10 Future Inventions Everyone's Been Waiting For

We get it. You feel like all the science fiction of yesteryear promised you a future of flying cars and hoverboards, and none of it has come to pass. Sure, we haveSegways and iPads, but it's small consolation when you wake up every day to a world without "Blade Runner" skylines. But these are only 1980s visions of the future. Back in the '50s and '60s, our expectations for the 21st century were even loftier. With science by our side, nothing seemed out of the question.

Just consider "Magic Highway USA." With an hour's worth of stunning animation, this May 1958 episode of "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color" awed television audiences with depictions of automated global highways, underwater road systems and antigravity cars [source: Sterling].

A year earlier, Disney's "Mars and Beyond" showed viewers what humanity's future on Mars might entail and even featured segments with famed German-American rocket scientist Dr. Wernher von Braun. It all seemed possible -- and much of it still is.

In this article we'll look at 10 future inventions we've been waiting for all our lives. Which ones are just around the corner, and which ones are mere relics of our post-World War II dreams?

1.The Driverless Car

You're quite the enigma, modern driver. You want the freedom and individuality that comes with the use of a personal automobile. Yet you constantly multitask with activities best left to passengers aboard a bus or train. You eat, drink, read, text, talk on the phone, trim your nails and even apply makeup. In short, you crave the driverless car.

Clearly humans are often the most dangerous part of an automobile. That's why scientists have been working on automated highway technology for decades. In the 1990s, the U.S. Department of Transportation sponsored the National Automated Highway System Consortium (NAHSC), which successfully demonstrated the potential of radar, magnetic and visual sensors that allowed test vehicles to navigate a specially prepared length of highway. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) also underwrote an autonomous vehicle research and development program, culminating in its 2007 Urban Challenge. This event saw robotics teams from across the country compete for more than $3 million in prize money through the development and testing of automated urban vehicles.

Oddly, one of the current leaders in robotic car technology is online services giant Google, which changed how people find information online and now has ambitions to change how people get from one physical place to another as well. Since the mid 2000s, Google scientists and engineers have been working to develop autonomous vehicles that utilize artificial intelligence software and Google Maps to navigate. Google's driverless car prototypes reportedly have driven 200,000 miles (321,868 kilometers) in tests on California roadways. Amazingly, Google's cars have never been involved in an accident while in robotic mode, though in August 2011 one of the prototypes was in a five-car collision near Google's Silicon Valley headquarters while a human driver was at the wheel. Google still awaits federal and state regulatory approval to engage in more extensive tests, and it's still unclear when -- or rather, if -- ordinary folks will be able to buy a car that drives itself [source: Crawford].

2.The Flying Car

3.The Underwater City

4.Robot Maids

5.Ticket to Mars

6.Food-in-a-pill

7.Personal Jetpacks

8.The Air-conditioned Suit

9.Atomic-powered Homes

10.A Computer That's Smarter Than a Human

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