Future Vision XPRIZE Loads Up With Neil deGrasse Tyson, Neal Stephenson, Mira Lane and Rod Roddenberry for $3.5M Sci-Fi Showdown

The future is officially on trial as four major voices from science, technology and science fiction prepare to help decide which optimistic vision earns millions in funding and a shot at the big screen.

Sci-fi spends plenty of time telling us how humanity screws everything up. Killer machines, ruined planets, evil corporations, dystopian governments, you know the drill. The Future Vision XPRIZE is coming at the genre from the opposite direction, putting serious money behind creators willing to imagine a future where humanity actually gets some things right.

The $3.5 million-plus global filmmaking competition has announced the four judges who will help select its grand prize winner: astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, bestselling science-fiction author Neal Stephenson, Google Vice President of Technology & Society Mira Lane, and Rod Roddenberry, CEO of Roddenberry Entertainment and The Roddenberry Foundation. That is one hell of a table to sit across from if your job is convincing people your vision of tomorrow deserves to become a feature film.

The winner will be revealed live on September 25, 2026, during Moonshots Live in Los Angeles, where filmmakers, technologists, builders, investors and some of the biggest names working at the intersection of innovation and entertainment will come together for a full day focused on ideas that could shape what comes next.

The competition is open to creators around the world and asks participants to submit either a three-minute film trailer or short film presenting a compelling and hopeful vision of humanity’s technology-enabled future. This is not about pretending problems do not exist. The challenge is to show audiences a future worth fighting for, building toward and maybe, just maybe, believing in. And the money on the table is very real.

The grand prize winner receives $2.5 million in production funding to develop the concept into a feature film, along with an additional $100,000 cash prize. Four runners-up will each receive $100,000, while ten finalists will receive $10,000 apiece.

For filmmakers accustomed to hearing some variation of “great concept, but where’s the budget?” this competition is flipping that conversation on its head. Bring the concept. Bring the imagination. Bring a world people actually want to spend two hours inside. If the judges believe in it, there is serious infrastructure waiting on the other side. Submissions close August 15, 2026.

Moonshots Live itself is shaping up to be much bigger than a standard awards ceremony. More than 1,500 filmmakers, builders and investors are expected to gather in Los Angeles for the event, which will feature conversations with Peter Diamandis, Cathie Wood, Anousheh Ansari, Astro Teller and others working across technology, investment, exploration and innovation.

The event will also feature finalist pitches from the Build with Gemini XPRIZE, a separate $2 million global hackathon challenging developers to use artificial intelligence tools to create scalable solutions for real-world problems.

By the end of the day, the Future Vision XPRIZE finalists take center stage, the winner gets crowned, and the whole thing rolls into an evening of networking. Somewhere in that room could be the filmmaker whose three-minute idea becomes a multimillion-dollar feature. No pressure, right?

What separates Future Vision XPRIZE from the usual film competition is what happens after somebody wins.

The winning concept will receive development and production support through partnerships with Range Media Partners and Google as part of their 100 ZEROS initiative. Google will also provide access to creative technology and artificial intelligence tools designed to help push the project from concept toward production. Republic Film is also involved, bringing a model that can allow fans to invest directly in the project with the possibility of sharing in the upside of the finished feature.

In other words, this is not somebody handing over a trophy, snapping a few photos and telling the filmmaker, “Good luck out there, champ.” The entire structure is designed around taking an idea and giving it a legitimate path toward becoming something audiences can eventually watch.

THE JUDGES

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson serves as Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and hosts StarTalk. Across decades of television appearances, public lectures, books and conversations about the universe, Tyson has built a career around making science understandable to people who do not spend their evenings reading astrophysics journals for fun.

His presence on the judging panel brings an obvious question to every futuristic idea entering the competition: does the science inspire possibility, or is somebody just throwing glowing buttons on a spaceship and hoping nobody asks questions?

For a competition built around technology-enabled futures, having somebody at the table who has spent decades communicating why science matters feels like a pretty natural fit.

Neal Stephenson

Then you have Neal Stephenson, and if you are building futuristic worlds, this brother knows something about watching fictional ideas escape the page and enter the real-world technology conversation.

Stephenson is the author behind influential novels including Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon and Seveneves. His 1992 novel Snow Crash famously introduced the term “metaverse,” decades before tech companies started spending billions trying to convince everybody they invented the idea last Tuesday.

Stephenson’s work has spent years poking at the relationship between technology, culture, power and the people crazy enough to build the future before the rest of society figures out what it means. That perspective should make him one of the more fascinating judges on the panel, particularly when filmmakers start presenting worlds shaped by emerging technology.

Mira Lane

Representing another side of the future-building equation is Mira Lane, Vice President of Technology & Society at Google and founder of the company’s Envisioning Studio.

The studio operates as an AI prototyping lab that collaborates with innovators and creators to explore emerging technologies and develop experiences showing what those technologies might make possible.

Lane previously founded Ethics & Society at Microsoft and also maintains a career as a practicing artist, giving her an unusual position between engineering, ethics, design and creative expression.

That combination matters in a competition asking filmmakers to imagine technology not simply as another gadget in the background, but as something capable of reshaping how humanity lives. The most interesting futures are rarely just about what the machine can do. They are about what happens when people actually have to live with it.

Rod Roddenberry

And then there is Rod Roddenberry, CEO of Roddenberry Entertainment and The Roddenberry Foundation and the son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.

Few entertainment franchises have carried the banner for optimistic science fiction quite like Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry imagined humanity surviving its mess, growing beyond many of its divisions and heading into the stars with curiosity instead of immediately trying to blow everything up.

Rod Roddenberry has spent his career helping preserve and extend that legacy while supporting new ideas built around a similar belief that the future does not automatically have to suck.

For Future Vision XPRIZE, that connection feels almost tailor-made. When the entire competition is centered on showing audiences a future worth building, bringing a Roddenberry into the room makes perfect sense.

There is something refreshing about putting millions of dollars behind science fiction that asks creators to imagine progress instead of collapse. Dystopian stories absolutely have their place. Some of the greatest science fiction ever created exists specifically to warn us about where technology, politics or human stupidity can lead. But if every version of tomorrow ends with civilization hiding underground while robots kick down the door, eventually somebody has to ask what the hell we are supposed to be building toward.

Future Vision XPRIZE is betting that hopeful futures can be just as dramatic, cinematic and provocative as broken ones. The bigger test will come when filmmakers show whether optimism can still deliver tension, danger, conflict and spectacle without defaulting to “everything went to hell.”

With Tyson, Stephenson, Lane and Roddenberry judging those visions, the competition has assembled four people who approach the future from completely different directions: science, fiction, technology, ethics and one of pop culture’s most enduring optimistic legacies. Now somebody has to walk into that room and convince them their future deserves $2.5 million to become a movie. Yeah, no pressure at all. Attendance for Moonshots Live is available by application at moonshots.com.

Future Vision XPRIZE also recognizes sponsors Salesforce, ARK Invest and Xsolla, along with donor Jed McCaleb.

ABOUT XPRIZE

XPRIZE creates and operates large-scale competitions designed to encourage new approaches to major global challenges. For more than 30 years, the organization has used competition-based innovation to bring together scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers and creators working toward scalable solutions.

More information is available at xprize.org.

ABOUT FUTURE VISION XPRIZE

Future Vision XPRIZE is a $3.5 million-plus global filmmaking competition focused on imagining a future worth building toward. Presented by XPRIZE and founded by Peter Diamandis, the competition works with Range Media Partners, Google through its 100 ZEROS initiative, and Republic Film to help bring the winning concept toward feature-film production.

Submissions close August 15, 2026.

More information is available at futurevisionxprize.com.

ABOUT MOONSHOTS LIVE

Moonshots Live takes place September 25, 2026, at the United Theater and Belasco in Los Angeles. The single-day event serves as the shared finale for Future Vision XPRIZE and Build with Gemini XPRIZE, bringing together more than 1,500 filmmakers, builders and investors for finalist presentations, conversations and the announcement of both competitions’ winners.

ABOUT MOONSHOTS

Moonshots is the media and events organization behind Future Vision XPRIZE, Build with Gemini XPRIZE and Moonshots Live, focused on connecting creators, innovators and resources around ideas designed to build and communicate a more optimistic future.