From Dune to The 3 Body Problem, the sci-fi popular in the modern era has arguably become more outlandish than ever. The 3 Body Problem imagines a proton, ‘unfolded’ in 11 dimensions, and turned into a planet-sized supercomputer. Even in the realms of the imagination, the possibility of such future science appears far-fetched. Is the outlandishness of our sci-fi correlated with the size of the gaps in our current understanding? David Kyle Johnson argues the more we learn about the universe, the more there is to discover.
 

 “[T]oday's science fiction is tomorrow's truth.”

-- Hal McAllister, Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1952, p. 127.

Although this quote (or something like it) is thought to have been said by Issac Asimov (it probably wasn’t), it is still a common sentiment. “What is science fiction today will be science fact tomorrow.” And if you believe this, you might think it explains why science fiction has gotten a bit more, shall we say, far-fetched lately.

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Think about the three-body problem, which serves as the title of both a work of science fiction (which was first a novel by Liu Cixin and is now a Netflix series) and is a problem in physics. The novel and show are pretty crazy! (Spoiler alert) You’ve got real to life VR, invisible indestructible nanofibers, and apparently, at some point, a proton will be unfolded in 11 dimensions, whatever the hell that means. “Since science has been unable to solve things like the three-body problem,” the argument might go, “science fiction writers have turned to speculating about solutions. And there’s a lot that science hasn’t explained beyond the three-body problem, like dark matter, dark energy, and quantum mechanics.”