🚀 lessons from sci-fi: a perfect sphere and why fiction makes a decent first draft for the future

🖋 notes on building: fear, resistance, and why doing it badly still beats not doing it at all

📚 what i’m reading: what defines humanity? turtles all the way down.

📽 artifact: the sphere reflects everything but us

Imagine you’re asked to draft humanity’s first alien-encounter protocol. Where do you even start? Better yet, who do you bring with you?

Or imagine a psychologist, biochemist, mathematician, and an astrophysicist walk into a bar.

Actually, they enter a spacecraft. From the future. Plus, a perfect golden sphere. An alien named Jerry. Samuel Jackson’s character is repulsed by calamari. That’s cinematic bingo in four moves.

(Spoilers Ahead)

In Sphere (the 1998 film adapted from Michael Crichton’s novel of the same namesake), a team of scientists is sent to the bottom of the Pacific to investigate a mysterious spacecraft discovered on the ocean floor. Inside, they find the flawless golden sphere. As each team member confronts it, their darkest fears begin manifesting in reality. The deeper they go, the clearer it becomes that the real threat isn’t the sphere, but the bounds of human imagination.

Now, the entire mission protocol, the very reason this odd assortment of experts ends up underwater in the first place, comes from a report written years earlier by the psychologist himself. His assignment was to outline what humanity should do if it ever encountered alien life.

He later admits the “official alien-encounter plan” was influenced less by data and more by Isaac Asimov and Rod Serling — heavy on the science fiction, and light on the actual science.

And yet, the more you think about it, this isn’t too half-baked of an idea.

Normally, when we’re faced with a challenge, we reach for precedent. History becomes our handbook. We look at which solutions worked, which failed, and how we might adapt them to today. It’s the comfort of knowing someone has at least left us breadcrumbs through the unknown.

But what happens when there is no precedent? When the terrain itself is new, whether that’s stumbling on a golden sphere at the bottom of the Pacific or trying to build a quantum ecosystem, imagination can fill the gap.

When data runs dry, we borrow from fiction, intuition, and thought experiments until reality catches up.

Fiction doesn’t hand us exact blueprints, but it does expand the range of what we’re willing to consider. Dune imagines a future where humanity rejects thinking machines altogether, while Sphere assumes psychology and mathematics matter as much to first contact as physics or engineering. These narrative experiments broaden the solution space.

We’ve already seen this play out. Nobody predicted the rise of “prompt engineers” before generative AI, or the sudden need for governance mechanisms to counter deepfakes. The same will hold true for quantum, synthetic biology, or space tech. The first plan will be imperfect, maybe even absurd, but iteration is the only way forward. As in Sphere, the key is to be willing to build on speculation, then adapt ruthlessly when reality tests it.

And where precedent fails, no single discipline holds all the answers. The unknown is too big, too multifaceted. That’s where Crichton’s eclectic team starts to feel less like fiction and more like instruction. Yes, we need physicists, engineers, and biochemists. But we also need linguists to interpret, policymakers to govern, and writers to document the first drafts of discovery.

And definitely at least one psychologist, because nothing derails first contact faster than an unprocessed existential crisis.

All in all, ecosystems aren’t advanced by niche specialists alone.

Deep tech ecosystems thrive when these diverse perspectives collide. A single discipline will never map the whole terrain, but the overlap with another can reveal new paths. Just as the crew in Sphere struggled with alien contact, we will stumble as we build quantum systems, biofoundries, or space economies. But collaboration across domains is how novel futures take shape.

Building unprecedented technology means borrowing from fiction, embracing imperfection, and assembling teams that represent more than just one slice of expertise. Progress will not result from silos, but from the collision of imagination, science, and society.

This week I caught myself doing something I’ve done for years — putting off the “easy” tasks. The short draft that should only take ten minutes. The thing I tell myself I’ll “get to later.”

That resistance, I’ve realized, usually comes from fear. And this specific flavor of fear usually stems from outdated perception (seeing myself as who I used to be instead of who I am now) or a knowledge gap in that I don’t yet have the skills, practice, or familiarity to do the thing well, so my instinct is to avoid it.

Really, the only way to close these gaps is to show up and do the work. When the resistance shows up (because it will), it isn’t a warning to stop. It’s a sign to lean in. To answer the question anyway. To send the draft. To do the thing badly if needed, because existence always comes before refinement.

That’s how I’m approaching Universum Labs. Talking about it feels vulnerable, unfinished, maybe not “serious” enough yet. But if we let that fear keep us quiet, then the vision never has a chance to grow.

That being said — we’re doing the first live demo at Quantum.Tech Europe 2025, in Rotterdam, this Septermber 29 - October 1. It will not be perfect, but it will be real, and real is the only place progress starts.

Re-reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (or the inspiration for Blade Runner” for all you movie > the book people) because the namesake behind the launch of this newsletter. An interesting exploration into what defines our humanity. Philip K. Dick framed it as empathy, measured and tested. But perhaps it’s something broader in the way we sense, adapt, and rearrange ourselves in response to the world. Machines may mirror intelligence, but it is our capacity to turn experience into meaning that keeps us on the human side of the line.

If you want to read along, you can find Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? here. (This is an affiliate link, which means I may earn a small commission if you purchase. Consider it a way to support Android Dreams while filling your bookshelf. Win-win.)