‘The Martian’ — But On A Macro Scale

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m really fascinated by how you might bootstrap human civilization on a new planet if you forced us to collectively only use the technology we have today. So, in essence, what if a Galactic Empire or some sort of human-made AI told us that Earth was doomed and billions could be saved — but with a catch.

While a few billion humans could get zapped to a new habitable planet, once we got there, there would be limited help. Humans would have to unite and start from scratch.

I keep thinking about this scenario whenever I have a little extra mental energy to use — which is often — and at the moment, I’ve come up with something like this.

What you do is, say you had three habitable earth-like planets to play with. Given the US’ history of being a national of immigrants, you initially zap everyone to a planet that is “Planet America,” if you will. This causes inherent conflict — a lot of people on earth hate America and what it stands for — and, as such, gives you something to play with on a storytelling basis.

But, wait, there’s more. You just use the Planet America as your first planet. The other two planets would be planned to be Planet China and Planet India, given the populations of those two nations.

What’s compelling, of course, relative to, say a novel or a Hollywood movie, is that American audiences would really, REALLY get off on the idea of America being an entire planet. And, really, it would be really easy to turn a novel or movie on this subject into a metaphor about the “crisis at the border” that fucking fascist MAGA shitheads keep blathering on about.

Anyway. the crux of the matter is, it would be really, really hard to do this, even with a lot of people. The issue is — it would take at least a century to replicate the globalized world that we live in if you’re starting from scratch with only a minimum amount of help from the thing that got you to the planet in the first place.

It’s all very interesting and if I become a successful novelist, it might be something I turn my full attention to.

Author: Shelton Bumgarner

I am the Editor & Publisher of The Trumplandia Report

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