Part of the fun of watching and reading science fiction is coming up with incredible technology that doesn’t exist in our current lives.
Teleportation devices and time travel machines have yet to be invented and yet some real-life technologies are now available that were first invented in the minds of sci-fi authors.
Here are five currently available technologies predicted by sci-fi that were years ahead of their time:
1. Hover board
Pretty much everyone who watched Back to the Future II in 1989 wanted Marty McFly’s hoverboard.
While technically true hoverboards aren’t yet available to the public, we’re getting pretty close; with the self-balancing two-wheel scooters (confusingly known as hoverboards) that everyone got for Christmas in 2015 and disappeared just as quickly when they started to catch fire.
Real genuine hoverboards are in the early stages of production and it shouldn’t be too long before someone can buy them. Hendo enlisted pro skateboarder Tony Hawk to demonstrate his working hoverboard and Lexus also has their own model in production under the name “Slide”.
Keep your eyes peeled for hoverboards hitting the market in 2017!
2. Babelfish
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy described the Babel Fish as a small yellow alien fish, which would translate any language to the user’s when poked in the ear.
A handy device indeed – and one we’ve come closer and closer to over the years. The more recent versions of the Google Translate app have done a pretty good job translating live speech or text or photos.
There are also now several sets of Bluetooth earbuds available that translate languages in real time. Waverly Labs’ Pilot earbuds were one of the first to be developed and are expected to be available from May 2017 to translate English, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese in conjunction with a smartphone app.
3. Self-driving cars
Self-driving cars are a popular theme in many sci-fi worlds, one of the most famous being Knight Rider’s KITT. Some other notable examples include Minority Report, Total Recall, and Logan’s Run.
True self-driving cars have also been around for a while, although they’re not quite ready to be released for public use. Google has been testing a self-driving car since 2009 and Tesla is already making cars with an autopilot function. Uber also has a self-driving fleet of cars, although it is always supervised by a human driver.
There are still some issues to be resolved before self-driving cars become mainstream, but it seems inevitable that they will remain.
4. 3D printers
We’re not quite at the point of the Star Trek replicator, which could produce everything from food to Starfleet uniforms, but 3D printers are the next best thing.
3D printers more similar to the ones used today can be seen in Jurassic Park, The Fifth Element, and were even described as far back as 1947 in Eric Frank Russell’s short story, Hobbyist.
3D printing technology is rapidly improving and even 3D bioprinters are now available to print tissues and organs in the same way the character Leeloo was created in The Fifth Element.
5. Internet
It’s hard to imagine life without the Internet these days, so it’s easy to forget that it’s only been around in a publicly accessible form since the 1980s and didn’t really take off until the mid-1990s.
However, some science fiction authors imagined the Internet long before it existed. One of the first was Mark Twain, who is more famous for his Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn novels.
Twain wrote a story in 1898, From The ‘London Times’ of 1904, which described a device that used telephone cables to create a global communications network and enabled users to see at any time what others around the world were doing. do were.