How do we get to the future? As the old joke goes: well, I wouldn’t start from here. Perhaps the greatest trick that the film director George Lucas ever pulled was to set his Star Wars series not in the future, but a long time ago. Lucas’s emblematic take on once-upon-a-time introduced each film as entirely unconnected in space and time to the present day. Everybody on screen was long dead. Their lives and troubles and loves and hates were dust. The tales of heroism and noble deeds were essentially myths.

Nature special: Future generations

Much science fiction does the opposite. It takes what we have now and spins it forward. Or it picks a destination and charts a course. Occasionally, the two narrative devices collide awkwardly, and present-day humans discover some futuristic technology, which they use to change their own path. But most of the time, even tales of aliens and interplanetary travel are presented as a consequence of a plausible series of likely events.

Technologists will tell you that the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed. But there is one factor that defies such a simplistic vision: humans. One day, in the not too distant future, every­body alive today will be dead. The planet will be inherited by people who had zero input into how Earth — their only home — was farmed, fished, burned, polluted, shaped and exhausted. Perhaps some of them are reading this.

If so, the people of the future — those born in the late twenty-first century and beyond — may well scan this special issue of Nature with bewilderment or mocking nostalgia. In a series of articles, we tackle the ethics and opportunities of early-twenty-first-century science and technology and its impact on our future generations. Gene editing, nuclear waste, climate change, the march of computers and population growth — decisions and paths embarked on today will resonate well into the future.

Nature has long taken an interest in the fate of future generations and how science can improve — and endanger — them. Back in March 1870, an issue in the first volume of this journal carried a review of the book Hereditary Genius (Macmillan, 1869) by Francis Galton, who spawned the field of eugenics (see A. R. Wallace Nature 1, 501–503; 1870). His book introduced claimed scientific concepts into what had previously been an economic and social debate about the relationship between present and future people. In Britain, this came during the era of friendly societies, groups of like-minded people who — before welfare and insurance — would pay subscriptions while young, and (they hoped) receive benefits in old age, sickness and death. (In reality, and in a stark example of the pressures that still squeeze pension provision, many of these societies paid out more to older members than they could take from healthy young workers, and so went bust.)

The concept of intergenerational equity in popular debate has since focused on finance, with environmental stability and sustainability tacked onto discussions only in the past few decades. The younger generations might feel, quite legitimately, that they are getting a raw deal. Just as many of the people who paid into friendly societies never got a penny back, so the generation born around the turn of the millennium must look at the home-owning and financially secure baby-boomers and curse the timing of their births. Yet these are the young people who will, as they mature, be asked to make monumental decisions that affect not just one or two generations to come, but hundreds.

As tools emerge that could eradicate the genetic basis for ill health, should they be used? When do nations abandon the (already shaky) attempts at collective action on climate change and make explicit their pursuit of pure self-interest? Just how do we dispose of drums of toxic waste that could remain hazardous for a million years? If the future starts tomorrow, then how do we best serve tomorrow’s people?

Perhaps there is a lesson in science fiction? Taking what we have and spinning it forward raises questions about the direction we head in — some of which are addressed in this special issue. And the best way to answer those questions is to work out, as best we can, where we, they — or if you are reading this in the future, you — want to end up. We start from here.