But while it's easy to imagine watching the hopeful utopia of Star Trek and saying, "Let's make that real!" it's a little stranger to think the same after watching Blade Runner or Gattaca . Yet ...

It's no coincidence that so many of our modern gadgets seem to have come from Star Trek -- our inventors and engineers all grew up watching it. In many ways, science fiction, not science, leads the way.

5 A Lab Is Brewing Apocalyptic Superdiseases

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The Sci-Fi Premise:

Movies about a worldwide superplague seem to come along every few years (see: last year's Contagion), but within that genre is the more cynical and outlandish "Lab creates and accidentally releases a pandemic" subgenre, like Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Stephen King's The Stand.

The premise is flawed from the start, as is typical of apocalyptic movies. Why in the hell would the government allow a top-secret lab to create a world-killing microbe in the first place? In terms of movie logic, it falls right into the category of "Hey, let's turn our nuclear arsenal over to Skynet" and "We should absolutely take this huge, destructive monkey back to New York."

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"Tyrannosaurs are the new house cats!"

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The Reality:

And thankfully, for once, we're right! There's no top-secret lab creating an apocalyptic disease. Because the lab is not secret at all, and it's located in Rotterdam.

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"It's down past the open-air asbestos dump. If you see the puppy slaughterhouse, you've gone too far."

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That's right, in a lab comfortably decorated with a disco ball and functional beer tap -- because if you're going to be working with ridiculously dangerous viruses, it's best to do it while drunk and listening to the one genre of music most likely to destroy your faith in humanity -- virologist Ron Fouchier has experimented on the feared bird flu virus, creating a new mutation that's more dangerous and potentially more contagious than the already-deadly original. In his experiments infecting ferrets with the virus, it eventually became airborne, so direct contact was no longer necessary for infection. The victim just needs to breathe the same air.