“The Jetsons” was set in 1962, so creators tried to show the future as it might be 100 years later.

There are a lot of urban legends surrounding the predictions in the “Back to the Future” movies, but several of them, including video games without controllers, have actually come true.

King’s story was originally published in 1981. While it predicts teleportation as the preferred means of travel, there’s an unpleasant wrinkle that makes itself known in the story.

In "Star Trek IV: The Vogage Home," Dr. McCoy encounters a patient who tells him that she's on dialysis. McCoy gives her the pill and mumbles about being back in the Dark Ages.

In May 2012, Moon stated that people should be bar coded at birth for easier identification.

Einstein was a genius, but he didn’t foresee the use of nuclear energy to power homes, ships and submarines.

Henry Ford’s assembly line principles are applied to all aspects of life in the book, and Ford Day is celebrated, complete with tiny wooden “T”s to represent the Model T.

“The Walking Dead” TV show is based on Robert Kirkman’s comic book series of the same title, which debuted in 2003.

In 1992, Richard Presley scored a Guinness World Record for "longest time spent living underwater" when he spent 69 days and 19 minutes in an underwater module in a Florida lagoon.

Now it’s sold in museums and stores everywhere, but the astronauts didn’t care much for freeze-dried ice cream. Today, regular ice cream is taken aboard spacecraft or the space station.

The first known mention of a jet pack was in the 1928 pulp magazine Amazing Stories, a serialization of what would become the novel “Skylark in Space.”

The Maschinenmensch (German for “machine-man”) of "Metropolis" is a bronzed metal robot with a very curvy female body and a creepy blank stare.

Although it’s impossible to know how long the phrase has been around, the first print example of it was in a 1938 newspaper column about the panic following H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” broadcast.

In the TV show universe, the Robinsons are selected as the first space colonists from the U.S. Their mission, launching in the "future" year 1997, is to colonize a planet that orbits the star Alpha Centauri.

Yep, he drank his own (filtered) pee. But he's in good company: As of 2008, the International Space Station has had a Water Recovery System, designed to process about 93 percent of the astronauts’ sweat and urine into drinking water.

Food pellets or pills are a mainstay of sci-fi -- apparently we'll want our food in concentrated form in the future. Leeloo's feat – a whole roasted chicken – is one of the most impressive, though.

John Wilkins, a bishop who was around in the mid-1600s, predicted future moon colonies in his book “A Discourse Concerning a New World and Another Planet.”

Many people think that Tang was invented for the NASA space program, but the truth is General Foods started selling it to the public in 1959. It didn’t become popular until after it was used in Project Mercury in 1962.

In "The Time Machine," H.G. Wells wrote of two races encountered by the Time Traveller in 802,791 A.D. The Eloi were weak and lived a life of ease, while the Morlocks did all the work.

Retro-futurism can mean two different things: Pre-1960s projections of the future or a current re-imagining of a past that contained futuristic elements. Steampunk is an example of the latter.