The amount of time and energy that otherwise smart people spend convincing themselves (and trying to convince others) that made-up science fiction stories and shows/movies with actors playing fictional characters are actually some kind of blueprint for a real future is just astounding.

I guess people think because it has the word “science” in it, it is somehow real?

People read novels about colonies on Mars, and now we are spending billions of dollars on trying to get people to Mars. Never mind that it is basically impossible for humans to live in any meaningful numbers on Mars and we are never going to science our way out of that. No, we are going to keep wasting massive amounts of money pursuing this pipe dream of human colonization of space.

Likewise, a bunch of us grew up watching a shows where people on spaceships talk to computers and have human-looking robots walking around doing stuff, so we think that’s where we’re headed. Now we have software that seems like that, so it seems futuristic and inevitable.

And the we’ve got a bunch deeply unserious people who seem to have convinced themselves that we are living in a simulation, or the universe is a giant hologram, or we will all soon be uploading our consciousnesses and living forever. None of this stuff is real! It is made up. It all makes for interesting stories, but it is all stuff that rooms full of writers came up with because someone was hounding them for a script for next week’s episode.

Originally published at https://petebrown.gibber.blog/science-fiction-is-not-the-future-its-made-up-stories-about-the-past-and-the-present.