I have always been a science fiction fan. As a child I spent hours immersed in these stories, even learning to read through them. It was always about how humanity advances, how conflicts are overcome, how unimaginable progress is shaped collectively, building space stations together, collaborating across boundaries.

Just this Sunday morning, while having coffee, I watched the old German series Raumpatrouille – Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffes Orion from the 1960s, and I was struck by how precisely it imagined a possible future. There is an electronic brain acting as planetary administration, and humans constantly have to navigate its absurd decisions. A technocratic future is laid out clearly, where humans rely on technology yet are perpetually struggling against machine logic. It feels as if one has to submit an application just to fly a spaceship, only for twenty five Vogon bureaucrats like those in Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to laboriously fill out forms, stamp them, and then stamp them again. 

Raumpatrouille anticipates a society where human agency collides with automated control, where an electronic brain governs galactic decisions, yet it also satirizes the inefficiency and absurdity of rigid systems. 

Then there is Asimov’s Foundation, which presents a similar theme on a grander scale. The future is mathematically predicted, plotted, and managed, but humans constantly disrupt these calculations. 

We are unpredictable, we question, we act, we change course. This story underlines that the future cannot be fully controlled, because humans are the variable no plan can account for.

Today much of what passes for futuristic thinking is really a mash up of speculative economic forecasts and curated visions from tech elites, designed to legitimize grand projects, without a single original idea, without a single alternative perspective. 

Meanwhile, Starship Troopers projects eternal war into the future, suddenly these narratives resemble AI races, space races, and tech showdowns more than speculative fiction.

The recurring theme has been and likely will remain humans versus systems, freedom versus control, unpredictability and the freedom to change one’s mind versus technocratic order. 

Past science fiction asked these questions creatively, inviting discussion and reflection. Space debris removal, planetary governance, and other pressing concerns arguably deserve attention before extending private and corporate ambitions further into the cosmos.

And frankly, I do not want a robot in my household.

Douglas Rushkoff, One of the first Cyberpunk’s, wrote: *Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires/ *German: Warum wir vor den Tech Milliarden noch nicht einmal auf dem Mars sicher sind.

He examines how techno-utopias turned into dystopias and how these narratives let billionaires indulge in their own escapism, shielding themselves from the very harms they created.

It is in a way sad that the future is  dictated by the illustrations of tech elites, leaving no single alternative imaginable. I refuse to accept that limitation and continue to dream a little further.