Bluecheck anti-moon crew reporting for duty. There’s a brief, throwaway scene in 2014’s Interstellar that accurately predicted our entire world. In Christopher Nolan’s not-too-distant dystopian future, Tom Cooper, an engineer-turned-farmer in the middle of an apocalyptic global crop failure, is called into his daughter’s school. The problem is she brought an old textbook to class depicting the American moon landing, and in the year 2067 educators have determined the Apollo program was only ever propaganda designed to bankrupt the U.S.S.R. Humanity, the teacher explains, has never left Earth. Cooper, an ex-pilot with dreams to enter space — a feat he accomplishes over the course of the movie as he journeys across the galaxy to save the world — stares aghast and helpless at the blinded “expert” with his daughter’s future in her hands.

It always struck me as unnerving, but not until my recent re-watch did I realize the extent to which this moment between Cooper and his daughter’s teacher was also prescient. Sure, I thought, ‘our schools are bad,’ and ‘just imagine how much worse they’re going to become.’ I get it. But back then I genuinely believed it was no longer possible to forget the past. Hadn’t the internet liberated information, and eternally preserved our history? I have probably never been more wrong about something so important.

The present malleability of information, and the speed of its generation, fundamentally degrades our collective knowledge, erodes our shared sense of the world, and calls into question every digital record of our past. This collapse of consensus reality is something I wrote about extensively in Tether, Part I and Tether, Part II. Among many things, current information technology at scale appears to make history impossible, and this is just the ground floor. In a little over two minutes, the Nolan brothers called everything: a once-unthinkable acquiescence to our crumbling world, an essential unseriousness of our most serious institutionalists, the authoritarian demand for submission to shocking misinformation, an unbridgeable reality gap between Americans in disagreement, and the minds of our children shackled by warped ideologues. But nothing in that schoolhouse scene so accurately predicted our future as the “myth” deemed unspeakably dangerous by our rusted founts of power: Man is a creature that goes to space, and our destiny is in the stars.