The Imagination Gap
Science is making history. Who’s making the story?
Last week, NASA’s Curiosity rover identified the most diverse collection of organic molecules ever found on Mars: 21 compounds in Gale Crater rocks, seven of them never seen there before.1. This came seven months after Perseverance found what NASA called “the closest we have ever come to discovering life on Mars”2: iron-rich minerals in spotted patterns associated with microbial activity on Earth, pulled from an ancient riverbed in Jezero Crater.
But my bet is you didn’t see it trending.
I’m clocking this as a systems problem. The cultural scaffolding that once turned kids into engineers has thinned. Artemis II has sparked something, and the potential is great, but what cultural structure is there to light up? The human imagination, worn down by turmoil and infighting, is hungry for something bigger than itself.
The public isn’t just uninspired. It is increasingly unequipped to push back, demand more, or imagine a future that belongs to all of us, not just the few people with enough capital to decide what gets built and what gets buried.
This has been on my mind for awhile, but I haven’t known where to point. Then I went to Austin, and I found something pretty tangible.
The room
A small SXSW session, Saturday afternoon at the Hilton. No stage, no panel, just a facilitated open conversation co-hosted by Ilsa Mroz of Planet Labs and Savannah Horton of Guidehouse. They’ve been running some version of it for three years. They opened the room immediately: what is your why?
The answers were genuine. Orbital debris dread. Scientific curiosity. The Overview Effect. Kids who grew up on Star Wars and realized they couldn’t be Han Solo, so they got a PhD in astronautics instead (and this is key).
The tone shifted when a space accessibility advocate named Erica said, matter-of-factly, ‘We are absolute shit at talking to people outside of the space industry.’
The room didn’t push back or flinch or disagree. Arms shot up, looking for the mic.
Someone pointed to the opening dilemma: recent important biosignature discoveries — the accumulating evidence that life probably once existed on Mars — weren’t even making a ripple in public consciousness. I mean... life on mars? David Bowie rolls in his grave.
A SETI researcher responded with some salient reasoning for science’s caution: validation takes time, and crying wolf has costs. Fair enough. Their work depends on that caution.
But that isn’t the underlying problem. There’s no machinery for translating this kind of discovery into something the public can hold, care about, and act on.
When the discussion dipped, an older, well-dressed gentleman spoke poignantly.
“The fact that we’re talking about going back to the moon in 2026 as a 75-year-old,” he said, “is deeply disappointing. One of the most disappointing things in my life.”
He remembered Sputnik. He remembered watching Alan Shepard. He said that if you’d asked every student in his sixth-grade class whether they’d be living on the Moon before they were old — every single one would have said yes. You could almost taste his chagrin.
Not five minutes later a novelist in the back asked if there were any physicists in the room. If I caught her exclamation correctly, she was writing a cyberpunk space station novel and couldn’t figure out what the disaster should be.
It wasn’t until after I exchanged business cards, quick intros and walked out into the Austin sun that something began to crystallize.
The imagination gap is a lack of narrative infrastructure. One person is building real futures that could feed exactly the kind of stories the other person has been waiting for his whole life. They’re sitting in the same room at SXSW, then getting ushered out and disappearing back into their separate worlds.
The thread
A few days later I saw Dava Newman speak — MIT astronautics professor, former NASA Deputy Administrator and director of MIT’s Media Lab. One of the clearest thinkers, and most impassioned humanists, I encountered all week. She mentioned almost in passing that when The Martian came out, astronaut applications went from around 1,000 a year to 18,0003. Just let that sink in.
One film. One great story grounded in real science. Seventeen thousand extra people at NASA’s door.
Apollo ran on stories that science fiction writers built decades before the launch. That is cultural pre-loading. Imagination feeding real science. The two are intertwined, and right now, in the most ambitious period of space and climate technology development in a generation, the narrative infrastructure is thin.
The public has no framework for evaluating what’s being built in its name, and no language for demanding more than what a handful of billionaires decide to prioritize. This means the imagination gap is also a power gap. Stories are how the rest of us get a seat at the table.
After the session, I caught Dava in the crowd and floated the idea. She was immediately enthusiastic. So were the people around her.
The Science Nonfiction Project
I’m calling it the Science Nonfiction Project. It’s a working title, and the founding cohort will choose a permanent name.
The core idea is simple: build a live bridge between the people imagining futures and the people trying to engineer them.
Sci-fi writers, filmmakers, and game designers with engineers, scientists, and founders working in space tech, climate tech, and deep tech. The goal is to produce narrative infrastructure: stories, prototypes, and conversations that inspire public imagination, inform policy, and surface investable ideas.
From what I’ve found so far, nothing quite like this currently exists. The NAS Science & Entertainment Exchange does excellent work connecting Hollywood with scientists for accuracy consulting, but it’s one-directional. Hollywood calls, a scientist answers. ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination publishes speculative anthologies with researchers. SciFutures runs SF prototyping for corporations. These are all valuable, but none are simultaneously: building a persistent community, connecting SF creators with active builders (not just academics or Hollywood), producing output aimed at public imagination and policy, and including interactive, gaming, and experiential formats alongside writing and film.
I’m sure there are more efforts out there, and if any come to mind, point me to them. My bet is there are also more people waiting for someone to articulate exactly this need.
The plan is phased. Phase 1 is a founding cohort of 12–20 writers, builders, and bridge figures, plus a virtual salon series pairing one writer with one builder for recorded conversations published through Signal+Static and partner channels.
Phase 2 experiments with formats: design fiction hackathons, writers’ rooms with scientists, game jams around climate or space scenarios. Bleeding edge science or deep tech presentations to an audience of creatives. Low-cost, high-signal tests to find out which formats generate the most energy.
Phase 3 is an event. The idea is amorphous, but I can feel it. A culturotechnological festival and conference with interactive and gaming spaces, film and TV, builder demos, talks, hackathons, and an investor track. Something like Sundance New Frontier meets Long Now meets a game jam. That’s a few years out. We’re starting now, small, together.
Who I’m looking for
This only works if the right constellation forms.
Writers and creators who work in grounded futures. Builders working in space, climate, autonomy, and deep tech. Bridge figures who already live between those worlds. Institutional allies who understand that imagination is part of infrastructure.
The next move is simple: virtual salons. One writer, one builder, one recorded conversation.
If that feels like your lane, reach out. DM me, comment, or head to the site. We’re still shaping this on purpose. The founding cohort won’t just participate. They’ll help set the signal.
The 75-year-old left that session before I could talk to him. I’ve thought about him a lot since. His disappointment was real and earned. But it’s also diagnostic. The imagination he had at twelve, the one that made the Moon feel inevitable, was built on stories. Stories about what human beings were capable of, what the future could look like, what was worth wanting.
Meanwhile, Curiosity is finding organic molecules in Martian rock, and Perseverance is pulling samples that may carry the first evidence of life beyond Earth. Some of the most consequential science in human history is happening right now, in real time, and there’s barely a ripple through our connective tissue.
That infrastructure isn’t gone. It needs to be rebuilt, deliberately, and by more than the people who can afford to fund it.
If you want to see a field report of my journey through SXSW, including this session and more, visit marcelmcvay.com/sxsw
Sources
Williams, A.J. et al. (2026). “Diverse organic molecules on Mars revealed by the first SAM TMAH experiment.” Nature Communications 17, 2748. doi:10.1038/s41467-026-70656-0
NASA (September 10, 2025). “NASA Says Mars Rover Discovered Potential Biosignature Last Year.” nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-says-mars-rover-discovered-potential-biosignature-last-year/
Dava Newman, SXSW 2026, Breaking Through Barriers session, March 17, 2026. (Astronaut application figures cited from remarks; not independently verified.)