Does Great Science Require Great Science Fiction?

That was the question recently posed on Big Think.

From the piece...

I enjoyed this recent article by Neal Stephenson in the World Policy Journal, but I think he and his editors may have buried their lede. Stephenson, a bestselling science fiction (SF) author who grew up watching the Apollo missions, is concerned about the lack of visionary science and engineering projects in our own time. Accordingly, he frames his essay as a lament about the decline of American innovation, of "our ability to get important things done," and so on. We've all seen plenty of commentary to this effect, especially since the Space Shuttle completed its last mission. Midway through, however, Stephenson recounts the following anecdote from a 2011 conference called Future Tense:

“You’re the ones who’ve been slacking off!” proclaims Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University (and one of the other speakers at Future Tense). He refers, of course, to SF writers. The scientists and engineers, he seems to be saying, are ready and looking for things to do. Time for the SF writers to start pulling their weight and supplying big visions that make sense. Hence the Hieroglyph project, an effort to produce an anthology of new SF that will be in some ways a conscious throwback to the practical techno-optimism of the Golden Age.

This struck me as a remarkable claim—not on Stephenson's part, of course, but Crow's. It's one thing for authors to trumpet their own importance, but to see a university president actually call on fiction writers to lead the country forward is startling. In effect he asks them: how can America have a great future unless you imagine it for us?