Well, if I wasn't scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas before, I certainly am now.
So, I had this dream the other night: Ya know how a few years ago, there was this panic that the super hadron collider at CERN was going to kick-start a black hole that would swallow the Earth? And ya know how there's a sci-fi cliché about Earth having a sister planet on the opposite side of the sun? Well, in my dream, a scientific accident sent the Earth 1000 years back in time, so the sister planet to Earth, was, well, past-Earth.
The question is, what would relations be like between the two planets? How readily would people exploit their own ancestors? And what would be more interesting—present day Earth traveling 1000 years into the past, or future Earth arriving in present day?
2 comments :
You KNOW that if there was a younger earth, there'd be rockets over there, using our 21st century weaponry to exploit all the resources, just 1000 years earlier.
The mining companies would be like: we know where all the gold and diamonds were. We can just go and claim those lands earlier... or simply genocide the peoples there. eg Australia. Sooo much easier to wipe out the natives with a machine gun - or a weaponised virus - and simply settle Australia in a time where there was no moral outrage when you wipe out a nation of people.
Also: kill Hitler at birth. :)
Gold and diamonds yes, but perhaps more importantly oil, coal, and gas.
I imagine it would either be a wild west scenario, where all the major countries raced each other to grab territory on old Earth, or there would be some sort of United Nations protection scheme set up to preserve and protect old Earth—which would, of course, get twisted and eroded over time.
Good point that 1000 years would pre-date European colonisation, so Australia, Africa, and the Americas would take completely different paths. Or maybe the new boss would just be the same as the old boss. Also, English would sound nothing like it does today.
Hey, what if the timeline changed so that Hitler ended up being the bloke who led the rebellion that liberated old Earth after 900 years of occupation? Hmmm, I might be getting carried away now.
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