History of the Future: The Fifth Element

Hi, everybody. I want to thank Bob, Om and the Center for Science and the
Imagination for inviting me here tonight and for putting on this campy and
spectacular series. I also want to thank the Majestic Theater and the staff here for graciously hosting such a big group of nerds so we can get together to watch a bunch of corny old movies every month.

So, I’m Kyle Law, and I’m a postdoctoral research scholar here at ASU in the
Global Futures School of Sustainability and I’m a social psychologist by training.

Broadly, that means I’m interested in learning about how human behavior is
influenced by the social contexts in which we’re embedded. I study how the social groups we belong to, the situations we find ourselves in, and the relationships we maintain with others interact with our personalities to push us to act in predictable and sometimes remarkable ways.

Specifically, I’m interested in how people think about the future. So, I’m going to make a cheesy statement now–but it’s one that I think is mostly true.

Humans, all of us, are time travelers.

We routinely transcend the boundaries of the present in our mind’s eye. We can feel the euphoria of past love and the ache of past heartbreak, we can conjure up vivid imagery of our childhood homes. We can anticipate the glory of future triumph and we can organize ourselves along paths to achieving our goals. We can even envision what we’ll eventually eat for dinner. I’d wager that most of us can’t get through a single waking hour without traveling through time.

We’re constantly learning from our past and planning for our future.

Time travel on that small scale is important for success in our own lives, but it only
scrapes the surface of what we’re capable of.

Imagine you’re an Alamosaurus in Mexico. You’re a little hungry, and you stretch your long neck up to the top of a conifer. You can smell the deep, minty nectar of its piney sap and right as you’re about to take a bite, you notice a huge rock hurtling out of the sky. Could you picture that somewhat vividly? Well you just traveled 66 million years into the past.

But imagining the future works just like imagining the past. Imagination and
memory share a common toolkit of psychological machinery. So, I want us to do some imagining one more time. But this time we’re going to the future. It’s the 23rd century, so not too far, relatively speaking, and you crash land in the backseat of a flying taxi cab.Just like when you were a dinosaur, something is looming towards Earth’s atmosphere. But, it’s not a rock this time. It’s a massive, sentient fireball, and you’re the only person on the planet that can save humanity.

Here’s the thing. When you look down, the city is still doing city stuff. There’s still traffic. There are still ads screaming at you from every building. There are still sirens, and someone trying to sell you something you don’t need. Of course, the technology is more advanced. The vibe is more chaotic. The fashion is…ambitious, but the same basic human problems are still here: greed, distraction, corruption, cynicism, exhaustion.

That combination of a dazzling future layered on top of a very familiar human
nature is precisely why science fiction is such a powerful vehicle for thinking
about the future.

It makes us ask hard questions.

When the stakes are huge, and the timeline is long, and the problem is bigger than
any single one of us, do we pull together? Do we look away? Do we crack jokes?
Do we keep doom scrolling?

So, in the spirit of tonight’s series, History of the Future, here’s what I suggest
about The Fifth Element. Underneath all the camp and spectacle, this movie is about a problem that I study in my work, which is: How do you get people to care about the future when it’s not right in front of them.

In my work, I think about the psychological ingredients that get people to care
about and make sacrifices for future generations. People who don’t exist yet, who
might not for a while, but who ostensibly will have the capacity to experience joy,
suffering, love, hatred and all the neat feelings that make us human. People who
will inherit the world we build, and of course, whatever we break.

This line of thinking can create a somewhat uncomfortable psychological tension.
Because, on the one hand, it’s easy to ethically commit in principle to protecting
the future. But on the other hand, when you zoom out far enough, you start to notice
everything that’s wrong with the present. Looking at the world right now, you might reasonably ask yourself: What’s the point of saving life when you see what humans do with it? The Fifth Element does some things wrong. And I’m sure that will come across on screen.

However, what it does really well is force us to interrogate whether the future is worth
saving.

It forces us to confront the fact that the future might depend on whether we
can stay committed even after we see the worst of humanity. Personally, I’d like to suggest that the future is worth saving. And I’d wager that imagination is the most powerful tool we have available to keep us caring about the future.

We’re mental time travelers. The same cognitive capacities we evolved to help us
plan in the near-term for our personal futures support planning long-term for the
futures of the collectives to which we belong. I dare you to travel in time to the past and think about the sacrifices of those who came before us. I encourage you think about what’s wrong with the world today. I invite you to travel in time to the future to think about what could be better for the world tomorrow.

So, I’ll close by saying that I’m not trying to sell this movie as a philosophical
masterpiece. It’s a really goofy movie. But there’s a reason it’s still around.

Underneath all its chaos, I think it’s grappling with a question that’s becoming
more and more central to our time:

Is it possible to love a future we won’t live to see?

So, thank you again for being here. Enjoy the movie. Laugh at it. And just notice
what it’s subtly asking you about humanity and our role in shaping where it’s
headed. And maybe even try to bring that line of inquiry into your daily dose of
mental time travel.