By Dr Nicole Bulawa and Dr Mike Ryder
While science fiction is known for its warnings about the future, it can teach us other lessons too. Indeed, there is a whole field of study known as ‘futures research’ where scientists try and make sense of our world and make plans for what the future might bring.
This goes far beyond merely trying to predict the future. Rather, it is a way to help us come up with ideas to help us deal with potential challenges and build a better society.
Here’s how just a few of our favourite sci-fi films help us do this…
Future prediction
The world of science fiction holds many examples of foreseeing the future. One of the most famous examples is the film Demolition Man (1993), in which police officer John Spartan (played by Sylvester Stallone) is cryogenically frozen and reawakened years in the future in order to capture his long-time nemesis Simon Phoenix.
As the story unfolds, we encounter many different predictions of future technologies, including the likes of videoconferencing, portable tablets, virtual reality and autonomous cars. Even real-life events are foreshadowed, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger entering politics, and the fact the actor who played Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes), really did end up serving time in prison!
While people still marvel at how so many predictions in Demolition Man came to pass, this is what ‘projections’ in future research are all about: predicting the future as accurately as possible so that we might prepare for new technologies to take advantage of what they have to offer.
The world of tomorrow
When thinking about the future, many sci-fi films rely on dystopian or utopian futures. Dystopias show futures where things have gone wrong, while utopias show the mother-of-all futures, the perfectly great ones.
The film Avatar (2009) essentially covers both. In the film, Earth is a dying planet (a dystopia), while the world of Pandora is presented as a potential new home for humanity (a utopia).
In futures research, both of these visions of the future could be used in something called ‘Participatory Action Research’ to either come up with solutions to avoid dystopia, or to try and find ways to achieve utopia – except without perhaps relocating to another planet!
The bad guys’ perspective
The one thing that sci-fi films cannot do without is bad guys. Usually, these are privileged individuals who have amassed huge power and wealth through the exploitation of others.
The film Elysium (2013) is the perfect example of this. In the film, a lucky few individuals live a life of luxury on a space station, while most of humanity lives on Earth, a desolate, polluted and overpopulated world.
Elysium repeatedly places the villains at the forefront of the action so that they can do what they do best: make the hero’s life more difficult. This is interesting for us as researchers as one of the aims of ‘critical analysis’ in futures research is to examine just who benefits if certain futures happen.
In this way, the film Elysium isn’t just interesting for the hero’s struggle to overcome oppression, but also for the way it examines the elites’ struggle to stay in power and avoid change.
Enter the multiverse
In recent years many sci-fi films have explored the concept of the multiverse – a concept where more than one possible future exists, and characters can move between them.
As a result, sci-fi films have become much more complex, to the point where you might need a chart to keep track of it all! The Christopher Nolan film Interstellar (2014) is a great example of this as it features parallel dimensions, multiple planets, and intricate timelines.
What’s so interesting about these films is that no matter how complex or convoluted their multiverse concepts are, there are always rules that control how the universe(s) work.
In Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), people can only jump into the mind of their doppelgänger version in another dimension, while the character Doctor Strange in Avengers: Infinity War (2018) uses an artefact to see a million possible outcomes of the future.
Both of these examples illustrates very well the second aim of ‘critical analysis’ in futures research, which looks at how research methods change the way we imagine the future.
Thinking outside of the box
If you’ve not seen any of these films before, we really do recommend you give them a watch. But when you do watch them, remember they’re not just a fun form of entertainment: they also tell us something really important about the future, and how we think about the future – insight that goes far beyond mere predictions.
If that’s not a good excuse to re-watch Demolition Man or Elysium then we don’t know what is!