I feel like a big problem in the modern world is the small scale of our dreams. Dreams drive us, they change the world. In 1865, French author Jules Verne decided to write a book to inspire people to dream big, impossible dreams. He decided to write a novel proving that humans could do anything- by describing how, if enough people worked together, they could journey all the way to the moon. This became one of the first hit books in a new genre, science fiction. Sure, plenty of people had written about travelling to the moon before- e.g. the Roman poet Lucian wrote of being sucked up into a giant waterspout and deposited on the moon- but Verne was the first to write at a level of detail that made is seem realistic, something that humans could do- e.g. he spends several pages discussing- with math- how, if you are in America and want to go into space, the coast of Florida is the right spot (he picked a spot two hundred km from Cape Canaveral).
These stories are important. The fathers of rocketry in at least two different countries (Konstantin Tsiolkovsky of Russia and Hermann Oberth of Germany) were inspired by Verne (Goddard of the US was more inspired by H.G. Wells than Verne). They independently realized that you couldn't build a cannon (like Verne depicted) that could let humans survive and get to the moon, so they went into rocketry. Verne and H.G. Wells told stories that were the first step to changing the world.<p>And modern science fiction seems stuck in a dystopian rut. Most of the good sci-fi (and I enjoy things like the Murderbot Diaries) are largely dystopic. Hell, Star Trek- long the most utopian of sci-fi- is doing movies about Section 31 and whole seasons about android slave uprisings. No one is inspired to build a better future by "Don't create the Torment Nexus", they just get inspired to build the Torment Nexus.<p>Basically, we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote.<p>Thank you for reading my TED talk.