Image via Complex Original
Welcome to the future. Or at least the future that many of us thought we'd have before it became the present. And while the current future has many great things in store for us, from computers that fit into our pockets to a train that transports us across half the world in well under a day (thanks Elon Musk!), it also does not have some stuff that we thought may exist. From hoverboards to moving houses, here's a list of 10 of the wacky (and not-so-wacky) contraptions, gadgets and inventions that we thought would exist by now, but for various reasons, don't.
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Food In Tablet Form
Instead of spending your days tasked with making healthy choices in food, you could just pop a pill to ingest pure nutrition. This happens in nearly every science fiction film, but if we actually found a way to mass-manufacture food pills, we could solve world hunger, the obesity epidemic, and all that fun stuff.
Personal Flying Machines
Certainly everyone has dreamed of flying one day, and we've always seen images of people in history trying to dive off a cliff with wings attached, but it's never actually been turned into a usable product. I would wager that very few people have been for a quick flight around the block after lunch, either, although certainly in Victorian times and beyond, we've dreamed of it. Still, one day maybe it'll be possible that we'll have machines that aren't planes that allow us to fly in the sky at extreme speeds and for extreme distances.
Advanced Cloning
Sure, we cloned Dolly the Sheep, but what about dinosaurs or humans? Apparently, people thought that we'd be a little further than stem cell research by now, but clearly that isn't the case. Still, cloning is a little futher in the future than we thought, and maybe one day we'll have actual neo-dinosaurs walking the earth.
Weather Control
Weather is a factor that has ruined many days, so you'd think by now we'd have a way to stop the rain in certain areas where it isn't beneficial. That's what they thought back as early as Victorian England, but it turns out we still don't exactly know how to manipulate the weather outside of a dehumidifier, a heater or an air conditioner. That's too bad, imagine a world where we could have a calm, clear day, every day?
Space Travel
So we made it to the moon. One giant leap for mankind and all that. That's all well and good. And then...well we didn't really make it any further. We all thought we'd be colonizing the moon by now, but clearly this is something that NASA needs just a bit more funding to take care of. Let's go space exploration, we can do it!
Intelligent Robot Servants
Now if you've ever seen The Jetsons, you'd know that Rosie the houserobot is the prime example of what we thought robot servants would look like. Then The Matrix happened, and we backed off of A.I. for a while, but we're still not at the point where we can have intelligent robot services. Still though, you have to wonder. One day they'll be cleaning your house, the next, they might overthrow you. Then again, I, for one, welcome our robotic communist jobless future where robots do everyhing for us, so you never know what we'll see 30 years down the road.
Moving Houses
The Victorians didn't just think we could transport a house, but thought that we could really move a house. Combine that with hover technology and just think about a house that can hover from lot to lot. Well it didn't happen, and it will probably be deemed a bad idea if it ever does when we run out of inhabitable land, but sometimes, you've just got to move with your house.
Teleporation
Commuting is a drag, and the longer it is, the worse it makes you feel. Now imagine if particle rush hour was the only thing you had to worry about every morning, and that you'd be at work within seconds. Now, you wouldn't be so tired then, would you? It may turn out, though, that you become a glob of particles on the floor, so maybe it's not worth the risk.
Hoverboards
While skateboarding is more than just a passing fad, hoverboarding would probably not have the same effect. Still, there are plenty of people in the '60s who thought we'd have hoverboards and other hover technology by now. Turns out, oil companies have more pull than we thought, so hover tech is probably a long way off.
Roofed Cities
Under the Dome may be all the rage on TV by now, but the idea of a roofed city goes back way further than the original Stephen King novel. We already do it in sports stadiums, which when fully packed can have the population of a small city, but the idea actually originated from the Victorians, who thought that by the 21st century, we'd have a way to protect our cities against the elements. Looks like you were wrong again, Victorian England.