Science Quote by Isaac Asimov

Asimov smuggles a quiet rebuke into what looks like a neat, rational observation: prediction is cheap; responsibility is the hard part. Coming from a scientist who also wrote the twentieth century’s most influential “engineering” science fiction, the line reads less like genre cheerleading and more like an ethical warning to his own tribe. Yes, science fiction is good at extrapolation. It can take today’s small habits and scale them into tomorrow’s disasters with unsettling clarity. But inevitability, Asimov insists, is a story we tell ourselves when we want to stop choosing.

The sentence pivots on a crucial asymmetry. Catastrophes can be “inevitable” in the sense that complex systems break, empires overreach, technologies spill into misuse. Solutions, by contrast, are not baked into physics. They require politics, imagination, coordination, and moral courage - the messy human variables that don’t obey tidy laws. That’s why the second clause lands like a cold splash: it punctures the comforting idea that progress automatically arrives to clean up after progress.

Context matters. Asimov wrote in the long shadow of nuclear weapons, Cold War brinkmanship, and the acceleration of industrial and computational power. His era was saturated with apocalyptic foresight, from mushroom clouds to environmental collapse. The quote positions science fiction as a diagnostic tool, not a salvation narrative: it can map the cliff edge, but it can’t guarantee the bridge.

Subtext: if you’re relying on “inevitable solutions,” you’re already rehearsing your excuse.