If I were to ask you to choose a work of fiction which best resembles 2025 so far, the easy answer is some dystopian nightmare.
You wouldn't be far off from the truth, especially when looking at our neighbours to the south. Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and honestly the entire genre of political dystopia books and movies are looking more and more like documentaries instead of works of fiction.
But, if you've been paying attention to science news, there are a lot of other things that have happened this year that are on the cooler side of things. So far, despite funding threats, AI slop and tech bros trying to take over the world, real scientists are doing a lot of interesting work, and moving us closer to a few cool works of sci-fi.
For example, there was a chance for us to be living through the plot of Don't Look Up when asteroid 2024 YR4 had a 3.1 per cent chance of impacting the Earth sometime in the 2030s. However, we dodged that cosmic bullet when NASA continued monitoring and calculated that there was a less than one-in-59,000 chance that the big space rock end it all on Earth, meaning a planetary defence mission to intercept and deflect the object planned for 2028 is no longer necessary.
In more human-caused cool science news, we are a step or two closer to Jurassic Park being a reality, now that de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences has actually been able to clone animals with characteristics of extinct species. So far, four dire wolf-esque modified grey wolves have been born, and a "woolly mouse" was cloned as a step towards bringing the Woolly Mammoth back to life. The fact that one of Jurassic Park's most famous lines is "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should" seems not to have been a deterrent to the scientists there.
In March, the large language model GPT4.5 was reported to have passed the Turing Test, which tests a machine's ability to imitate a human. In the test, a person is given a task of trying to determine whether another speaker is either a machine or a human, using written questions. A machine "passes" the test when the person on the other side isn't able to tell if they are talking to a machine. While GPT4.5 isn't the first AI to pass the test, the idea that more and more can is bringing us a lot closer to futures like those in Terminator and Ex Machina.
Finally, in what I think is the coolest science news lately, astronomers have figured out that an exoplanet 124 light-years away has an atmosphere containing dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide. Those two compounds, on Earth, are only known to have been produced by life. So far, that is the strongest evidence we have of biological activity beyond the solar system. While we have a lot more work to do to prove that, it's pretty freaking cool. There are many, many science fiction works that involve aliens, too many to count. However, the Three-Body Problem series comes to mind as a relatively modern example.
While all of this is cool, eight-year-old me is very excited. I think a lot of times we forget that science fiction stories are often cautionary tales, and allegories for things going on in the real world. Don't Look Up is a bold-faced commentary on us barrelling towards climate change, Jurassic Park is about human hubris, Terminator is a cautionary tale about giving machines control of our lives, and the Three Body Problem is an allegory about colonization, and ignoring the problems that we have here on Earth in favour of interplanetary exploration.
All science fiction is actually about the time when it is written. It removes our real-world issues, puts them into a context that we don't relate to, and tells it back to us so we learn something from it. Heck, even Star Wars is about the rise of fascism and corporate control.
So while all this cool science stuff is cool, let's make sure we remember science fiction is allegory, and we have a lot to learn from it.
