Time Travel and Mental Powers, Part 2

This blog post is a continuation from Time Travel and Mental Powers.

Today I read the first chapter of Paul Levinson's novel "The Plot to Save Socrates". It reminded me of the first story I ever wrote that is set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe. That story is called "Exodemic" and a major element of the plot concerns a virus that is discovered on Earth...a virus that was used to protect Observers, humans not born on Earth who visit Earth in order to observe the development of human civilization on Earth. "Exodemic" is mostly concerned with events after 1759, but I included a prelude from 322 B.C.E. in which Aristotle is taken off of Earth by an Overseer.

It is fun to imagine that extraterrestrials might have first visited Earth hundreds of millions of years ago and that the entire history of our species has been monitored and recorded by "Observers". In the Exodemic Fictional Universe there is no need to imagine time travel that carries people with advanced technology back into what is for us the past history of Earth. If extraterrestrials long ago started the practice of taking lifeforms off of Earth, then we can imagine that some humans were long ago taken to live in a secret underground base on the Moon where they developed advanced technologies and accepted the task of observing, but not disrupting, the on-going development of Earthly civilization.

However, in what I hope is a tribute to Asimov, I am trying to create a sequel to his novel "The End of Eternity". As I have discussed before (Painting Corners), Asimov was unable to find a good conclusion for his Foundation stories. I hope that "The Start of Eternity", a kind of fan fiction, can provide a suitable conclusion by linking Asimov's Foundation stories into the Exodemic Fictional Universe. Will the "The Start of Eternity" mean the end of Time Travel?

After reading Paul Levinson's knol about "How Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Demon Finds a Stage in the Foundation and Dune Trilogies", I started thinking about secret groups of people with "Mental Powers" in the Foundation and Dune Trilogies and the Haldus Order of The Search for Kalid. To what extent might humans with "mental powers" secretly influence, shape or control the course of human events? If a "mutant" subpopulation of humans with "Mental Powers" existed, how would they use their powers and how would they interact with the bulk of humanity?

It might seem that I have raised two different issues here, Time Travel and Mental Powers. However, within Asimov's Foundation Universe, maybe these two issues are linked. What if it was human invention of the "positronic brain" that allowed for both "Mental Powers" and Time Travel? If so, then invention of positronic circuits becomes the critical event in the "Foundation Reality". "The Start of Eternity" explores this idea. The story is still under construction and collaborating authors are welcome.

Image. Public domain.