Why Science Fiction is Important for the Next Leap of Humankind?

Look around us. We wake up, we sit in traffic, we sit in cubicles, we stare at spreadsheets, we go home, we socialise, and then we sleep. And we do it all over again. Is this the grand culmination of millions of years of evolution?

This social construct we designed for ourselves is keeping us comfortable, distracted, and making us produce just enough to keep the machine running!

We are a species capable of splitting the atom and looking back to the beginning of time, yet we (most of us) are entirely consumed by mundane life.

We’re living in a self-built terrarium, mistaking the glass walls for the edge of the universe. The things we stress about, taxes, quarterly earnings, social media clout, are just … manufactured anxieties! These are illusions we agree to participate in.

While we’re busy playing house on this pale blue dot, our actual, fundamental purpose is silently rotting away in the corner.

What is our actual job?

Evolution didn’t give us this massive, energy-hungry prefrontal cortex just so we could optimize click-through rates. Our biological protocol is much more than just survival.

It’s expansion! It’s exploration!

We are supposed to be out there. The universe is terrifyingly huge and mostly empty, and we are the universe experiencing itself. Our core goal, the only one that actually matters on a cosmic scale, is to get off this rock. We need to leave the solar system. We need to build generation ships, massive, self-sustaining habitats hurtling through the void for centuries. We need to seed life across the galaxy. That is the goal! Everything else is just a side quest we’ve gotten hopelessly lost in.

If we stay here, we eventually die here. It’s that simple. Asteroid, supervolcano, or just the slow death of our sun. Earth is a ticking clock anyway, and we’re arguing over who gets to sit in the best chair.

So why aren’t we building the ships?

I’ll tell you why! Because we’ve lost the capacity to imagine them. We have the best minds who can figure out the physics of it, the biological challenges of it, but the problem isn’t just funding or technology. It’s a profound failure of vision.

We’ve built a society that actively discourages the kind of long-term, multi-generational thinking such as that required for interstellar travel. We operate on quarterly timelines and four-year election cycles, when we should be thinking in centuries and millennia.

Generation ships are arguably the most audacious engineering projects conceivable. They require closed-loop ecosystems, advanced propulsion systems,  some of which we haven’t even theorized yet, and psychological resilience on a scale we’ve never tested.

To build all these, we need engineers who are also philosophers, and scientists who are also artists. We need a society that values the distant future more than immediate and instant gratification.

Right now, we’re short-sighted and stuck optimising the present.

Why is science fiction the missing curriculum?

If you want to build a generation ship, you first have to be able to see it in your mind. This is where our educational system spectacularly fails. We are churning out compliant mercenaries, not visionaries. We drill dates and formulas into kids’ heads, effectively teaching them how to maintain their ranks and status quo. But we don’t teach them how to dream on a galactic scale.

This is why science fiction needs to be mandatory in schools. And I don’t mean as a fun Friday extra curricular activity. I mean it as a core curriculum, right alongside maths, science, and history.

Sci-fi isn’t just spaceships and laser beams. It is the literature of ideas. It’s the only genre that enables us to perform thought experiments about what we could be from a perspective of art and philosophy. That creative thinking is missing in school.

When kids read the works of Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke for example, they aren’t just consuming stories. They are actively running simulations of human potential with their own unique thoughts and perception.

Just think about it. How do you prepare a generation to build a ship they will never see completed, to launch a journey their grandchildren will finish? You can teach science and math to do that, but to teach that ambition, you need more than textbooks.

You have to infect them with ideas! Novel concepts! Notions without limits!

You have to show them the vast, terrifying, beautiful potential of the universe and make them desperately want to be a part of it. If a kid can’t imagine a generation ship, they sure as hell aren’t going to get interested in figuring out the propulsion mechanics for one.

We need a generation that looks up at the night sky not with romantic, passive awe, but with a hard, calculated curiosity.

Science fiction is the seed for that vision and curiosity!

The transition from a planetary species to an interstellar one won’t happen by accident. It requires a brutal reassessment of our priorities and policies. It means recognizing and acknowledging that the real world we inhabit is a temporary fiction.

It’s time we stop romanticizing our localized struggles and start focusing on the long game. The generation ships won’t build themselves. The stardrives won’t invent themselves. We need to tear down the artificial constraints of our current social construct and channel that massive, collective human energy toward the stars.

The void is waiting. The only question is whether we’ll step into it, or just quietly fade away into it. We need to resume our evolution.

Update: Apparently, a video essay version of this article has gotten popular and I’ve been invited to do a TEDx Talk.

Update: Here’s the TEDx talk.