Why Talk So Much about Science on My Sci-Fi YouTube Channel?

Two months ago, I started a YouTube channel called “Into the Vortex.” The theme is to look at the kinds of ideas that drew me to both physics and science fiction, ideas that often run counter to our human intuition, the deep, profound, and weird. So it may seem strange that, in a channel with somewhat of a focus on science fiction, to do videos on purely scientific topics, like entropy or next week on the Anthropic Principle.

What I love about science fiction is not the tropes. I’m fine with mech suits and space ships and neon cities and alien invasions, but that’s not what draws me to the genre. What I love about science fiction is that it acts as a means to explore insights into reality and possibility that bend the mind. Questions like, what is outside the universe? What is reality made of? How did life come to be? And on the human side of things, what future societies might we want to aim toward, and which ones should we do everything in our power to avoid? What future discoveries could wreak havoc on the social narratives we tell ourselves? The answers lead to more questions, which lead to even more profound answers. Such is the nature of the pursuit of knowledge.

David Brin is a master of exploring the big questions in his novels, Earth and Existence. In these, he presents feasible pictures of what global society might look like in the near future, exploring the big questions and mysteries of our time, like consciousness, the long-term effects of climate change on society, the Fermi Paradox, extrapolation of wealth inequality, and evolution by natural selection applying in places we might not ordinarily think of it. Brin would not have been able to examine such deep topics if he weren’t intimately familiar with them.

It is this sense of depth and profoundness I strive for in my videos. It is why, not only do I talk about ideas that can easily be used for sci-fi worldbuilding, like faster-than-light travel and looping universes, but I also talk about things like the similarities between the workings of physics and computer simulations. Perhaps there is an author out there who sees my videos, understands the topics, and is inspired to write a great story exploring the questions arising from them.