Reflections from Summer at the Wharf 2026
Having been tasked with writing up one of the last big themes that emerged from our Summer at The Wharf event (the theme is: how stories, beliefs and imagined futures shape what gets built), it was an absolute gift when Elon Musk pinned this short film to his X profile at the weekend.
The insane scope and grandiosity of the film has given me the impetus I needed to smash this out, so big thanks Elon.
Let’s talk about the film first, because I’ve watched it way too many times over the last few days and I need to talk about it.
“Age of Beyond” is a film about the future by a director called Aze Alter using all the AI video tools. It tells an epic three-minute story about how us humans are going to expand across the solar system settling planets and moons, building a metropolis on Mars called New Olympus, and re-creating Cornwall’s Eden Project in domed mega-structures floating above “the acid clouds of Venus” to prove “the harshest worlds could be reimagined”. Along the way we’re going to extract the “infinite material” we’ll need to build all of this by rinsing the asteroid belt, conquering the moons of Jupiter from a rocket base on Callisto, discovering life 40km below the surface of Europa (spoiler: it’s a huge jellyfish that makes whale noises), and learning to “channel chaos” on Io (which seems to involve mega-machines open-cast magma mining). Sometimes, we’re going to build entirely new worlds instead of terraforming them. The film resolves on a spaceman or robot holding a gene-edited baby with glowing eyes that's able to breathe the toxic air of an alien world.
It should go without saying that all of this awesome new future is unlocked through “natural and artificial minds collaborating”, and there’s some vital prerequisite context right upfront at the top of the film in case you were wondering: “Earth was in harmony.”
The whole thing is narrated by a kind-sounding lady to the strains of sweeping classical music. She sounds like an AI, based on the calming voiceover that might explain a new class of ultra-luxury adventure hospitality. I was happy to imagine her as a real lady who had just rounded off a high-end psilocybin retreat with a week of deep meditation.
The film makes all of the videos about Neom, Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 project, look a bit like a poor man’s revamp of Center Parcs.
Nevertheless, the teenage science-fiction fan deep inside me still finds it exciting. In spite of the dissonance, and perhaps because of it. Yes, I do slightly hate myself for this.
Slight side-bar: Aze Alter originally posted this film in April 2025. At the time, Elon Musk objected on the grounds that cooperation is slightly overrated, and the Moon a distraction from Mars.
Now, Elon’s only gone and captioned the film, "This is the future we shall bring into being". That makes it more like a mission statement or roadmap. SpaceX has re-pointed itself towards the Moon (or “Luna” as we must now start calling it, presumably so that we don’t mix it up with other moons in our solar system where we’re building bases).
“Age of Beyond”, and Musk’s re-titling of it, provides the perfect way to frame the discussion we had earlier this year at Summer at the Wharf, when we were extremely lucky to hear talks and panel discussions from a range of brilliant minds, specifically on this subject.
Here’s some hot take-age.
Fiction is the R&D department
Friend-of-The-Wharf Jenny Kleeman has spent twenty years reporting the places where technology and humanity collide, which her Guardian editor files under "icky future stuff". (I make a point of quoting the title of her book “Sex Robots & Vegan Meat” every time I get the opportunity.) Her talk revolved around the chicken-and-egg question: which comes first, the technology or the imagination?
Emphatically, Jenny's answer was imagination. She’d recently been to Arizona to meet Noland Arbaugh, the young quadriplegic man who let Musk's Neuralink put a chip in his brain and now plays chess with his mind. The idea is not new. It is Iain M. Banks's neural lace, coined in his Culture novels in the mid-1990s and adopted wholesale by Musk, who has described himself as "a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks" and named SpaceX's drone ships "Just Read the Instructions" and "Of Course I Still Love You" in his honour. (Banks, an avowed socialist who said he pretty much despised American libertarianism, sadly isn’t around to comment.)
Her second example was stranger. At the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, lamb foetuses have been gestated in plastic bags, an artificial womb straight out of Brave New World, now being repurposed to save the smallest and most vulnerable humans there are. Huxley wrote it as a warning, in 1931. We've used it as inspo.
All of it existed in our collective imaginations as tropes of science fiction, as Jenny put it, long before anyone tried to make it real. The chip and the womb, written long before they were built. It highlights the fact that people we call visionaries are very often working from someone else's vision, usually a novelist's. The entrepreneur gets the patents. Imagination writes the brief.
Fiction is the sales department
Stories about dodgy-feeling future-stuff do another job, which is to make the new thing feel pre-approved. Jenny pointed out how deliberately companies reach for images we already know from fiction, so the future arrives pre-lubricated, which takes the edge off the ‘shock of the new’. NASA rockets that look like Tintin’s. Humanoid robots styled like Buzz Lightyear instead of Terminators. The unsettling pitch that opens with: ‘we are saving sick people, honest guv’.
The brain chip starts with a story about a paralysed man. Gene-edited babies start with a story about hereditary disease. The effect is, gently, to make you feel like a wrong’un because objecting means you must be against helping quadriplegics and in favour of infant suffering. Jenny’s advice at The Wharf: keep your arguments sharp, because the people selling these futures are very sharp. She was cheerfully bleak about the tech billionaires, pointing out that they know perfectly well they are no longer the good guys in the story. It’s simply that they don't care.
Humans, choose your fiction carefully…
Fiction is an inescapable part of being human. Money, nations and religions run on it, and so has every technology before AI. We may like to call ourselves Homo sapiens, 'the wise ape', but, as Terry Pratchett reminds us, a more accurate name is Pan narrans, 'the storytelling ape'.
That was always fine. Fine-ish. Stories are also the exploit, the one reliable way past the rational mind. Armies don’t march on spreadsheets, even when they’re hungry. And people don’t join death-cults because of the data. But now the machines are writing the fiction too. In this case, a vivid and beautiful three-minute fantasy, generated by AI, and pinned to a billionaire's profile as a roadmap for the species. And let’s not forget, the machines are built out of our stories in the first place… and Reddit. Maybe it doesn’t matter if you make a powerful non-human intelligence fluent in the one language that overrides human judgement. But maybe it does.
As Jenny put it, with the right story, technology can take us to extraordinary places and it's up to us to decide where we want to go. The future starts as fiction. So do we. But it matters who's holding the pen. Somewhere on X, one answer is already pinned.
