The main thing about roaming beyond your area of formal expertise is to know your limitations and have a little courtesy. We're pretty brash about standing before the experts in some field and posing questions they might not have thought of. The latter approach doesn't win you friends, or repeat invitations. But a sense of humor wins friends for life. Our civilization does a good job of training agile minds.
Science fiction is part of the process.
In any given year, there are ever more conferences bringing together experts from widely varied fields to cross-fertilize and encourage their intellectual breadth. I coined it. So don't try to claim it, all you renaissance-generalist swine out there. Moral declines in living societies are usually judged by ignorant people with little or no power of observation, based on theories posited by people with little or no grasp of the way societies work. Health of a social structure must be judged by how it treats its individuals and how it forges ahead on new frontiers.