More than a decade ago, in 2008, Pixar released a movie called Wall-E. This futuristic film served as a cautionary tale for all of us who were dazzled at the time. After Wall-E (the garbage compactor) finds a plant, he travels to space on his Axiom ship and embarks on a mission to protect the plant and return humans to Earth. Pixar’s Wall-E painted a grim vision of our future, but how much of it was true? There are some things he predicts right (and wrong) about the future.

The latest mission to Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX has confirmed a long-held doubt: the Pixar movie is the science fiction movie that best predicts our future.

Generally speaking: self-driving cars, people glued to the screens of their devices, garbage everywhere, a company that dominates the world. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? You’ve either just watched an animated movie or observed the world around us. Debuting at a time when the economy was at its lowest point since the Great Depression, the dystopian society surrounding the worker robot scared many with its anxious predictions.

The movie shows a World that became uninhabitable due to climate changeobese space tourists who only communicate with the last surviving humans via video calls and rely on scavenging instead of food. With the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, the skyrocketing obesity rates, the takeover of our lives by Zoom calls, and the rise of meal replacement companies like Soylent and Huel, there are eerie similarities to much of our current reality.

The characters’ ship is called Axiom, and that’s where SpaceX comes in. The company’s April 8 launch carried three tourists to the International Space Station for a 12-day trip and was dubbed “Axiom Mission 1” – no coincidence at all.

WALL-E is the story of two robots who apparently fall in love. But also consumption traps and technology addiction. “I usually like to be right, but not in this case. I didn’t want to be right about so many things in this movie,” WALL-E writer-director Andrew Stanton said in this Bloomberg article.

The movie begins with a garbage cleaning robot roaming a post-apocalyptic and abandoned Earth. Occasionally, when you have to seek shelter storms struck. This reflects reality: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned last year that extreme weather events, which used to be only once every ten years, now occur every three years.

One company to rule them all

In the film’s narrative, climate change is caused by widespread overconsumption. The blame falls precisely on one company, the monopolist Buy’N’Large. It bears more than a passing resemblance to AmazonIt controls about 40% of the West’s e-commerce market and is expected to generate more than $500 billion in sales this year. The Seattle-based company was the inspiration for Stanton even 15 years ago.

There are more parallels with Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos. Buy’N’Large also operates the spaceship in the movie; Meanwhile, Bezos owns Blue Origin, a rocket company that also offers excursions for space tourists.

But it was another tech billionaire who helped Stanton and his writing team develop their vision for the direction of humanity’s journey: Steve Jobs. Apple’s co-founder was also the CEO of Pixar and spent half of his workweek at the company’s headquarters in Emeryville, at the entrance to Silicon Valley. This meant that Stanton saw the iPhone a year before it was released in 2007. He was at a party that Jobs couldn’t help showing off the device. “I think his ego got him down,” Stanton said.

overconsumption

In the movie, skyscrapers are replaced by high garbage mountains that reach higher than the clouds. Insects have since been considered rare. the natural resources needed to feed them are nearly gone. Wall-E spends his days condensing piles of garbage while adding to the growing mountains of debris. Americans alone produce more than 1,500 pounds of litter per person per year.

It’s no secret that years of handwritten letters and phone calls are almost over, replaced by abbreviated text messages that hardly resemble the actual use of language. The obese people who were the first to consume the garbage that started the Wall-E robot took this trend to the next level. Electric and autonomous cars drive obese populationis equipped with a screen that blocks the passenger’s line of sight. Addicted travelers sit and stroll the streets drinking large “Buy ‘n Large” bottles. It is at the will of the mass production company as the people in the movie spend their days watching Bn L commercials and consuming Bn L products.

In the real world, the era of smartphones is nigh, pushing users’ eyes into the visors of their devices. Social media, web browsing, Pokémon Go and everything else people want is at their fingertips in seconds. Seems like a great thing, but in the meantime, the fine line between reality and technological fiction It continues to blur. And movies like Wall-E predict everything that happens.