Everybody enters cryogenic sleep until Earth heals !
Two excellent books I read recently sparked what I think is an interesting thought-experiment/movie-plot I wanted to share.
Orson Scott Card's "Pastwatch - The Redemption of Christopher Columbus" envisions a future society that finally reached serenity just to realize that after its share of past struggles, their environment has passed the point of no return and all they can do is sit down and watch their heritage dissolve to nothingness, or is it ? [Story begins here...].
Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" (Successor to "Guns, Germs, and Steel") studies patterns of past societies collapses attributed to environmental
misuse and correlate it to the current situation on our planet.
Overdosed on apocalyptic stories of environmental hell, I read Professor Diamond's explanations regarding the unavoidable per-capita impact of human waste on the environment (after all, we're not in cryogenic storage). And then it hit me, my very own movie plot ! Here it comes -
"Humans not many years from now realize that the environment is marching towards a point of no return after which all our technology will not stop planet Earth from deteriorating until it could support no living form. At this point of time, while Earth can still regenerate and slowly heal its past wounds our society is determined to take a brave step - put everything on hold, enter cryogenic sleep and wake up ten thousand years from now as if only a minute passed in a planet earth that is healed past the wounds of our ancestors. Everybody is prepared and the countdown begins. Ends. Our hero feels as if he just woke from an afternoon nap, walks out of the cryo chamber and find that something went terribly wrong... "
A sure blockbuster isn't it... ? How would you continue from here ?
Orson Scott Card's "Pastwatch - The Redemption of Christopher Columbus" envisions a future society that finally reached serenity just to realize that after its share of past struggles, their environment has passed the point of no return and all they can do is sit down and watch their heritage dissolve to nothingness, or is it ? [Story begins here...].
Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" (Successor to "Guns, Germs, and Steel") studies patterns of past societies collapses attributed to environmental
misuse and correlate it to the current situation on our planet.
Overdosed on apocalyptic stories of environmental hell, I read Professor Diamond's explanations regarding the unavoidable per-capita impact of human waste on the environment (after all, we're not in cryogenic storage). And then it hit me, my very own movie plot ! Here it comes -
"Humans not many years from now realize that the environment is marching towards a point of no return after which all our technology will not stop planet Earth from deteriorating until it could support no living form. At this point of time, while Earth can still regenerate and slowly heal its past wounds our society is determined to take a brave step - put everything on hold, enter cryogenic sleep and wake up ten thousand years from now as if only a minute passed in a planet earth that is healed past the wounds of our ancestors. Everybody is prepared and the countdown begins. Ends. Our hero feels as if he just woke from an afternoon nap, walks out of the cryo chamber and find that something went terribly wrong... "
A sure blockbuster isn't it... ? How would you continue from here ?
posted by Itai Lahan at
7:59 PM
4 Comments:
A rogue individual stayed awake and reproduced while the rest of the world slept, and his/her entire lineage is awake while everyone else sleeps. Upon awakening, the hero is immediately greeted by being hauled away and told his is now working for the "Lineage".
Or perhaps a meteor strike (less likely) takes place while most of the world sleeps, and the kills thousands of species of creatures and throws the ecosystem into chaos. Then when everyone who is still alive wakes up, they realize they've slept through something they may have been able to prevent.
By
Anonymous, at 7:20 PM, January 29, 2006
OK sounds like a good plot but went wrong that's the question that's open to so many answers?
anyway for the moment lets assume that most of the humans on the planet did go in to cryo sleep however a small group of humans decided that they would lay low wait till all the remaining humans were safely tucked away in there cryo pods and then resurface to take the planet for themselves! image all the technology and resources that would be left behind for the taking!! now being human as we are these small group of people were not the only ones with this idea! there were also many other groups with the same idea thus leading to a massive war between the remaining
groups over who controls what! the end result nuclear Armageddon!! now after 10000 years all the nuclear fallout as decayed enough for human life to survive once again however seeing as everything was destroyed and the power plants and systems that were supposed to support the 6 billion people on the planet in there underground cyro pods were damaged only a few hundred humans including our hero survived to awake to a world destroyed instead of a healed one well there can be only one answer! our hero must travel back though time assuming by sum miraculous and totally absurd occurrence that a machine capable of this, was available and survived the war!. and save mankind from its own extinction! how exactly i don't know but there's one idea to think on!!
By
Anonymous, at 9:29 PM, February 20, 2006
They awaken to an Earth devoid of life. They move to Mars which in the intervening period of their suspension has been terraformed by their robots into a lush, tropical Eden, and they begin the great works of civilization anew: exploration, discovery, innovation, invention, etc...
New technology is develeped as new knowledge is discovered and applied. Friends and family meet and celebrate rites of passage. Love is found and lost in new towns, cities, villages. Cars fly and people endure. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Write a story about individuals in extraordinary circumstances. Show the best of our species interacting with other life forms and with strange new technologies. Convey your readers through a range of emotions and deliver them a story that spans space and time and retells the tales worth telling.
By
Anonymous, at 8:06 PM, September 21, 2007
Our hero feels as if he just woke from an afternoon nap, walks out of the cryo chamber and find that something went terribly wrong, as a trap springs under his feet, launching him in the air.
He ears some glapping from behind the bush and sees a group of small humanoids arrive jumping. They look emaciated and hungry, and he seems to be their future meal, the cryogenic chambers transformed in a convenient food dispenser for the descendants of the descendants of the humans who did not make it to the cryogenics...
By
dot, at 2:32 AM, April 16, 2009
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