How Sci-Fi Creates Our Reality

Science fiction is a Rorschach test. Either the creators of these futures believe humanity is headed toward good things or they believe humanity is headed toward bad things. In many instances they take the news of the day and follow its path into a possible iteration of the future. The results aren’t always pretty.

Ready Player One is going to be out soon. In this future possible reality people are so poor they live in trailers stacked atop one another and they have to escape their dreary lives using virtual reality. But there’s a twist — there is hidden treasure in the game and one person might be able to escape the sadness.

In Star Trek The Next Generation, however, humans were able to overcome their differences and work together toward a more Utopian version of the future. Things were so great, in fact, that Geordi LaForge was fitted with a VISOR to help him see. Humanity has progressed so far in this alternate version of the future that a man blind from birth is able to rise to greatness with almost no problems whatsoever.

Which version of reality will we see in the future? No one knows for sure. But Sci-Fi vision can give us a few different predictions.