Every day, frustrated people around the globe wonder via sarcastic t-shirt whatever happened to the future we were promised as children. A future in which everyone flies their hovercar to a four-hour workday at the cybermines, breaking off only to pop a protein pill and hop a transport tube to the exercise pods.

After all, the iPhone is kind of like a Star Trek communicator (especially this iPhone) and some of those giant glass underwater hotels they’re building in Dubai rival Heinlein on a good day. But what about the rest? Our jetpacks, robots and laser guns? Were they just sweet fiction, the hollow promises of a society longing for the comfort and freedom of a spandex unitard?

Sadly, no. The disappointing truth is that the futuristic devices we’ve demanded for so long are already here. Just different … and kind of shitty. It’s like when you order something at Denny’s based on the picture on the menu, but when the food comes out it looks like a pile of phlegm smothered in gravy. Behold: the future (in phlegm and gravy form)!

What We Were Promised: Forget gun control, bullets will be obsolete once we get our hands on an ion-spitting, atomic-powered, soul-searing plasma cannon. From Han Solo’s handy blaster to Kirk’s minimalist phaser (complete with multiple firing modes), the laser gun has become so intrinsic to our vision of the future that we created laser tag just so our children could train in their usage, in preparation for the inevitable laser wars of 2013. The ray gun is proof positive that while mankind may have enough collective imagination to envision a futuristic multi-verse where vast empires slug it out on the galactic scale, we aren’t quite up to imagining doing so with anything other than a good old-fashioned, pleasantly phallic six-gun in our hands.

As Seen In: Star Wars, Barbarella, Alien, Farscape, Dune, Doctor Who, anywhere lightsabers are unavailable.

The Pale Imitation: Scientists have actually made a pass at the ray gun. Only problem is it’s the kind of pass you used to make on essays about how you spent your summer vacation. Instead of a hand-sized blaster spitting ionized crimson death, the military has proudly unveiled an invisible sound wave that kind of burns and is the size of a truck. Here’s a video of a middle-aged “60 Minutes” reporter easily foiling it with a mattress.

Well, even if we can’t look forward to Star Wars-style laser battles, at least we can rest assured that our enemies, provided they don’t have any mattresses handy, will have to step literally several feet to the left in deference to our mighty future arsenal.

What We Were Promised: There’s nothing more passé than eating food. We’ve been doing it for thousands of years now, and it’s time to move on. Soon enough, the only people shoveling food into their mouths will be out-of-touch Neanderthals watching tumbleweeds roll by at the abandoned food court. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be popping protein pills by the handful, saving us enough time to read books describing how stuff used to taste back in the primitive days.

As Seen In: The Jetsons, Soylent Green, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

The Pale Imitation: Tiny cans of ass-flavored soda, nutrition bars that virtually demand to be eaten four at a sitting, and the addition of the word “energy” to the front of nearly every food product imaginable. And while the food is getting smaller, it’s a long way from pill size. In the meantime, instead of focusing on cramming all that goodness into a single dot, food companies have taken to making shitty-tasting versions of all their regular foods.

Energy cereal? Really? This distraction could prove fatal to the future of food pill technology. If we’re not careful, the trend towards down-sizing food could become totally derailed and end up with shelves full of energy-boosting hot dogs, memory-aiding muffins, and chicken breast that inoculates you against polio.

What We Were Promised: As early as 1900, man was envisioning a future in which all major cities were connected and traversed with smooth-moving, safe, and speedy robotic sidewalks or, failing that, at the very least some kind of city-wide vacuum tube that whipped civilians through the air to their destinations at staggering velocities (and yet, against all logic, never resulted in the splattering of the tube’s interior with the remains of a commuter who leaned a little too far to the left).

As Seen In: Metropolis, Caves of Steel, Minority Report, Futurama

The Pale Imitation: The Segway. It moves you around at about walking speed, and instead of costing the government billions of dollars to install moving sidewalk technology all across the country, it costs rich douchebags a few thousand dollars to graphically point out that they are, in fact, rich douchebags (who shop at The Sharper Image no less). And in case you can’t afford a Segway, or don’t want to be seen riding one, you can get a taste of the future at nearly any major airport. That 100-yard segment of moving sidewalk is just long enough to let you slip into a daydream about shuttling effortlessly from place to place, but not long enough to let you actually enjoy it.

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