Barren sandscapes patrolled by marauding gangs poised for vehicular warfare. Highways scarred by explosives and littered with remnants of abandoned vehicles. Children locked in cages and families hunted on horseback. Destruction and gratuitous violence in abundance.

If the trailers for some of this year’s most anticipated blockbusters are anything to go by, Hollywood holds a bleak outlook for the future. In cinemas this year we have, to name just a few, a Mad Max prequel, a Dune sequel, the latest from the Planet of the Apes, and a 2024 US Civil War - all showing a future marked by societal collapse, resource scarcity, and power struggles as humanity grapples with the dynamics of drastic change.

Mainstream movies and other art forms can tell us something about wider public sentiment; in this case, the dystopian-themed films correspond with reports of a national mood of pessimism and worry.

But whilst Hollywood is trailing some of our worst fears, Nesta premiered Future Signals 2024, our annual look ahead to the innovations and ideas that could shape the world this year and beyond. Signals suggests that very different stories are possible.

When we looked at the big trends for the future, we didn’t find despondency, we found an international appetite for tackling society’s biggest challenges, reflecting a growing public focus on environmental sustainability and digital technology - and most importantly a belief that things don’t have to get worse, they can get better.

Some challenges, like the climate crisis, can feel insurmountably large. Others, like the ailments afflicting the NHS, seem frustratingly persistent. Future Signals features ideas that might help to address them, from literally out of this world solutions like space-based solar power to radically reimagining old practices, such as using the latest technology to allow patients to recuperate at home whilst being treated in “virtual” hospital wards.

So if our Signals are slightly at odds with Hollywood’s calamitous vision of things to come, they do instead find common cause with an alternative creative vision: solarpunk. This emerging sci-fi subgenre projects a vision of the future where nature, technology and humanity operate in harmony. As Solarpunk Magazine puts it, “solarpunk stories are decidedly not dystopias”. Likewise, the big themes of Future Signals 2024 were the environment, digitalisation, technology and an optimistic view of the world we can shape.

Solarpunk isn’t just utopian escapism though, it speaks to the real problems humanity faces, but with a belief that we can harness our collective abilities to solve them. So too our Future Signals are not blindly optimistic, acknowledging some of the big challenges we face now and may face in the future, and illustrating the thoughtfulness and collective action often required to address them. For example, incredible advances in brain imaging and AI are helping to create “mind-reading” technology that could potentially recreate images from our minds or boost the thought signals of people with spinal injuries so they can walk again. At the same time, these breakthroughs are raising big questions about ‘neuroprivacy’ - how can we protect ourselves from people spying on our deepest thoughts?

A key element of the solarpunk ideal is balancing technology with the environment and humanity, not dividing our planet into separate ‘digital’ and ‘natural’ worlds. That’s a vision we see in this year’s Future Signals too, with the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu digitally backing-up their entire country to preserve its sovereignty and culture in the event that rising sea levels render it uninhabitable, harnessing technology to weather adversity and loss.

Both solarpunk and Signals teach us the same lessons - that we have agency, that the choices we make now can determine the future that lies ahead and that a better future begins with ideas. As Geoff Mulgan argues, it is our imagination that provides us with the options to address those big challenges, equipping us with the vision of a plausible and desirable future that we can create for the generations that follow.

So whilst the future we see on the silver screen this year may not fill us with optimism, it’s important to remember that by digging a bit deeper we might find inspiration to start creating a solarpunk future of our own.