Yes, betting on where the future can lead us just leads to kind of poor imaginings of what the future could be. But, that's not what makes scifi interesting, the ability to teleport a missile onto another persons ship, or shoot a gauss rifle with flechette bullets to zip though someone, or the ability to have personal flying machines is interesting, but, that's not why I care about scifi settings. It's the fact that scifi is inherently a human question, it's the fact that we have the effective power of gods, but, not necessarily the morality to follow through with it. It amplifies and shows who we are and what we do, and how we justify it.
A lot of the "scifi greats" aren't about what technology is and what it can do, it's following through with the thought of so what. If humans had the ability to travel through space, but are still stuck in tribalism, so what do you get? Dune. If you have humans travel through space, but, hold themselves to an unbendable moral/ethical code, what do you get? Star Trek. Basically every Assimov short story and book is just about humans dealing with who they are, and the technology passes over.
The technology is just a gravy on top of a story about who humans are, and how far we go, in scifi greats.
I'm not disagreeing with you. The "Hero's Journey" is one of the oldest tropes for a reason. All I'm saying is that the set pieces in sci-fi work very differently than they do in fantasy settings.
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Stop asking me. It was the clue on Wheel of Fortune when I made the account to ask a question about Faxanadu. *Shrugs*