Perhaps our hope is not in reaching for the stars, but in caring for what we already have here on Earth.Īd Astra is streaming on HBO Max and is available to buy on Amazon, YouTube, and Vudu. Though Clifford’s fate as an explorer is bleak, apparently meaningless in how fruitless his pursuit of extraterrestrial intelligence was, it has a converse effect on Roy, who returns home with the intent of reconnecting with the family that he estranged in his father’s footsteps. Roy (Brad Pitt) travels into the depths of the unknown to reconnect with his estranged father Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones), but the time and distance of his work to discover extraterrestrial life has robbed Clifford of his sense of human connection and his desire to ever return to Earth. How does one deal with the profound emptiness of being alone in the universe? Ad Astra posits that the exploration of space, the distances that we must inevitably cross in order to expand outward into the great unknown, comes at the cost of our humanity. So we’ve put together a list of 15 films from the last decade that help us explore our possible futures, and in the process, maybe help to give us a roadmap for our present. They’re a window into our collective humanity, and when grounded in plausible scenarios that could lie just around the corner, they can give us the inspiration to shape our future in reaction to or in full embrace of that hypothetical. It can be daunting to think of the future, but thankfully, movies help contextualize our anxieties, fears, and hopes. In many ways, we can’t even come to a common understanding of what a positive future even is. Despite our best efforts to build a better tomorrow, we still don’t know what tomorrow looks like. To make the understatement of the year: The future of humanity is uncertain. Follow along as we deep dive into the great unknown.

What does the future hold? In our new series “Imagining the Next Future,” Polygon explores the new era of science fiction - in movies, books, TV, games, and beyond - to see how storytellers and innovators are imagining the next 10, 20, 50, or 100 years during a moment of extreme uncertainty.

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