Thursday, June 28, 2007

Science fiction ideas

New Scientist Space Blog: Have researchers found the Tunguska crater?

As the article indicates, there are many reasons to be very sceptical of the claim that a small lake in Siberia may be an impact crater from the Tunguska event.

Still, it seems to me to be to the good start for a science fiction movie to have a submarine down there, discovering in the mud an alien artefact that was left over from Tunguska.

Speaking of movies, some years ago it occurred to me (while reading some fan boy ideas as to what would be good stories for future Indiana Jones episodes) that it could be a nice idea if Indiana Jones was involved in some intrigue surrounding the (alleged) Roswell UFO crash. (UFO followers will recall there was a claim that some of the "ufo" pieces had symbols on them, resembling some ancient or alien script. This would be a reason for the scientists to call in Jones.) There could also be a tie in with Raiders, because, you will recall, one of the bad guys thought the Ark of the Covenant was a radio transmitter to God. (Maybe it is a transmitter to the nearly God-like aliens instead.) The end result of it could be a message sent out to aliens, resulting at the end of the movie in the eventual arrival in the 1970's of the mother ship as depicted in Close Encounters. You could digitally insert Indiana Jones into the end of that movie, and have him leave into alien immortality.

Hey, I did say it was many years ago that I idly thought about such stuff. I was single for a long time before I got married, you know!

3 comments:

TimT said...

Nah, with Indiana Jones the interest is in this guy always confronting something from the ancient past. James Cameron did an interesting film, though, in 'The Abyss' where he has some speculation about sf creatures that live on the bottom of the ocean - maybe something like that?

Steve said...

I can't see why the issue of the symbols could not lead to some investigations around some ancient sites (probably in Central America, I am guessing.) This my idea is rather ancient astronaut, Erich von Daniken-ish, and those ideas are (correctly) regarded as very flakey now. (Gosh, he's got a website, apparently - I can't open it right now.) But weirder story ideas have worked before.

Anyway, I basically like the idea of tying together two previously unrelated Spielberg films. Heinlein did this with his books, but it became tedious rather than clever after a while.

I can see one possible objection to my story: it's one thing to suggest God is on the side of the Jews, and maybe a different thing to suggest it was super advanced aliens instead. But let's see - maybe the Arks powers were just an inbuilt alarm system that would have worked for anyone. That's why the Nazi's wanted it after all. As to who left it here and why - well that's for further working out. I want to just be the "big picture" studio head, sprouting ideas while some hack goes and fills in the details.

Steve said...

Sorry. It's Nazis. The apostrophe Nazis will be after me if I don't correct that.

As to The Abyss: it wasn't a bad film, but too long and Cameron is not good at making very sympathetic characters.