It was a lazy Sunday afternoon and just like any other weekend, I was binge watching. This time it was one of my all-time favourite sci-fi movies ‘Mad Max — The Fury Road’. It makes a simple yet compelling point — the pursuit of a post-apocalyptic green place ended where it started from.

As the movie progressed, my mind began to drift away in joining the dots together. The blurry line between scientific fiction and non-fiction was disappearing and something, preposterously common between the two was becoming vividly evident. Both forms exploit the idea of using advanced technologies to save mankind from extinction by discovering newer horizons and building better habitats.

But how could scriptwriters peek into the future before scientists? There have been astounding similarities between the vision of filmmakers and the natural disasters taking place now. Few movies that show this correlation include Contagion (2011) > Covid-19, Interstellar (2014) > sandstorms in China and Martian (2015) > SpaceX Mars mission.

The phantasmagoria projected by sci-fi movies and the actuality represented by the real-world scientists intersects at technology and policy. It may seem like a coincidence, but history tells us that early warnings of climate change have been ignored by governments, creating negative externalities on individuals, degrading public goods such as air, water, land and accelerating irreversible environmental damage over the years.

The expeditious progress of the West has always fascinated me. Be it the scientific and technological progress it has made over the years or industrial revolution that it has pioneered or the Hollywood action movies, there’s something surreptitious about it.

Did they really have access to an Atlantis equivalent system of information? Or did the tectonic plates push an entire nation of intellectuals westward? Or did they try more, fail more and hence, experience more than the rest of the world?

On the other end of the spectrum, I wonder why was NASA or Google established in the US and not in India (despite the fact that Indians constitute a sizeable chunk of its workforce)? Why did the Northwest Europe succeed in global trade and commerce while the Middle East did not (despite the fact that both the worlds have similar demographics and access to natural resources)?

The questions seem to be infinite, and the possibilities may be limitless ranging from human capital, geography, cultural differences to abundance of natural resources. Perhaps, the key lies in policy (the strategy behind governance).

In this 3-part series, I shall attempt to unravel a phenomenon with interesting examples of how technology in the quest for advancing mankind, is, in fact, bringing us back to square one.