Top 10 things that sci-fi predicted correctly

2. Flying cars

Back To The Future Part II was a terrible disappointment. Ever since the first Back To the Future closed with “To be continued…” in 1985 we’d longed to see a sequel, and by the time Part II was released – a full four years later (and that’s decades in child years) – we’d given up all hope of one. The anticipation was so huge that Part II could never live up to the hype, but looking back it did have some remarkably accurate predictions, and one of them was that we’d have commercially available flying cars by 2015.

Flying cars by 2015? You bet

Okay, so it isn’t exactly pretty or practical for most commuters, but Terrafugia’s ‘flying car’ does have licences for both road and air, and is set to be commercially available in 2013.

WANT TO KNOW MORE? Terrafugia’s flying car

1. The internet

Sadly, the literary genius Douglas Adams never lived to see the proliferation of internet-connected smartphones, devices that let you find a clean Soho toilet one moment and the distance of Earth’s closest celestial neighbour the next. If he had, he’d have enjoyed the warm, smug feeling of sitting back with a gin and tonic in one hand and his prized smartphone in the other, checking his emails while searching for panda images, and thinking to himself, “I invented that”. May he rest in peace.

WANT TO KNOW MORE? The greatest story ever told

Douglas Adams, as he would have appeared when this photo was taken