Science fiction/short story ideas

  • A budding human settlement on Mars, quickly maturing through shipments of industrial/manufacturing/agricultural equipment from Earth, gets cut off from the last few critical shipments for a self-sustained future due to a world war on the home world. The Martian settlement must now figure out how to ensure a sustainable future for themselves by either inventing and building the lost equipment (like semiconductor fabricators, radio communications equipment, Earth-based fertilizers, and rocket fuel) themselves, or navigating the complex task of acquiring what they need from a world mired in conflict and fog of war.
  • Humans experience reality and consciousness in a continuous way (at least, it seems this way to me). If the current path of development for powerful AI continues on its path, future AI agents and artificially conscious beings may experience reality as a discrete sequence of computations/inferences instead. How might a story narratively explore the difference between these two kinds of conscious entities and how they experience time and life?