Your opinion: Why do we need fiction?

[akash]

It's a good reminder that you should spend time doing something completely unimportant and inconsequential just because you can.

[Cosmic Teapot]

- Fiction is art, art is culture. Culture is what makes us different from animals.
I guess you could say telling stories is what makes us human. IMO even our ego, our subjective view that there is something in our head that qualifies as the "me" is a story that we tell ourselves. Without that we would not be able to function as what we call a human being or a person.

- Science Fiction is a starting point for real science. Like mobile phones in Star Trek or interstellar exploration in Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" in 1865

- Serves as a reflection of our society (for example 1984) and popular science like
Jurassic Park (Human Genome Project in the 80s and 90s),
Limitless and Lucy (Neurology, Human Brain Project 90s - now),
Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, Ex Machina (Artificial Intelligence),
Minority Report (Big Data)
I'd like to add that these movies like to overestimate the accomplishments and dangers of some scientific fields. Especially when it comes to the Human Genome Project. But that overestimation is in fact the reflection of our society. It's what the masses see and what the media portrays. New and exciting fields and early accomplishments may lead to inappropriate hype that ultimately ends in our works of fiction. These works can be seen or read by later generations and show them our values, hopes and fears.

- and as a reminder: The boy in the striped pajamas, Downfall, Shindler's List