dannnex

Almost a decade ago, someone asked me what I thought was the most "sci-fi" technology that already exists in society. For a long long time my answer to this question was contact lenses. Magic little gel hemispheres that are relatively cheap and manufactured with so much precision that they bend light in exactly the right way to allow someone to see clearly. That's insane. (The history of contact lenses is super interesting too, they're both insanely old and super new depending on how you look at it. The very first idea that resembled modern day contact lenses was proposed by mfing DA VINCI in 1508, but modern silicone hydrogel lenses were only invented in 1998.)

And that might still be my answer in some contexts. But from a more aesthetic/philosophical standpoint I think the answer has got to be street lights.

Now the technology of "large lightbulb on a stick" doesn't exactly scream sci-fi, but the purpose and infrastructure around them absolutely do. The single most constant ecological feature of this planet is the night-day cycle. Long before the first microorganisms, even before WATER was present on this planet, the earth rotated during its orbit around the sun. The cycle of day-night-day-night has never been broken in 4.5 BILLION years.

Until now. 

Ours is the first society to say "yeah we'll pass" when confronted with the mandatory darkness of night. A society so constant and unyielding, so full of momentum, that we decided we don't need the sun to light our paths anymore. We'll do it ourselves. Our society must grow, must expand, and before we eventually expand upwards and outwards into the solar system, into "3D darkness", we had to expand into 4D darkness, expand not our usable physical area but our usable temporal area. We claim the night as OUR time, say that these are hours that we WILL use, and we will MAKE them usable, natural order be damned.

If that isn't sci-fi, I don't know what is.