[Wri] Original Commentaries to my Science Scholars Shortstory

Last semester we each were given the task to write a short story on the topic "what if things were different?"

I began writing mine during a board game night a week before the due date, and here's what I wrote at first. Without much of the story hinted, I hope these words themselves are logically consistent.

That being said, the story itself WILL be made available asap.

Chapter 4 - Commentary

"In layman's terms, just think about what happens to an embryo as it grows - a human looks like a fish first - a new form of human society could undergo an extensive period of development where the residents aren't as satisfied as they would be if they stayed on earth. In biology, the effect is likely because that DNAs associated with different levels of functionalities start to get activated at different periods. When glycolysis evolved, there's likely not yet life as we know it; when spinal cords first developed, all animals breathed using gills... reasonable?"

The effects are at best reducible. We have our own troubles, on this lonely island of humanities, days are not any less similar to our ancestors',

...

Just consider, what if the the East and West met at a more opportune time?

Painful as it would certainly be, for each and every one who would go through the collisions of worlds, descending away from the crossroads, we see serendipity. We see how history propagate.

Probabilities could just be logics at its most magnificent scale. If events are interconnected universally, then in every smaller patch of space-time, the only correct description is likelihood. Whether that conjecture's true or not, humans are adept in following serendipities. 

As a form of life, we maintain and proliferate our existence by grasping every near miss, slight chance and strange incidence there are. We build up on them, and jovially assume that every new experimental data in every newly devised project is independent from the ones before.

What if.…

Does it feel like a trial?

The route of the voyages of Zheng He's fleet. Wikimedia Commons

Before actually beginning this story, my mind wandered and I wrote an essay emphasising how good imagination (and critical thinking) itself functions not at the scale of details, but rather as the ability to structure a world. Though I must confess that my ability to grasp such powers is weak, I have tried my local-best (not going to be global-best, apparently!!) given the temporal limitations.

I did not plagiarize anyone. That being said, I still find it really hard to say my work is categorically original, as my story sources not only from actual facts, phenomena and logics that I learn about but also (most of the times unconsciously) from fruits of imaginations of great people generous enough to share their worlds with us in various forms. 

Several ideas and inspirations of this short story were from Cixin Liu's Short "Xiyang (Western Oceans)", Asimov's ...many books and Christopher Nolan's film Interstellar,  Stanley Kubrick Film 2001: a Space Odyssey and Carl Sagan's novel Contact and non-fiction Pale Blue Dot.

Author,

May 2nd, 2016,

Saturn II, Saturn.