Jul 13, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min · 11 segments
Did science fiction predict AirPods? Neuralink? The death of God? For this final episode of Season One, John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach give you what hacks call a listicle: three transcendently…
So to make things a bit easier, we're going to give you what we hacks call a listicle.
We're going to highlight three transcendently significant things that were prefigured in science fiction and definitely came true.
So in the meantime, we can help you understand why we've made the selection we have, because like all these lists, it's going to look a bit arbitrary.
But we want you to see that there's a serious point behind each choice, both the predictions that came true and the ones that didn't, which in each case points up something important about the role of science fiction in predicting the future.
So we know science fiction does fulfil a predictive role, but is it a healthy thing? In a 1999 CNN interview, Larry King asked Stephen Hawking if science fiction was helpful, harmful, or neither.
It's useful, replied Hawking, both for stimulating the imagination and for diffusing fear of the future.
But does it really diffuse fear by predicting the future? Some might say it stokes up those fears.
Our urge to predict things that are going to happen in the future isn't by any means limited to the science fiction genre or to our own time.
So as we heard in our previous episode, Mary Shelley drew on the science that was novel in 1816 and projected it forward in Frankenstein, also showing the social implications of such a capability if it were to be actualised.
But technological and social predictions of a similar sort can be traced back much, much further.
In 1260, the Middle Ages, Roger Bacon predicted that the application of scientific knowledge would transform transportation.
Cars can be made so that without animals, they will move with unbelievable rapidity, he wrote in the Epistola de Secretis Operibus.
So to make things a bit easier, we're going to give you what we hacks call a listicle.
We're going to highlight three transcendently significant things that were prefigured in science fiction and definitely came true.
So in the meantime, we can help you understand why we've made the selection we have, because like all these lists, it's going to look a bit arbitrary.
But we want you to see that there's a serious point behind each choice, both the predictions that came true and the ones that didn't, which in each case points up something important about the role of science fiction in predicting the future.
So we know science fiction does fulfil a predictive role, but is it a healthy thing? In a 1999 CNN interview, Larry King asked Stephen Hawking if science fiction was helpful, harmful, or neither.
It's useful, replied Hawking, both for stimulating the imagination and for diffusing fear of the future.
But does it really diffuse fear by predicting the future? Some might say it stokes up those fears.
Our urge to predict things that are going to happen in the future isn't by any means limited to the science fiction genre or to our own time.
So as we heard in our previous episode, Mary Shelley drew on the science that was novel in 1816 and projected it forward in Frankenstein, also showing the social implications of such a capability if it were to be actualised.
But technological and social predictions of a similar sort can be traced back much, much further.
In 1260, the Middle Ages, Roger Bacon predicted that the application of scientific knowledge would transform transportation.
Cars can be made so that without animals, they will move with unbelievable rapidity, he wrote in the Epistola de Secretis Operibus.
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