What one of these two would make the better Sci-Fi story?

The “33 billion years in the future” story is kind of far fetched in my mind. Do you really think humans will be able to survive for that long?

I prefer the “immortality” one. There is a lot of material to work with on that concept. It would make a great novel or comic, but might be hard to fit into a short story.

I like the idea of the 33 billion years into the future, but I think it could be really great and super-dramatic as a short story. You would just have to find the right (shocking and or ironic) twist. The concept makes me think of that movie Artificial Intelligence, which started out great, but then had a really lame, unbelieveable ending. You want your ending to have that Wow factor.

You should read the short story called The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson, to see what I mean by having a good story with an “out of left field ending” that was extremely shocking.

Good luck to you : )

I agree with @erichw1504—in this case immortality (i.e., a permanent cure for aging, plus the ability to salvage & re-create the mind in case you’re accidentally run over by a freight train) seems more plausible than survival into the deep future. Indeed it would take immense creativity just to portray humanity (if that’s what you’d call it) hundreds of times older than the present age of our species—very challenging indeed.

Either way, I’d love to read about it!

I vote for the “immortal” idea also. I loved it when I saw your previous question and would really like to see what you’d do with it.

I love the 33 billion years in the future story. It is more original than the immortality one to my mind but it would be extremely difficult to do well. H G Wells described the end of the world quite nicely in the Time Machine where the Earth was slowly dying and the sun was expanding to become a red giant. At the end of the Universe I imagine libraries the size of worlds that no one visits and the absence of God. A great setting for asking philosophical questions. Good luck whatever you choose to do.

Seems a bit like saying, “Which sperm would make a better man?” I’ll reserve judgment until your stories can at least walk.

Both of these are settings. And both are interesting.

But you don’t have a story yet until you are talking about a character: a character facing a problem or struggle or conflict of some kind and trying to defeat or overcome it.

You could make a great story in either one of those settings, and you could also make a great story without moving two characters off the back doorstep of your house right this afternoon. It’s the characters you create and what you do with them in their environment that counts.