Grand Futures: the Interplay Between Science Fiction and Planning Really Far Ahead

How great could the future of intelligent life be? Questions about what life and intelligence can achieve in the universe is something science and science fiction have been interested in for a long time. They have often overlapped. Olaf Stapledon's cosmic visions were strongly informed by discussions with the biologist JBS Haldane who was heavily inspired by H.G. Wells, and the physicist Freeman Dyson acknowledged Stapledon's ideas in his own work on what is now called Dyson spheres. This talk will describe some of the ways visions of the far future and megascale engineering have danced between fiction and science, and current thinking about just how big our future could be.