Hoverboards, it must be said, have not lived up to their promise. They still touch the ground, for starters, and then there’s the minor matter of them exploding without warning. All in all, though, the Back to the Future franchise has had a pretty good track record when it comes to predicting the future of technology, from biometric payment methods to smart glasses. And while no other movie can claim to have invented the self-lacing sneaker, there are a host of other technological advancements that first came to life on the silver screen.

Space travel: A Trip to the Moon (1902)

More than a year before the Wright brothers’ first flight, director Georges Méliès was already setting his sights higher—much higher. A Trip to the Moon may be short (less than 13 minutes), and it may be silent (the first “talkie” was still decades away), but its vision of human space travel holds up remarkably well. When the Apollo 11 astronauts finally made their own trip to the Moon, their spacecraft bore a striking resemblance to the bullet-shaped capsule that carried Professor Barbenfouillis and his crew to their iconic encounter with the Man in the Moon.

Griefbots: Metropolis (1927)

In this silent film from 1920s Germany, a grief-stricken inventor tries to resurrect his lost lover by creating a robot duplicate. If that sounds familiar, it’s because artificial intelligence “griefbots” are allowing 21st-century users to interact with simulated versions of deceased loved ones. By analyzing the deceased’s text messages and other digital artifacts, large language models like ChatGPT can learn to mimic their personality and speech patterns. These advances raise profound questions about the nature of death and memory, and modern-day artists are already responding on screen and stage.

Genetic engineering: The Fly (1958)

André Delambre, inventor of the world’s first teleportation device (or, as he prefers, “disintegrator-integrator”), has also volunteered to be its first human subject. But when a housefly accidentally joins him in the chamber, man and bug find their atoms intermixed, transforming the Canadian scientist into a horrifying half-man half-fly. While teleportation is still a ways off, transgenic organisms—those made with the DNA of other creatures—are not. Through genetic engineering, we now have cows whose milk contains human insulin, fish with glowing jellyfish genes, and goats that produce spider silk.

Self-driving cars: Total Recall (1990)

What do you do when you’re Arnold Schwarzenegger and you’re being chased by a Martian dictator’s armed goons? Hop in a getaway car, of course—in this case a Johnny Cab, one of the self-driving taxis that roam the streets of 2084. In the three and a half decades since Total Recall’s release, we haven’t made a ton of progress toward memory modification or Mars colonization, but we do have our own self-driving taxis. In 2023 alone, over 1,600 autonomous vehicles were registered in California—the same state where Schwarzenegger served as governor from 2003 to 2011. Given the violent fate met by Schwarzenegger’s last robot taxi driver, companies like Waymo are no doubt hoping that the former Governator sticks to public transit.