question:  What would have happened if Drs. Niemand and Hillyard had not visited Henry Middletown?
context: This, be it understood, is fiction—nothing but fiction—and not, under any circumstances, to be considered as having any truth whatever to it. An interview with Dr. I. M. Niemand, Director of the Psychophysical Institute of Solar and Terrestrial Relations, Camarillo, California. In the closing days of December, 1957, at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New York, Dr. Niemand delivered a paper entitled simply, "On the Nature of the Solar S-Regions." These implications are discussed here in an exclusive interview with Dr. Niemand by Philip Latham. I suppose you might say my main job today is to find out all I can between activity on the Sun and various forms of activity on the Earth. What do you mean by activity on the Sun? NIEMAND. I'm afraid I can't say just what a sunspot is. It means you can only approximately predict the future course of sunspot activity. There is unquestionably a correlation between sunspots and disturbances of the Earth's magnetic field ... Now, Dr. Niemand, I understand that you have been investigating solar and terrestrial relationships along rather unorthodox lines. I think our biggest advance was the discovery that sunspots themselves are not the direct cause of the disturbances we have been studying on the Earth. Whereas the real cause is an invisible filterable virus. In the solar case it turned out to be these S-Regions. It is extremely doubtful, however, if the radiation we detect is the actual cause of the disturbing effects observed. Let's see ... remember that speech from "Julius Caesar" where Cassius is bewailing the evil times that beset ancient Rome? Philosophers have wrestled with it ever since the days of Job. Generally they have concluded that man is inherently wicked and sinful and that is the end of it. The truth of the matter is that men go to war because they want to go to war. Such a syndrome is characteristic of menopausal women and some men during the climacteric, but these people failed to fit into this picture.
output:  They would have been missing a key point of connection that allowed them to move their work forward
options:  They would have traveled to Australia to talk to a specialist  They would have totally given up on their research  They would have been missing a key point of connection that allowed them to move their work forward  They would have talked to a radio astronomer at a different observatory