The future, it turns out, starts in 2020.

Far enough in the distance to dream, yet seemingly within arm’s reach, that year was attached to more predictions of technological innovations from readers than any other in the interactive, crowd-sourced timeline published online with “The Future of Computing,” last week’s special issue of Science Times.

Holographic displays. Robotic restaurants. Computers that replace doctors, translators and drivers. If it’s proximate science fiction you want, you’ll have it, it seems, at the end of the decade.

Looking at 2020 and beyond, readers imagined a future with cures for intractable diseases, direct links between brain and computer, automated everything, contact with alien life forms, sentient machines and no language barriers.

Readers were invited to make predictions and collaboratively edit this timeline, which was divided into three sections: a sampling of past advances in computing, predictions that readers could push forward or pull backward in time with the click of a button (but not, of course, into the past), and a form for making and voting on predictions. Tens of thousands of edits were made.