I – like many people – love science fiction. I grew up with sci-fi books, comics, movies and games, and I’ve spent a considerable part of my waking hours talking to friends about science fiction subjects and ideas. From the fantastic but deadly deserts of dying Barsoom to imperial Mongo’s crystal caves to the spectacular and heavily armored steel landscapes of the deadly Death Star, there’s most likely not a single science fiction world I haven’t’ come across.
For the sake of my essay, I will focus more on “hard” science fiction (focused on scientific accuracy and realism) than on “soft” science fiction (basically fantasy with little regard for the actual sciences. This isn’t a criticism, as I very much enjoy both forms of sci-fi).
Now, the term “science fiction” means “technology in the future” for most people, but that’s not actually what the term originally meant. “Science fiction” meant “scientific speculation”, though it is undeniable that fantasy had a massive influence on the formation of science fiction as a genre (I think that we can firmly put this movement at the end of the 19th Century, even though speculations about extraterrestrials, sky ships and space travel have existed as far back as Lucian of Samosata’s “A True Story”).
The interesting thing is this: despite what you read or hear, science fiction (as a predictive model) is mostly useless and is almost always wrong. Maybe I should be more precise: optimistic science fiction predictions are always wrong. They seemingly get nothing ever right. From domed cities on Mars, flying cars, artificially intelligent robots, advanced medical technology, universal one-piece clothing fashion, alien technology, global nuclear wars and even futuristic religion: almost all of these predictions have been catastrophically false. Let’s take flying cars: for as long as I can think, I’ve heard of flying cars. It didn’t surprise me much that this idea was already very old when I first heard of it. My father had heard it in his childhood and my grandfather had heard it in his life. Even my great-grandfather (who was an enthusiastic lover of science fiction) consumed works where flying cars populate the skies of sky-scraper-clad cities. Every new generation hears of flying cars and this has been the case since the early 1920s. Before then, we had the idea of a world of “airships”, where airships dominated the heavens. Neither idea ever came to fruition. Airships did exist, but they never became all-dominating. Planes were cheaper to build and easier to pilot, and they didn’t require huge crews (I’m talking here about the large “Zeppelin”-style rigid airships, not the semi- or non-rigid airships of the current time).
I will now make a controversial statement: flying cars will never exist. Never. No matter how advanced we become, they will never ever become a reality. Why, you ask? And this brings us to the root problem of optimistic science fiction’s inability to correctly predict reality. Flying cars make perfect sense in abstract thought. The streets are crowded, so let’s take the traffic to the skies! No more rush hours! You can also fly faster than you could drive on the ground, so why not work in Thailand, sleep in Austria and go on vacation in Acapulco, Mexico? Well… humans. That’s why. The problem isn’t technology per se, but human infallibility. “8,650 people died in traffic crashes in the first three months of the year.” (sic National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (of the USA)).
This number may sound low, but think about it. 8,650 people have died in car accidents in the first three months of 2024 alone and these are only the deaths, not car accidents in total. Now imagine having car accidents with flying cars. Let us for a second imagine that two cars collide in the air above an extremely populated part of a city, like the finance district of Berlin. The amount of damage can only be guessed, but plane crashes should give us a good example of what such a disaster would look like. Imagine a hundred plane crashes but all at once and all in the same place.
These cars wouldn’t merely fall to the ground, they would be like tiny meteorites, crashing into buildings, causing other cars (through Collison) to also ram objects and killing many people, possible thousands (we assume that there would be “sky streets” like we see in movies like the Star Wars prequels, not a “free for all” scenario like in Babylon 5). Burning debris would rain down on unsuspecting pedestrians. And this would be only one accident. A single one. A single accident of this technology (maybe because of the human pilot, a malfunctioning computer or technical problems with the flight system of the car itself). We humans don’t do that well on normal streets, streets which are basically just left and right (and backwards). Now imagine that we have to drive in the skies, a three-dimensional form of flight. Not only do we have to care about left and right as well as speed, we also have to care about air pressure, the height of flight, the presence of other, extremely fast cars (we will assume, for the sake of argument, that flying cars would be faster than our normal, wheeled cars), Earth’s gravitational forces, the aerodynamic drag as well as flying animals.
I can hear the objections: “But George, don’t pilots have to deal with these problems as well? Is it really that hard to imagine that most citizens would receive training similar to pilot training? Pilot classes usually only take three months. That’s nothing!”
It does take only three months to become a pilot (earn a pilot’s license), but no airline in this world would want a complete rookie to fly around their gigantic Boeing 747 planes (which are filled with passengers). It takes more than one and a half years to get the required 1,500 hours of required flight time to become an airline pilot. Airline pilots are well-trained and well-experienced specialists in their field. Does anyone here really believe that the average Joe would be able to get such experience without costly and extremely demanding training? Can we really train millions of people to become expert pilots? And this is merely a look at the pilots themselves. We’re not talking here about the insane regulations, costs, infrastructure requirements and environmental impacts flying cars would have.
The problem with flying cars isn’t the technology per se (a few successful prototypes have been developed) but the fact that most of the visionaries who foresaw this vehicle didn’t really contemplate the effects of such a device. CONTEMPLATIO! That’s the magical Latin word here!
The authors thought something like this: “We have too much traffic on the ground, so future people will transfer this very traffic to the skies, problem solved!”
But none of these writers said: “Hold on, wait a minute! What would the effect of this technology be? How would actual humans use it and how would it affect the current world?” Ideas were just accepted, because futuristic technology is cool. Phasers are cool, because they can make things disappear in an instant. Never mind that an actual phaser would produce such massive heat (not to speak of the radiation and the superheated gases and particles) that Captain Kirk and Mister Spock would literally burst into a billion pieces, because the ray itself would instantly heat up the environment and kill the users as well as the targets (we see that people get vaporized by phasers, this couldn’t be achieved without an extremely high degree of temperature, even if we assume the lowest degrees, we’d still have 100 million degrees Celsius, the surface of our Sun is a cool compared to this level of temperature). A real phaser would only get fired once.
The famous Polish author Stanislaw Lem called this the “appeal of fairy tales”. Lem didn’t mean to say that such ideas or concepts are silly (the term “fairy tales” mostly suggests silly stories for children in the English language, but fairy tales literally mean fairy tales/folklore/mythology in other languages and are not used as a pejorative description).
He argued (in “Summa Technologiae” from 1964, his masterpiece) that futurologists as well as science fiction authors all too often use “cool ideas” instead of asking logical questions about these ideas or the practicality of such concepts. They also – paradoxically – love to ignore biology, history and the “engineer’s perspective”. The engineer can’t focus on fantasies, his field is strictly practical. It was to work in the real world, or his project was a failure. Lem argued that futurologists and science fiction authors should learn from engineers and get an “engineer’s perspective” on technology. Let’s for a second consider one idea from Arthur C. Clarke’s book “Profiles of the Future” (1962). Clarke argues, that the people in the far future would abandon their bodies and exist as brains in freezing chambers, where they could basically be eternally stored (a very foolish statement from an otherwise highly intelligent man, how would the blood-flow through artificial means through the brain even work?). Computers and radio waves would connect these brains with cameras and speakers, thus allowing them to speak and travel the world. What can I even say about this idea? Let’s see… an apparatus which keeps the brain alive, connects it to sensory organs and allows them to experience the world? Yes, Arthur C. Clarke predicted that humans should/would/could abandon their organic bodies in favor of a cumbersome, impractical and stationary existence. Lem laughed at Clarke’s idea and correctly argued that the human body already exists (plus the idea of freezing brains is stupid. Frozen brains wouldn’t experience much, they would be dead).
By chilling the brain, metabolic processes can be slowed down during certain surgeries, but we're not talking about freezing here. Freezing would 1.) make the thought process impossible and 2.) kill the brain and 3.) cause the growth of ice crystals, which would permanently damage the brain's cellular tissue. Plus, there's no evidence that freezing a brain would give a brain a longer life. The spans of our lives are mostly dictated by genetics and our lifestyles. If you want an extremely long-lived brain, you'd have to engineer one through genetic engineering.
These two examples, the flying car as well as the “frozen brain chamber”, show perfectly why optimistic science fiction will never be accurate. It takes absurd and illogical technical ideas and tries to paint them as wonderful and marvelous.
Now, why is pessimistic science fiction so much more accurate? We do have many things from negative ideas about the future and technology, including global surveillance, social engineering, drone warfare, radioactive ammunition, bunker-breaking missiles, rape drugs, satellite weaponry, exoskeletons for military purposes etc. Environmental pollution is real, not domed cities on Mars. Pandemics and gigantic, global corporatism have all become real. Remember, these things were envisioned by pessimistic science fiction many decades before they ever became real. “1984” and “Brave New World” are more accurate than "Her" and “Walle-E" is more accurate than "Meet the Robinsons" (I’m deliberately using this movie as an example because it shows a very naïve and utopian future world.). "Dune" is in many ways much more accurate than "Star Trek".
Now, I have an explanation for this: people who write dystopian science fiction are often confronting their own weaknesses and our human condition. Our human condition. We are violent, we love, we hate, we make war. We abuse others, and we love to gain power and dominance. We want revenge, and we love to see our enemies suffer (even if we pretend that we’re above such things). We’re jealous and we are proud. We love sex, and we admire those who are able to conquer vast territories. We feel deep admiration for emperors and empires (many young men love to endlessly think about Rome and I can relate to this. It is the empire which still dominates our minds and souls). We’re sinners by nature. Utopian science fiction sees humans as perfect little cogs in gigantic, technocratic societies, but it also always strips them of their humanity. The very thing which makes them human to begin with. Gene Roddenberry (to use a popular example) was dissatisfied with the idea that the crew of the Enterprise (D) could be sad about the death of crewmates, and he never wanted them to fight. It was so ridiculous that the writers started to ignore him, because every good show needs drama! There have to be problems that have to be solved or overcome!
As long as optimistic science fiction continues to ignore practical reality and human nature, it will continue to be as inaccurate and ridiculous as it is in our days. Don’t get me wrong, I greatly enjoy Star Trek, but there’s no denial that it is so far removed from actual reality that nobody can take it seriously. People can take "Warhammer 40" and the “Helldivers” games more seriously, because Helldivers and Warhammer don't blend out our negative and positive human traits.
Lem was right all along: science fiction authors could massively learn from biology and engineers. His laughter will be heard throughout the ages and “Summa Technologiae” will remain much more accurate than “Profiles of the Future”. Lem - unsurprisingly - was a rather pessimistic author and thinker, but his predictions have been surprisingly accurate. He predicted complex beauty surgeries, complex sex toys and sexual practices and identities, the internet (a globally connected system of computers and servers), the collapse of the Soviet Union, the hardships of space travel (Lem argued that space travel would eventually happen, but far further in the future than most people think), climate changes, pandemics, the miniaturization of technology and the imitation of biological systems (for the development of medicine and robotics).