View Single Post
  #5  
Old 09-19-2021, 12:31 AM
cosmicfish cosmicfish is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Mar 2015
Posts: 477
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by StainlessSteelCynic View Post
Generally in research it seems to be that there are two ways to increase the levels of research: -
1. more money
2. more time

I've never been that happy with the time travel aspect of The Morrow Project and looked for ways to resolve that problem. My preferred option was to apply both of the principles mentioned above - time, money
I typically took the approach used by W.A. Harbinson in his Projekt Saucer set of novels.
In that story, the main character starts as a young boy in (I think) the late 1800s. He has an epiphany and realises the Sun will eventually die out and thus so will humanity. From that point on he is driven to find a way to get humanity into space to colonise other planets.

He ends up becoming quite amoral and using people as just another resources but his research becomes the source of the flying saucer and alien abduction events throughout the world.
The prime point here though, is that he has something like 40 years of research time and during the 1930s-40s he makes himself available to the Nazi government of Germany so he can make use of all their resources to further his research. So, he gets both time and money.

I quite like the idea of Morrow Research Centres and I think with sufficient resources (i.e. money but also time), they could probably reach some level of advanced tech needed to make the Project viable.
But obviously, how do you keep such places secret and how do you get all the funding necessary?
So I can understand why the original writers of TMP chose the time travel method even though I prefer not to really make use of it myself.
The amount of time and money already devoted to research should massively eclipse what TMP can bring to bear through conventional means even ignoring the issues of secrecy. Inventing anything like a cryotube will require massive investments in other fields, often for completely different purposes, and while you could get lucky that is narratively weak.

Time travel gives BEM the certainty and evidence to convince the CoT and everyone who needs to crawl into a cryotube. He is not the first one to predict WWIII, and without time travel I don't see how TMP exists as anything but a handful of people with off-the-shelf hardware wandering around right after the bombs drop.

As to the secrecy, the research would be the easiest thing to conceal in the whole Project. A relative handful of people, limited facilities and equipment, a few locations. If you can move hundreds or thousands of armored vehicles and thousands of people with weapons and explosives at hundreds of locations then the research centers should be easy, especially since they don't need to survive the war.

I've been doing scientific and engineering research for more than a decade now. With thirty years and a trillion dollars a year I don't see cryotubes happening starting with 50's or 70's tech.
Reply With Quote