Science fiction authors often start with a very wild premise,
and then try to
logically work through the consequences of the premise. That's
"deduction",
and the author writes those consequences into the story. The
reader,
encountering those consequences over the course of the story,
tries
to figure
out
the premise ("induction", rather more difficult). This game
between SF
authors
and readers has been going on since the 1940s or so.
We can now imagine a TV series that capitalizes on that "game",
showing us
a
small crew of human explorers visiting some alien planet, and
the aliens are
behaving in ways that seem nonsensical, because everything
seems to be
legal,
including murders, rapes, theft, and so on. Each episode might
cover one
aspect of the nonsense, and when the series ends, the humans
have finally
figured out why the apparent nonsense actually makes sense.
For these aliens, one of the keys to the nonsense is
metaphysical in nature;
they have ways of communicating with THEIR dead (referenced
as
"Ancestors").
Likely they will be shocked to discover humans can't do that. It
is important
to
the structure of the series that the humans not find out about
this alien
capability for several episodes after the show starts --and a
couple episodes
might go by after that, in which the humans are trying to
convince themselves
their discovery is true!
One of the consequences of accepting that discovery, of course,
will be
human
curiosity about dead humans. The aliens can't answer that
unless some
human
is willing to die, of course. There might be more than one
episode about this.
Anyway, if a death happens (probably unwillingly, so common
are deaths in
TV
shows, although here we have to be careful since the crew of
human visitors
is
small), the result can still be rather unenlightening, as far as
the goal of the
series is concerned. The aliens could say something like, "Well,
the
Ancestors
told us that the human soul didn't stick around, and likely
zipped back to your
home planet. This is OUR world, remember?"
The next key directly relates to the first. If you could contact
a human
Ancestor, and that entity stated it was planning on incarnating
into a new
human
body, would you believe in reincarnation? Well, the aliens don't
know
anything
at all about whether human souls reincarnate or not, but they
certainly believe
it
happens on THEIR world! Not necessarily all the time, though.
One
metaphysical notion I've never seen explored might be called
"soul
reproduction". God is NOT involved in this TV series, but we
can imagine the
alien souls interacting in such a way as to make more souls.
Many births on
the
alien world would be associated with the "new" souls. And even
when a
reincarnation happens, the soul doesn't remember What Has
Gone Before,
basically making it equal to a new soul.
Now we can imagine some episodes in which a female member
of the human
crew has become pregnant --will the baby have a human soul or
an alien soul
(because all the human souls are back at Earth)? For the
purposes of the
TV
show, it might be best if the outcome is left in doubt --
remember that SF has
a
purpose of getting people to THINK, more than it is about
saying, "this is the
truth". Also, remember that human pregnancies take 9 months
to complete,
and we can't expect the series to cover that much time. A
miscarriage might
be
the simplest all-around thing for the TV show to do, here.
So, what IS going in the alien culture, that allows murders,
rapes, etc?
Well,
consider the world from the viewpoint of the Ancestors. It is a
playground!
Souls are immortal and can't be harmed by any physical thing,
see? So, the
Ancestors are essentially playing a game. Any of them can
incarnate
into
the world, and make up any rules at all, for interacting with
others in the
physical world. Game-points are scored or lost not by the rules
someone
chose, nor by, say, how rich one got, but by how well the
person abided by
his
or her own rules. For example, if someone had a Rule that it
was perfectly
OK
to randomly maim other persons, then if that person happens to
become
randomly maimed, and complains about it, then that person
loses game
points.
Simple!