“I will never tire of the best lesson that Star Trek always practices but never overly mentions — every time a person experiences something totally fucking weird and impossible, they tell someone about it and that person believes them. Then they start working the problem.”
— @NicasioSilang, November 2018

But this would require speculation...

When the Future of Computing Academy recently suggested that authors of computer science papers should write about the possible negative implications of the technology they build or the research they conduct, one complaint I saw from scientists was that this would require speculation: How are we supposed to know what bad things might happen?
Casey Fiesler, Black Mirror, Light Mirror: Teaching Technology Ethics Through Speculation, October 2018

Impossible sci-fi nonsense

“If you write out the basic facts of trees, but framed as technology, it sounds like impossible sci-fi nonsense. Self-replicating, solar-powered machines that synthesize carbon dioxide and rainwater into oxygen and sturdy building materials on a planetary scale.”
— Jarod K. Anderson, @CryptoNature, 30 July 2019

Not in my lifetime

“I am embarrassed to admit (don’t tell anyone) that when I first saw the interior doors on the Enterprise slide open automatically as crew members walk up to them, I was certain that such a mechanism would not be invented during my years on Earth.”
— Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, on his impressions of the original Star Trek series. (From the essay Happy Anniversary, Star Trek, in Space Chronicles, p. 197) 

Asimov to Muppet Magazine

“My own feeling is that science fiction, of all the different forms of literature, is the one that most easily accepts the notion of change. Things are changing very quickly, and any kid who thinks about it knows that the world in which he or she will be a grown-up — which he or she will be helping to run — will be considerably different from this one. Maybe better, maybe worse, but different. Science fiction explores the future world.

I think more and more young people are beginning to feel that science fiction is the kind of literature that a person interested in reality should be reading.”
— Isaac Asimov, to Muppet Magazine, 1983

Brain Pickings calls this quote “science fiction as lubricant for change.” More/context via Brain Pickings, Isaac Asimov on Curiosity, Taking Risk, and the Value of Space Exploration in Muppet Magazine