by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
One of the more interesting aspects of the Impossible Scenario is if you give the demands of every major nation — especially the ones with nukes — equal weigh, it really is almost impossible to figure out. Or, put another way, someone’s gotta backdown.
The obvious venue for all of this horse trading would be the UN. So, that brings up a really interesting situation. In fact, it was my complete ignorance of real world UN politics that caused me to stop working on this as the basis of a huge novel series.
I think as a screenplay you could pull it off. And I have a few screenplays and short stories I’m interested in working on when it comes to this concept, but I have four novels I’m working on at the moment. As such, I just like letting off steam writing about this because of how interesting it is.
So, here’s the issue — you have an empty (and lush) earth-size planet that aliens are willing to zap a huge number of humans to (say, 1 billion), but there’s a catch — once humans are zapped there, we’re pretty much on our own. The more we’re on our own, the more interesting story would become because you’re effectively doing The Martian, but on a macro scale.
Anyway, I love thinking about the actual nuts and bolts of how you would settle a planet at the very beginning if you had some very strict conditions. One condition being the planet would be part of humanity’s “homeland” and, as such, We’re All Human. Also, no more war. And, lastly, there would be some sort of global government and civilization.
One wild outcome of all of this would be you could potentially have “Cowboys in Space” whereby you have a story involving cowboys on this new planet doing cowboy stuff but with modern communications equipment. (I think them riding horses would be cool.)
The obvious use of the USA as the basis of such a homeland’s government and civilization is very easy to use (if you’re appealing to American audiences) but everyone else, all 7+ billion people on earth would fucking hate the idea. Which, of course, is conflict you would have to address, which brings you some plot to work with.
There is a lot you can do with such a universe. You could do a movie or novel about making the decision to accept the alien offer. Then the lead up to being zapped. And then what happens once humanity got there. It would be epic.
And there remains a possibility that I will write a short story set in this universe at some point soon. But I love, love, love these four novels I’m working on. So, it will be a while. We’ll see.
