Writing in these dark times

I recently had an idea for a story.  Some 10,000 years from now, humanity is on the verge of extinction – for reasons – and they use all of their knowledge and the last of their resources to build a time machine to send someone back to tell us we need to change the path we’re on.  Not a terribly original idea – I think I’ve already written four or five stories like that – but the way this person arrives in our time was kinda new. 

I started thinking about it, and quickly realized that there will be a lot of history between now and then.  They’re not going to come back and just say, “To change your path you need to support this politician’s bill,” or whatever.  They might show up and be confused that the Roman Empire isn’t still around, or be like, “Oh, I guess this is before Nigeria took over the world.”

So what future message would they give to help us?  I played around with this for a while, and that was when I ran into an issue.  Maybe ten or so years ago, just the message, “The path you are on leads to our extinction,” would probably bring enough of us around to try to make the world a better place.  But now, it seems the more likely result would be, “How dare you say we are on the wrong path!” Do you really think the people that willingly voted for a convicted felon would heed warnings? 

Working through how this person would arrive and what message they could give us was fun; it was the joy of creation we get when we write.  But that joy was tainted by the bitter reality we currently find ourselves in.  And I almost threw this idea on the “Interesting idea, but not worth spending time writing it” pile, but the idea didn’t want to give up that easily.  Originally, I figured the original story would have to be a novella, at least.  But if I can figure out how to get it down to a short story, I’ll put it on the list of stories I want to write over the next few years as part of my Sisyphean task of rolling our reality towards a better world.  It is, as they say, “Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness,” and sometimes, those candles take the form of stories.