by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
For the better part of a decade, I’ve been fascinated by the following scenario — what if a Galactic Empire came to humanity and said, “Earth is doomed. We’ll give you a second chance in your own ‘homeland’ of a few habitable places in a different solar system, but there’s a catch. We will only zap you there, you have to use your existing technology and unite enough establish a planet-wide government.”
This would be an amazing opportunity, of course, but the story would deal with how difficult it would be to unite humanity to do such a thing. If you treat all humans as equal — as we should — how do you figure out how to unite the very, very diverse and divided humanity?
Given that under this scenario, the Galactic Empire would be zapping a huge number of people to this new solar system — in the hundreds of millions — it seems to me that the only way to do it would be to use the United States as the basis of your new, planet-wide government, culture and civilization. The reason is, the United States has a huge population and history of being a nation of immgrants.
Where the story gets really interesting is you could use the whole thing as a proxy to talk about fucking cocksucker MAGA idiots who want to turn the United States into white Christian ethno state of “blood and soil.” So, part of the plot would be how Americans balanced this amazing opportunity with the natural inclination of MAGA to flip the fuck out because even though say, 200 million Americans would settle this new planet, 400 – 600 million non Americans would also settle the planet as well.
So you have much gnashing of teeth about how the “American way of life” would be in jeopardy.
And this doesn’t even begin to address the whole bootstrapping issue. You could have all these really interesting scenes of how to start a global economy from scratch — it would be The Martian, but on a global scale.
Anyway, I don’t have a plot at the moment. And I have a lot of other stories I’m working on — four thrillers at the moment — but this continues to be fascinating to me because of how difficult and complex it is.
