monika bielskyte

What if the most “futuristic” thing you’re being sold is the most passé? Sci-fi trained us to imagine the future as escape — but what we’re so hell-bent on escaping might be where the real answers are.

Before anything gets built — someone first has to picture it. Creativity is the root of all transformation; it lets us see something before it exists. Science then tests those visions, overturns some, and reveals what’s actually there. Discoveries become technologies, and those technologies hand science new tools to explore with. It’s a feedback loop.

What our collective imagination prioritises narrows the futures we can pursue. We keep looking for greater intelligence in gods, in aliens, in machines — everywhere except the living world that made us, reducing it to background scenery, something to transcend.

In parts of tech culture, science-fiction narratives now function less like speculation and more like articles of faith (see: TESCREAL). Once you’re trained to accept fantasy as foresight, you lose the ability to tell real science from science fiction. And that’s what men like Musk exploit — selling us dreams of “Planet B” while their recklessness makes life here more volatile by the day.

We are destroying this world faster than we can learn from it. And it has SO MUCH to teach us:

On the deep seafloor, oxygen appears to be produced in total darkness — an oxygen source on our own planet we never knew existed.

An octopus arm contains extensive neural circuitry supporting local sensing, reflexes and movement. This is already informing soft robotics.

Birds orient themselves by reading Earth’s magnetic field through quantum effects inside their own eyes — the kind of quantum coherence our instruments generally hold only in carefully engineered, isolated conditions.

To borrow Ed Yong’s title, we live in An Immense World — and it is this one, right here. The most futuristic technology on this planet isn’t being engineered. It’s being ignored.

Filmed at @global.tech.weekend.tbilisi

#Futurism #Foresight #Protopia #WorldBuilding #InnovationStrategy