Creative Destruction: SciFi Goes Spiritual

The Matrix is a system, Neo.  That system is our enemy.

 - Morpheus, The Matrix

Let a complex system repeat itself long enough eventually something surprising might occur. That too is in God's plan.

- Six, Battlestar Galactica

Our bodies are so intricate and vulnerable; our intelligence and ultimately our humanity is the only thing that distinguishes us; and in the face of an infinite universe, what do we have but our ties to each other?

   - James Franco, Huffington Post

If we can't live together, we're going to die alone.

  - Jack Sheppard, LOST

Together, we will live forever.

 - The Fountain

Our mythologies across time and distance have each discussed the connectedness of all things, the  ouroboros of natural boom and bust cycles.  What has come before shall come again, but what changes?  With each iteration, we human beings gain more individual agency, along a spectrum, in a social context.

And we look for answers.  Is this all I am?  Is there nothing more?  Science Fiction is about who were are, now, but equally, it's about where we have come from and where we're going.  It's a metaphor for unknown realities that lay tantalizingly beyond our perception - for now. 

Cobb: You create the world of the dream. We bring the subject into that dream and fill it with their subconscious.
Ariadne: How could I ever acquire enough detail to make them think that it's reality?
Cobb: Well, dreams, they feel real while we're in them right? Its only when we wake up then we realize that something was actually strange.

Who we are is not who we feel we should be.  Nor is what it means to be human as distinct as we would like to imagine.  Do we matter?  What happens to us?  If your focus is the individual, we are all doomed to end.  That ending, though, is a beginning - what we leave behind becomes the matrix from which springs new life, both biological and social.  Through this constant genesis, we all matter.  We are what came before, we are what comes next - we are part of the whole.

And the whole is more than the sum of its parts.