"Beam me up, Scotty!" The show: Star Trek. The Scotty: Montgomery Scott. The beaming: teleportation. It's a staple of many sci-fi plots, this ability to be transported from place to place instantaneously. While nothing even close has yet made its way to the real world, a number of physicists have studied whether we really could hurtle ourselves through a hypothetical wormhole. The U.S. Air Force has undertaken a study on it, and one man has even filed a patent for "a pulsed gravitational wave wormhole generator system that teleports a human being through hyperspace from one location to another."
Top 10 Failed Futuristic Predictions
Google has been testing a self-driving car on the highways of California. But cool ideas such as these have often not panned out. TIME takes a look at visions of the future we've been endlessly waiting for (and some that we're happy haven't yet arrived)