I am a big fan of hard science fiction. Roughly put, “hard” science fiction is science fiction that sticks as closely as possible to real science and technology, attempting to make the “science” in the “fiction” as believable as possible. It is typically based on real physics, biology or engineering, with authors having to explain how things work rather than hand wave things into existence, like lightsabers and “The Force”.
Some hard science fiction works define themselves by the “hardness” of their physics. For instance, Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem trilogy tries as best to apply imaginative uses of plausibly realistic physics to an alien invasion story. Then there are those that go by biology. Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time is probably the best hard science fiction that explores the nature of Darwinian evolution on another planet.
Another type that I have come to really enjoy is where the “hardness” of the science comes from social sciences — a form of hard social science fiction, so to speak. Arguably the greatest writer of this genre was American author Ursula K Le Guin, whose works of science fiction were based more on rigorous social thought experiments — as opposed to science and technology itself — with themes covering ethnography, capitalism and anarchism, feminism, and social power.
Much of the foundation of hard science fiction is effectively taking our reality today and asking, “If this one thing were different, how would the world look?” So that’s what I am going to do with this month’s column. In the past month, I have had the opportunity to learn in far greater detail about some technological efforts that are pretty groundbreaking with far-ranging consequences. Some of them may be slightly further away than others from becoming a day-to-day thing, but they are all currently absolutely in the pipeline. And none of what I describe will be that one particular technology that seems to be capturing everyone’s attention today, just to avoid further saturation of viewpoints.
Hard science fiction scenario one: What if the average human lived until 150?
The quest for immortality is, like what it attempts to achieve, timeless. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Qin Shi Huang ingesting mercury as an elixir of life to modern day popular culture like Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone or Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail, the nature of mortality remains at the very heart of the human condition.
Recently, I attended a talk in which Harvard Medical School professor Dr David Sinclair described how his lab had developed methods to reverse ageing in mice, reprogramming their cells to a more youthful state. Prof Sinclair is well known for his work on the molecular mechanisms of ageing as well as his attempts to slow or reverse the ageing process. He has somewhat achieved this with mice via molecular means and he hopes to achieve this with humans at some point. Let’s suppose he succeeds (despite current funding cuts to his lab by the Trump administration) — what would a society in which the human lifespan is essentially doubled look like?
Hard science fiction scenario two: What if we fought climate change by creating robot versions of plants and animals?
For the record, one answer to this question comes from my favourite computer game series of all time, Horizon: Zero Dawn and Horizon: Forbidden West, where machines that mimicked horses, cows and even a Tyrannosaurus Rex (among others) were designed to restore life to earth after a global extinction event, with each machine serving a specific ecological function. The games are amazing with the most beautiful graphics I have ever experienced, but their core theme comes from this nexus of nature and ecology called biomimicry.
The concept of biomimicry refers to the development and design of technologies that are inspired by non-human biological species and their various processes. As I have argued before, nature is history’s greatest innovator with evolution producing “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful”. Biomimicry takes seriously the view that evolution has optimised solutions all across nature and we can use those solutions to solve human challenges more efficiently and sustainably. After all, it is human hubris to assume that human ways are necessarily the most efficient or effective in every activity that we so choose.
If you would like to get somewhat terrified (or excited, or both) about killer robots, you should look up “Boston Dynamics Spot” on YouTube. Polybee is an Australian deep technology start-up that uses drones to essentially automate the pollination of fruit, taking on the role of bees. Companies are also taking inspiration from spider silk to create ultra-strong, biodegradable fibres that can serve as bulletproof vests. To be clear, biomimicry is not new — the Shinkansen bullet trains in Japan had their noses redesigned after the beak of the kingfisher, which allows for silent, splash-less diving, and Velcro was created after a Swiss engineer noticed how burrs stuck to his dog’s fur.
Hard science fiction scenario three: What if, instead of relying solely on earth for natural resources and metals, we could mine asteroids in space instead?
One of my favourite things to think about is the fact that, with the exception of hydrogen and helium, every other element on the Periodic Table that exists on earth came from the rest of the universe, whether they came from other much larger stars, from supernovas or the collision of neutron stars. That we are made of the universe is such an awe-inspiring feeling, at least for me. A more pragmatic day-to-day application is that all the minerals in the ground — gold, silver, rare earths, nickel, lithium, vibranium — were ultimately the result of space debris crashing down on earth. It was a lottery of asteroids or comets or other space projectiles that enabled Malaysia, for instance, to mine tin in the 19th and 20th centuries.
But what if we didn’t depend on what we could find on earth alone for resources? What if there are other surfaces out in the solar system, at the very least, that we could mine for materials? In the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, asteroids come mostly in three types: carbonaceous (rich in carbon and water-bearing minerals); salicaceous (silicate rocks and some metals); and metallic (self-explanatory). As it is, Nasa’s OSIRIS-REx mission has collected and returned with samples from the near-earth asteroid Bennu, while China’s National Space Administration launched Tianwen-2 in May 2025 to collect and return with samples from the near-earth asteroid 469219 Kamo’oalewa. But it goes beyond public missions — a Californian start-up plans to launch a mission to land on a metallic asteroid, after which it would test a laser-based system that would vapourise asteroid material, allowing for easier collection of minerals.
There are other suggestions — for instance, to save cost, instead of going to the asteroid, why not bring asteroids closer to, say, lunar orbit and mine them from there? Sounds practical, but anybody who can “target” asteroids is necessarily existentially scary for all of us (see The Expanse) and let’s not forget it was possibly an asteroid (likely a comet) that wiped out the dinosaurs when it crashed into the Yucatán Peninsula 65 million years or so ago.
Emerging technologies today are creating all kinds of material for hard science fiction writers. And as we know, technology really can go either way in terms of gain or pain to society. In the graphic novel
Watchmen, Ozymandias says to Dr Manhattan, “… our scientists are limited only by their imaginations”, to which Dr Manhattan replies, “And by their consciences, surely?” Let’s hope that the very worst of the outcomes remain limited to hard science fiction stories.