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Podcast: Richard Syrett's Strange Planet
Episode: 1294 Programming the Cosmos: How Science Fiction Conditioned Humanity for Space
Description: EP. #1294 Programming the Cosmos: How Science Fiction Conditioned Humanity for Space
What if humanity didn’t invent the space age—but inherited it? In Part Three of our four-part series on how science fiction shapes reality, Professor Mark Brake traces an unsettling pattern: rockets, satellites, lunar landings, arcologies, even cosmic megastructures all appeared in fiction long before engineers built them. From Kepler to Clarke, storytellers sketched the architecture of the modern world centuries in advance. Were these writers merely imaginative—or were they quietly programming our collective future? Tonight, we follow the thread into orbit, where fiction stops...