Americans Need to Imagine a Better Future

Frederik Polak, the postwar Dutch futurist, once observed that “the rise and fall of images of the future precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures.” In his classic work The Image of the Future, Polak argued that every society lives by the mental pictures it paints of tomorrow. When those images are bright—visions of discovery, growth, and human flourishing—they generate confidence and spur people to invent the future they dream of. Just the opposite happens when the mental images turn dark. These visions of exhaustion, decay, or impending disaster become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

By that measure, America had lost much of its optimistic imagination by the early 1970s, as I write in my 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist. A toxic mix of environmental pessimism, Vietnam-era disillusion, and nuclear dread reshaped the cultural mood. Where the 1950s and 1960s had offered visions of lunar colonies, atomic abundance, and Star Trek’s interstellar utopia, the 1970s delivered nightmares of natural resource exhaustion, societal breakdown, and runaway population growth. It was, as policy analyst Brink Lindsey puts it, an “anti-Promethean backlash”—a revolt against the very idea that technology and growth could be humanity’s salvation rather than its undoing.

Hollywood fully absorbed the mood change and never quite let it go, churning out story after story of environmental apocalypse—with modern techno-capitalism as the Big Bad. It’s been a steady narrative through-line from Soylent Green (1973), which warned that consumerism would end with cannibalism, to The Day After Tomorrow (2004), in which Manhattan froze solid due to a chaotic climate. The moral had become familiar: industry, technology, greed, and resource overconsumption lead inexorably to ruin. Small and pastoral are what is beautiful. Avatar (2009) transposed strip-mining to an alien moon, thinly veiling a sermon about rainforest destruction—and audiences flocked to it, making it the highest-grossing film of all time.

The age of streaming television has taken up the same script. Don’t Look Up (2021) on Netflix satirized political paralysis over climate change through the lens of an impending asteroid strike. The message, however cleverly repackaged, remained the same: Capitalism and technology promise prosperity but, if left unchecked, will deliver extinction.

Then there’s Extrapolations (2023), Apple TV+’s big-budget, star-laden anthology series. It merits a deeper dive as it really captures the genre’s eco-dystopian ethos. Each of its eight episodes, taking place from 2037 to 2070, leaps forward in time to show how rising seas, vanishing species, and desperate technological fixes shape everyday life. Familiar faces pop up—Meryl Streep voices the last humpback whale in 2046, and Kit Harington plays a swaggering tech mogul who builds a financial empire on climate profiteering. By the finale, the CEO stands trial at The Hague for corporate crimes against the planet.

Same old story? In a way, yes. Extrapolations rehashes the “limits to growth” doomerism that first took hold in the 1970s. Yet what makes it a particularly egregious entry is how blithely it ignores what we have since learned over the decades, especially recently. First, the 2020s have seen a recognition that nuclear power is indispensable for decarbonization—even before the AI-driven surge in electricity demand underscored the need for energy abundance. Back in 2021, for instance, Japan declared nuclear essential to its 2050 net-zero plans and began reversing its post-Fukushima retreat. Meanwhile, the clean-energy toolkit itself has expanded: Modular nuclear, fusion, and geothermal are moving from promise toward reality, joining solar and wind. Much of this is being pushed forward by a wave of start-ups, fueled by billions in venture capital. A quick glance at the business pages would tell you as much.

The creators of Extrapolations, however, imagine a world where none of this is happening, where solar is the exclusive route forward—nuclear gets not a single mention—entrepreneurs are the villains, and high-energy decarbonization never gets off the ground. Had the show been more tethered to reality, it could have told a dramatic, factual, and ultimately uplifting tale of how humanity can innovate its way through its biggest problems.

A reasonable question: Does any of this really matter? Why should we care about the stories we tell ourselves about the future and our ability to make it a better place? History suggests we should absolutely care. For most of our species’ existence, we imagined neither utopia nor dystopia. The future was not a story at all, but a repetition of cycles. Seasons returned, empires rose and fell, but daily life hardly shifted. To suggest that tomorrow might be unlike yesterday was to risk impiety toward one’s ancestors. As Carl Becker put it in 1936, modern progress could not be conceived until philosophers abandoned “ancestor worship” and accepted that their own age might surpass those before it.

By the middle of the second millennium, Europeans began to doubt the old authorities. If Aristotle had missed gravity and the New World, what else might he have gotten wrong? As economic historian Joel Mokyr explains, scholars slowly embraced the heretical notion that “these old people were very smart, but we are smarter.” Out of this leap of faith came the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment. It was this cultural breakthrough, arguably more than any single invention, that made modern progress possible. We started telling ourselves a much different story about our collective agency.

Progress, then, has depended on cultural confidence—the conviction that tomorrow could be better than today if we choose to make it so. I call this sort of techno-solutionist thinking “Up Wing”: an optimistic, future-facing belief that through innovation, courage, and risk-taking, we can solve even unforeseen challenges and build a more prosperous, resilient, and humane future. By contrast, Down Wing thinking is rooted in limits and caution—a worldview that treats risk as danger to be avoided rather than opportunity to be seized, preferring stasis over the uncertain promise of progress.

This is why Up Wing science fiction matters. It dramatizes what progress could look like, turning disruption into something tolerable because the destination seems worth it. The Star Trek franchise imagines liberal democracy expanding at warp speed across the galaxy. The Expanse, both the book and streaming series, offers a grittier vision of the future—a space society marked by inequality, resource struggles, and political tension. Yet it is also a story of endurance and ingenuity. Humanity has spread across the solar system, building space stations, colonizing asteroids, and terraforming Mars. The show highlights the challenges of technological progress, but it never portrays them as reasons to stop moving forward. In The Expanse, turbulence is the norm, but it is also the price of becoming a spacefaring civilization.

When Herman Kahn, a rare sunny thinker to emerge in the 1970s, pondered how best to usher in an era of mass abundance, his advice was strikingly simple: Change the story. “The single most important thing that could be done,” he argued, was to replace today’s bleak visions with “reasonably accurate positive images of the future.” Without such pictures, especially in rich capitalist societies, pessimism would stifle ambition before progress could begin.

That does not mean we need to be inundated with Panglossian utopias. The Martian (2015), with its protagonist forced to “science the problem” on Mars, illustrates how ingenuity turns disaster into survival. Interstellar (2014) shows how rejecting science courts ruin, but embracing it opens the stars. Even author Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves (2015), which begins with the destruction of the moon, ends with humanity’s rebirth in space.

Such tales matter because they encourage agency rather than fatalism. As the sociologist Elise Boulding once noted, “In eras when pessimism combines with a sense of cosmic helplessness, the quality of human intentionality declines.” A society bounded by narrative doom loops of collapse will find it hard to summon the will to innovate and shrug off failure when not every innovation follows a linear and unbroken line to success. How many Elon Musk critics have suggested SpaceX was a failure because they did not understand or refused to understand that rapid iteration and learning from mistakes were inherent to the company's business model?

Reversing this cultural drift will require more than waiting for Hollywood to change its mind. By far the best thing we can do is make sure we have public policy—light-touch regulation on emerging technologies, federal science investment—that is supportive of economic acceleration. When people see breakthroughs happening in the real world, it becomes easier for culture to imagine and celebrate optimistic futures. Beyond that, we need education that restores confidence in progress, as Herman Kahn once proposed, with a curriculum that would counter “relentless negativism” by highlighting how technology has repeatedly solved past challenges (imagine an “AP Progress” class tracing innovations from the steam engine to the internet).

We also need symbols and tangible works that express our deepest ideals and anchor cultural aspiration. The American Colossus initiative proposesa monumental statue called The Great Colossus of Prometheus on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, envisioned as a beacon of optimism and human triumph on the western edge of the New World. Like the Statue of Liberty does for liberty and aspiration, this Promethean colossus would be, as declares the project’s manifesto, “an emblem of the inborn ability of the human individual to free himself through invention, science and creative enterprise.”

We need a creative ecosystem that depicts futures where “big stuff gets done,” in the words of Stephenson, whose Project Hieroglyph brought together scientists and writers through Arizona State University to imagine plausible innovations such as a twenty-kilometer tower. And we need cultural institutions that celebrate humanity’s neverending journey, such as NASA’s Visions of the Future posters, which turn distant planets and moons into destinations of possibility. Billionaires can play their part too, by underwriting dramas that show futures worth striving for. Jeff Bezos did exactly this with The Expanse when Amazon picked up the show after Syfy canceled it in 2018.

Culture, and especially sci-fi, is not a sideshow but central to progress itself. It gives us the imaginative runway to believe that disruption is worth the tumult, and that a better world is ours to invent.