On that matter of time and creativity..

The concept of Time and Precogs is one that continues to fascinate me. If you had a full view of the future, all futures, you could learn so much from it. You could examine your potential lives and gleam from them great answers, without actually having spent your life. Knowledge without cost, as it were.

An example: You could examine a potential life where you pursued an indepth study of medicine, and secured funding and a laboratory to experiment in. In this lab, you could seek the cure for cancer. As you would already be able to conduct thought experiments in pursuit of an answer, you would be able to continually refocus your efforts towards the cure. Each experiment that you might conduct, is instead supplanted by the new experiment using the results of the old that was never actually done. *sigh* I realize I'm explaining this badly.

In your first year of your lab conduct experiment Alpha, and learn that you can curb cancer's expansion with drug #1. The rest of your career is spent pursuing Drug #1 and how the world reacts to it.

Then... you reset back to the first year in your lab complete with the knowledge from Alpha and the world's subsequent research gains. You use those boosts to set up experiment Beta and discover a better drug. You spend your career pursuing that better drug and the world also posts its own research and development.

You reset again... still with the knowledge of Alpha and now Beta and perform... You get the idea?

So a full precog should have an expanse of knowledge that's perhaps approaches omniscience. It's still based on knowing the consequences of each of their potential actions. But because they can examine that before committing to a course of action their actual potential wealth far exceeds any. This is why, I suppose, most precogs are given either prophetic powers (Predict certain aspects of the future, but not the whole form) or can only peer a little ways into the veil.

So, what does all this have to do with being creative? I'm trying to write a story in a world of precogs. Most of the population is "normal", some of the population can peer into the future by about the space of a week before the possibilities blind them. Others can see all potential choices, but become trapped by that vision and live life little more than automatons, follow the course they've selected but forever in the future instead of the now. Two precogs are fighting over the protagonist, a simple (for the purposes of this post) normal person who one is trying to turn into a hero and the other is trying to claim for herself.

When wrestling over someone who can't see the future, against someone who can, what happens? What limits are required for precogs in order to allow the story to go? What happens when there aren't limits?

So, enough rambling. Maybe next time I will actually post writing (or free write). Or, and this is probably more likely given my trends, next time I'll post some more "hmm" questions. I don't know, can't see the future that clearly myself!