What "science fiction" means differs, since there is a lot of dystopian fiction out there, far larger than the amount of solar-punk type positive portrayals.

> How accepting did they think they could be in a future where they had to eat bugs instead of cow

Stuff like that is a great example. "Eating bugs" can be a Snowpiercer-style dystopian image of you forcing down cockroaches while the rich eat steak. But IRL insect protein is being made into flour or other substrates for processed foods. Insects are mainly being grown for chicken and aquaculture feed. And soon culture meat is going to enter the market and scale. But much of r/futurology seems intent on framing that as dystopian, too.

> The question of how far we could adapt to higher science fiction level advances was truly fascinating to listen in on as my students debated.

I think there are a lot of questions posed by science fiction that our ethics are just not equipped for yet. Take robots or androids. Where do we consider them human? A mining robot isn't going to be seen to have rights or need protection, I'd wager. But what if your neighbor has a bevy of sex-bots that look like underage kids? Should that be illegal? But they're robots, right?

Consider too virtual worlds. Do you allow any fantasy to be acted out in virtual worlds? Nominally, going in, sure, many would agree to that. But humans have an 'icky' factor that kicks in very quickly. Consider hentai now. There are plenty of types of porn that were never anything more than ink on a page or pixels on a screen, but people would still want to be illegal. No humans were harmed, but people insist (with no real foundation) that it "encourages" this or that, ergo if you hand-wave hard enough then it's a public danger and thus should be banned. It's bullshit, but it's also that "icky" factor kicking in, where people have to rationalize banning it on basis of moral revulsion. That's only going to become a more acute problem as technology improves.