I was making coffee the other morning while listening to a physics podcast, when the guest—a cosmologist and college professor—shared an anecdote that made me pause. During a lecture on exoplanets, one of her students asked—earnestly, the professor said—why us humans haven’t tried to contact the other intelligent species that are out there. The professor, a kind person, didn’t snap back with what I would have said, which is some form of “What the hell are you talking about?” Instead, she gently explained that we can’t contact other intelligent alien species because we don’t actually know if there are any other intelligent species out there. At all. Not even a hint.
The student was stunned.
We live in a world where the entertainment industry delivers us a consistent stream of sci-fi stories. From Star Trek to Star Wars to Arrival to 3 Body Problem, sci-fi novels, TV shows, and movies depict realities where alien civilizations, artificial gravity, and lightspeed travel are not just possible but fully realized.
But in reality…no, we haven’t found intelligent life beyond Earth.
No, we don’t have artificial gravity on spaceships.
No, we can’t time travel, teleport, or access alternate dimensions, at least not yet.
When we don’t recognize where science actually stands, we form unrealistic expectations. Then, when anticipated breakthroughs don’t arrive overnight, trust erodes, with disappointment and disillusionment following close behind.
All of it starting with where our expectations come from.
The Gap Between Science Fiction and Science Reality
We live in an era where special effects and CGI-heavy movie scenes make scientific miracles look routine. Fictional narratives toss around terms like “quantum entanglement,” “neural link,” or “gravity drives,” and since these are phrases involved in real-life theoretical concepts, they sound plausible enough that the story feels real.
This idea is the backbone of good sci-fi—it engages the imagination and can inspire innovation, so long as audiences can distinguish what’s possible from what’s fiction. But when that line blurs too much, unrealistic outlooks take hold, collapsing into cynicism when progress isn’t instant.
To be clear, I’m not blaming sci-fi creators…partly because I am one, but also because most authors and filmmakers don’t aim to mislead. They use real science mixed with imaginary concepts to spark the same wonder they feel themselves. It’s not their fault when audiences can’t separate fact from fiction, but that confusion still occurs.
Take the show Black Mirror. One of my favorite episodes, “San Junipero,” depicts a society where it’s possible to upload your consciousness to a simulated reality after death, living forever in a digital heaven. The main characters are two women who love each other and have chosen to be together in this afterlife reality, reliving the story of how they met. It’s a beautifully executed episode about love, memory, and second chances set against neon-soaked beaches and synthwave soundscapes, and went on to win two Emmys (it’s also one of the very, very few Black Mirror episodes with a happy ending). But, in the real world, we’re nowhere near the technology needed to upload a human consciousness. The current state of neuroscience doesn’t fully understand how consciousness or memory encoding works, much less how to digitize it. Even optimistic projections place this technology decades at a minimum and more likely centuries away, if it’s possible at all.
Another great sci-fi series, The Expanse, shows a future where humanity has settled the solar system and established a fully self-sustaining Martian colony with advanced tech for domed cities and terraforming. But in reality, NASA and SpaceX are still only in the planning phases of sending the first humans to Mars, ever. So far all we’ve sent are a few billion-dollar rovers. We are nowhere near building Martian cities, let alone manufacturing a breathable atmosphere over there. The initial challenges—radiation shielding, food production, sustainable life support, astronomical funding—mean even the most rudimentary Martian colony is still a distant prospect.
Then there’s one of my favorite movies, Her, where Samantha, an operating system with a warm, soothing voice, becomes a fully sentient AI capable of love, self-awareness, and complex emotions. Today, while AI has advanced in pattern recognition and can generate human-like text, a true sentient consciousness with self-awareness remains out of reach. Experts still debate if AGI—artificial general intelligence—will happen at all, and even if it does nobody is clear when or what exactly it will look like. Current systems like ChatGPT may sound conversational, but they don’t understand or feel in any human sense.
The Paradox: Disbelief and Hyper-Belief
What baffles me is this: the same cultural force that makes people believe we’ve got sci-fi-level technology is also feeding the growing distrust of science itself. It’s a paradox: many claim the moon landing was faked, vaccines are a scam, or climate change is a hoax, yet many also believe we should already have flying cars, Martian colonies, and sentient AI.
Both of these beliefs shouldn’t coexist, but in humanity they do.
Science fiction is powerful because it’s emotionally convincing. It packages the futures we desire in clean narratives where scientific miracles arrive just in time. But due to a lack of understanding about how science actually works—messy, nonlinear, and self-correcting—changes in scientific consensus are often seen as evidence that scientists don’t know what they’re doing, rather than as a natural part of the process. Sci-fi primes us to expect fast, clean results, but real science is meticulous.
When even a small portion of society takes the forward-thinking of sci-fi as a guarantee, or mistakes the unnaturally clean logic of a story for how science functions in the real world, they can become suspicious of scientists and disillusioned with the world they live in. This confusion doesn’t just impact how we talk about technology while we’re hanging out with friends or having a conversation with family; it has real-world consequences for how we fund, support, and trust the processes that will actually get us closer to the futures we want.
Real-World Consequences of the Paradox
The consequences of a lack of trust in science can be seen all around us.
Many people—possibly conditioned by science fiction narratives to be wary of government conspiracies and biological weapons—felt suspicious about the Covid pandemic and the subsequent vaccine rollout even though decades of groundwork in mRNA technology made the “overnight” breakthrough possible. As Dr. Sabrina Assoumou, a BU School of Medicine professor, explains in regard to the vaccine, “I think there is a perception that things moved very fast, but we want to underscore that the technology being used now was being studied for a decade.” Johns Hopkins Medicine similarly clarified that “Vaccine developers didn’t skip any testing steps, but conducted some of the steps on an overlapping schedule to gather data faster.” The science was real, the breakthroughs were earned, but public expectations of what science should look like led many to dismiss legitimate progress.
Then there’s the strange tension between flat Earthers, moon landing deniers, and people who believe that interplanetary travel is imminent. There are people who insist NASA faked the moon landing while simultaneously championing Elon Musk’s plans for space colonization in our lifetimes, distrusting the same scientific institutions and processes that would make that effort possible.
It’s also telling that in the same species, we can find these two extremes: biohackers who believe radical life extension and digital immortality are around the corner thanks to CRISPR, AI, and nanotechnology, and vaccine skeptics who distrust these very technologies, fearing microchips and unnatural interventions. Both ends of this spectrum are shaped, in part, by sci-fi narratives—one fueling hyper-belief in imminent breakthroughs, the other fostering suspicion toward proven science. Together, they illustrate the divide in how we engage with science, a divide that often stalls the incremental progress needed to extend human lives.
These contradictions have consequences that reach beyond internet debates.
The Importance of Understanding the Scientific Process
It’s easy to dismiss all of this as just another cultural quirk. A weird but harmless inconsistency in the digital age. But the confusion between science fiction and scientific reality is not harmless. It directly impacts how we think about, fund, and support the research that shapes our future.
We’re at a moment of high stakes. From climate change to pandemic preparedness to the governance of artificial intelligence, we are facing challenges that require public trust in science and a collective willingness to fund long-term, careful work. If we expect science to deliver clean, rapid, cinematic breakthroughs, we’ll be disappointed, growing cynical and impatient just when patience matters most.
The reality: real science is slow, careful, and methodical. It is a self-correcting, error-seeking process, peer-reviewed and incremental, rarely delivering the kind of “aha” moments that science fiction promises. Or as Ed Yong writes in The Atlantic, “This is how science actually works. It’s less the parade of decisive blockbuster discoveries that the press often portrays, and more a slow, erratic stumble toward ever less uncertainty.”
It’s that stumble that has given us vaccines, clean water, space travel, and the technology you’re using to read this right now; it’s that stumble that will get us closer to the futures we want, one step at a time. Sci-fi should inspire us to dream, but it isn’t a roadmap; it’s a vision board. It can light the spark, but we need disciplined science to turn it into reality. Without clear public understanding, we remain stuck between disbelief and disappointment. We should celebrate real science, educate our communities about how it works, and protect its integrity so we can continue moving forward.
Because the only way we can continue reaching for the stars is if we keep our feet firmly planted in reality.
