into place so the actual story can begin. What you want to avoid is making the reader feel like crucial and interesting events have been skipped over or that you are doing so much explaining of things that happened before the current scene that you might as well have started writing there.
I'd suggest starting the story with the assistants talking over what they're going to do about the main scietist's plans. You could start it with the main assistant revealing the scietist's plan to go back in time and craete life on other worlds, but that poses a story challenge. Realisticly, not all of the assistant would react the same way, namely "Oh, that's horrible and we have to band together and try to stop him!" Some might think it's actually a good idea and some might think that while it's a bad idea, voicing their concerns directly to the main scientist is the more logical and ehtical thing to do. So these people break away from the group, go to the scietist, and tell him that a bunch of his assistants think his idea is dangerous and may try to stop him with sabotage or worse. The main scientists takes precautions to safeguard his experiment and himself, and our story hits a dead end. So if you start with a meeting of a group of assistants who know what's going to happen and who have all been identified as sympathetic to the idea of stopping the experiment from going forward, you eliminate that problem. The thing to avoid is showing every single person arriving to the meeting, exchanging pleasantries, sitting down, etc, UNLESS this reveals things about them that will be important later in the story.
I have heard a thing or two about theoretical time machines that could send things back only as long as the machine has been in existance. But the main thing is going to be figuring out how time travel affects the timeline and the people who do and don't participate in the time travel itself.
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