Personally, I think it's fairly obvious that science fiction is the only way humanity has to laugh at random chaos...
A.K.A. existence.
   Admittedly, I'm a nerd so I'm a little biased. Frakkin' cylons, trepanation and detectives with DID aren't things that generally make people squeal with delight. Believe me, nerds understand this very well, which is why most of us are pretentious little monkeys pretending to hoard a lot of bananas.
    But, in the interest of world peace (instead of Hallmark Palooza the 14th), I feel there is one very important banana that all monkeys and humans should know of. Allow me to introduce some and remind others of the overly used and beaten sci-fi plot bunny: parallel universes. When you've put your little universe of characters through every sort of maddening apocalypse that you and your army of ideas written while stoned can think of, you can always make them go through it all again, only in a slightly different universe, as even slightly different people. All this from one of 3,000 theories of time and space, that for every new direction an individuals' life takes, there is another plane of existence for every possible outcome...just slightly out of phase.
   Naturally, it's always ridiculously hard to get to these out phase phases of reality. There's always some nearly impossible obstacle separating our young - and surprisingly good-looking - heroes from the other possible worlds.
   Now we're getting to the best part of the banana: all that separates the world you see through your eyes and the world where you actually ate that jelly baby is some minute difference in frequency, in phase.
   Now my fellow monkey-humans, I want you to remember all those times where you've seen the world move around you and felt outside of it, out of phase. Don't panic, I'm not a quantum physicist so I have no authority to even suggest that you've been entering and exiting parallel universes...but please do allow me the poetic license.
   The New is Alien and Different by definition, which is why we may separate ourselves from them. New Alien Different could be harmful and that jelly baby may not have had proper FDA sanctions. So we ignore it, pass it by, yell at it, throw rocks at it, put economic sanctions on it, veto it, cut negotiations with it, freedom-fries it, ethnically cleanse it, persecute it, quarantine it, or even change the channel on it.
   But remember, all that separates you from all possible worlds is a fraction of a wavelength.

Theoretically.