Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

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At what point do they notice they are being captured? Depending on when this is set (relative to our own tech) and the relative speed at which their host star travels to the black hole, they could get little warning. The smaller the black hole (roughly planet size), I think the interesting it is, especially if it's on a collision course with earth.

I could imagine some engineer notices that some more distance probe from the star is suffering from clock skew, but nobody takes them seriously, putting it down to a fault in the circuitry: "It's old, the crystal timer is well out of spec". Then another distant probe also suffers a similar problem, and more people begin to take it seriously.

By the time they collect enough evidence that this is not by chance, other people have started to notice that stars have been vanishing behind a space in the sky. When asked why they didn't notice this sooner, there was no telescope pointed there for a while due to its position and budget cuts to the astronomy programme have limited search time.

Then the real drama begins, they know that amateurs will also notice soon enough, so they need to control the spread of information. They then need to somehow convince people who will most certainly die, along with everybody they know and love, and work towards the common goal of saving the human race.

Then some awesome science fiction around space travel that can escape black holes. Of course something will happen and the escape will be narrow, with them needing to sling-shot off the black hole or something.

I would call it something simple like "From Darkness" as not to spoil too much the story. For some reason Matthew McConaughey will be a space cowboy pilot, Amy Adams as space-travel Science officer, Matt Damon is chief potato grower and Denzel Washington has for some reason got to make a super hard decision to leave somebody behind. Samuel L Jackson will at some point get pissed off and force the launch. In a side story, Bruce Willis starts an expedition to go mine the black hole, and instantly gets noodled.

Perihelion Summer[0] by Greg Egan is a great story with a similar premise (A black hole passing by the solar system and affecting earth's orbit)

[0]: https://amzn.to/3DNiUDj

If you're interested in reading something similar, your description reminds me of The Black Cloud by the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. I have to say I found the writing quite clumsy, but owing to him being an astrophysicist himself there was quite a lot of attention to detail in making the plot scientifically realistic (within certain bounds).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cloud

I'm hooked. You should write this up as a screenplay.

Or, for extra challenge/fun, as a stage play.

The setup to your story sounds good, but the implied ending is unrealistic.

I think a better way to write the latter part of the story is that, finally, after lots of bickering, humanity mostly comes together and starts building a device that will save humanity, but the only have one chance to make it work. However, some religious terrorists infiltrate the project and destroy it. Unfortunately, it was the only one and there's no time to build another, so humanity perishes in the end.

Yawn. That's one of the most overused tropes in fiction. It'd be much more surprising and inventive to do a story where they do come together and work hard only to fail due to running up against the laws of physics. The audience might actually learn something from it and you could play out the stories of the characters as they grapple with their inability to save the Earth or delude themselves into thinking they still have a chance. If you want to send a message it would be more productive to harp on the fact that better astronomical programs may have spotted the danger sooner and allowed for other solutions.

I'd prefer a happier ending though with a bit more of a sci-fi spin. Narratives where everybody dies in the end were gimmicky to begin with and are just becoming tired and depressing now.

>That's one of the most overused tropes in fiction.

Huh? How is that overused? I've only seen it in "Contact", except, unfortunately, the project was saved by the government having enough foresight to build a 2nd, identical and secret machine in Hokkaido, Japan, though I did think that plot point made a good statement about religious nuttery in America (which really isn't a problem here in Japan).

>It'd be much more surprising and inventive to do a story where they do come together and work hard only to fail due to running up against the laws of physics.

I hate those kinds of stories, and this has been seen in sci-fi before too. The whole story is just pointless because it was a no-win scenario from the start, so there's no lesson at all, other than "what's the point of even trying?".

I like my story idea because it makes a good statement about how dangerous and destructive religion is.

>If you want to send a message it would be more productive to harp on the fact that better astronomical programs may have spotted the danger sooner and allowed for other solutions.

That kind of plot won't make for a good story.

>Narratives where everybody dies in the end were gimmicky to begin with and are just becoming tired and depressing now.

I honestly have no idea what you're talking about here: narrative where everybody dies are not even remotely commonplace in popular fiction. Even Game of Thrones has a happy ending of sorts, though lots of people die along the way. You must be watching or reading some kind of fiction I'm unaware of.

"When Worlds Collide" is a similar story.

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