Neil deGrasse Tyson on a Dystopic Future | Breakthrough

It's always been a curious fact to me that the most successful science fiction storytelling involves completely dystopic scenarios or finales, and all of them, essentially all of them.

Now maybe at the end they give you some glimmer of hope, but something bad really happened during the story. I have mixed feelings about this in the following way: um, I think essentially every dystopic projection of the way technology takes us—because it's always technology gone bad, always, if it's a science fiction film.

So, I have never seen technology go as bad as has been projected for it in the science fiction stories. Maybe it hasn't gone that bad because the very story that describes how bad it goes is what alerts us to that possibility, and then we prevent it in the first place. I'll allow that possibility.

All right, I think what's more likely is that people take a new technology and then they project it forward without any checks and balances in between the birth of the technology and the complete dystopic expression of that technology. They're forgetting that in between, people are making other decisions.

Oh no, let's not have it continue this way 'cause that's dangerous! Let's continue it this way. We make these mid-course corrections all the time, all the time.

If you did this back in the dawn of space flight, you'd think half of anyone who got in a plane would die any time it took off. And we made planes safer. We made safer planes.

If you were at the beginning of the dawn of the nuclear era, you'd say, well, the whole world is going to end in a nuclear explosion. Okay, so we need wise leaders and wise, um, uh, international agreements. And we say, no, that's not going to happen if we do use nuclear powers for energy and not for war, right?

So yes, you need some wise, some wise shepherding of technology as you go along, but often the storytelling ignores the mid-course corrections that we put into place all the time.

And so, I, believe it or not, I have confidence—enough confidence in our species to think that we will never allow society to crumble in all the ways that science fiction dystopic storytellers make it happen.