In the year 2001, Earth has become a biologically sterile wasteland where all plant life is extinct. To maintain the possibility of future reforestation, the last remnants of the planet's ecosystems are preserved within massive geodesic biodomes attached to a fleet of commercial space freighters orbiting Saturn. The Valley Forge, one such vessel, serves as a floating ark tended by a small crew of bored corporate employees and a dedicated botanist, Freeman Lowell. The world is depicted as a place where humanity has solved fundamental needs like poverty and disease through total industrialization and synthetic food production, but at the cost of the natural world and human imagination.

The societal dynamic is defined by a deep-seated apathy toward nature; Earth's population has adapted to a climate-controlled, artificial existence where the preservation of forests is viewed as an unnecessary commercial expense. When the corporate masters order the destruction of the domes to return the freighters to profitable shipping service, Lowell mutinies, murdering his crewmates to save the last forest. This portrays Earth as an abandoned biological origin that has fully transitioned into a techno-industrial hub, viewing its ecological heritage as a "mothballed" curiosity rather than a vital necessity.

Silent Running is notably prescient in its depiction of stewardship as an automated routine. While we have not yet reached a point of total botanical extinction, the film’s vision of space-based seed banks mirrors real-world efforts like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, albeit in orbit. The film accurately predicted the anthropomorphizing of service robots; Lowell’s relationship with drones Huey and Dewey prefigures modern social robotics where humans project emotion onto non-humanoid machines. Additionally, the film's depiction of robotic surgery and drone-assisted maintenance aligns with current aerospace and medical trajectories, though the film correctly identifies that technological progress without ecological restraint leads to a point of no return where preservation becomes a lonely, desperate act of piracy.