More than three-quarters of Australians believe microscopic life has been found on other planets and almost half believe humans can be frozen and thawed back to life, despite neither being true.

These are some of the findings from a survey of 1,250 people commissioned by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO).

Called Fact or Fiction, the survey was conducted as part of National Science Week 2011 to assess whether Australians can separate what is happening in the "real world" from what we see and read in science fiction.

The survey asked people whether eight scientific technologies seen in feature films, such as light sabres, invisibility cloaks or hover boards, were science fact or fiction.

ANSTO's Discovery Centre Visitors Centre team leader Rod Dowler says the results were a surprise.

"This survey has confirmed that willingly or not, we believe in science fiction movies more than we realise," he said.

Only one-quarter of respondents were aware that it is possible to grow an eye in a dish, although 44 per cent correctly believe flying cars exist.

But it is not all bad news.

While many of us might dream of being able to travel through time, more than 90 per cent of survey respondents correctly identified it as still being in the realm of science fiction. A similar survey in Birmingham, United Kingdom, found 30 per cent of respondents thought time travel was possible.

Who wants to live forever?

The survey also revealed the older we are, the longer we want to live, with 46.3 per cent of respondents aged 65 years or more listing "reversing the ageing cycle" in the top three areas of science they would like investigated, compared to only 13.2 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds.

Despite this, only 10 per cent of those surveyed wanted science to discover the secret for immortality.

According to Mr Dowler, three-quarters of respondents said they were interested in science, with most receiving their information from television news stories. Only 6 per cent sourced their information from science magazines and 3 per cent from science centres.

Last year, a survey commissioned by the Australian Federation of Scientific and Technological Societies found 30 per cent of Australians thought dinosaurs and humans co-existed and one-quarter believed the Earth took a day to orbit the Sun.

Mr Dowler says despite the potential for science fiction to blur the line between reality and fiction, it serves a very useful purpose.

"Science [fiction] films can be very inspirational to scientists and the general public, getting more people interested in science and setting the bar for the types of technology we would like in the future," he said.