But the series has endured for more than half a century because of how resonant it remains today. The Twilight Zone is at its core an exploration of the human condition and commentary on how people cope with fear of the unknown. Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling said that even in science fiction, he was most compelled by stories that were relatable first in human terms. “If you can’t believe the unbelievability, then there’s something wrong in the writing,” he told a college class in 1975. Serling's outlook also meant he was more interested in imagining the world as it might actually become. Here's how he explained this idea in a 1970 interview: "I would probably shy away from the year 2500. I would much rather deal in 1998. The hardware that I use, I think, should be identifiable. I like to know what happens Thursday, not in the next century."

Yet now that we're well into the “next century” that was so distant to Serling, some of The Twilight Zone's more fantastical ideas and inventions have emerged in real life. More than 50 years since it first aired, re-watching the series reveals that many of the technologies and ideas it imagined as supernatural in the 1960s are commonplace or at least conceivable today—including driverless cars, flat-screen televisions, human-like robotics, government surveillance, and more.

The 1963 episode "Valley of the Shadow," for example, features a device that manipulates atoms to make objects disappear or appear. Scientists today are working on making "invisibility cloaks" that obscure objects by bending light waves around them, while 3D printing technology is becoming cheaper and more mainstream.

Several Twilight Zone episodes deal with nostalgia and the desire to return to one's youth. In "Static" (1961), a man is able to listen on-demand to a radio broadcast from his childhood, an idea that seemed supernatural when the episode first aired but is banal today. Platforms like YouTube have so altered our expectations about what’s available on-demand that we’re often surprised today when we’re not able to revisit obscure broadcasts from the past. (And if you want to get meta about it, here’s a clip from that very episode.)

The Twilight Zone also predicted driverless vehicles in more than one episode. A driverless 1939 Lagonda coupe chases a man in "A Thing About Machines" (1960), though the coupe was possessed rather than programmed like Google’s modern-day fleet of autonomous vehicles. Plastic surgery as we know it was still in its infancy when The Twilight Zone first aired, and today cosmetic surgery is common—though still not as extreme as depicted in "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" (1964), the episode that imagines a world in which young adults undergo surgery so they can look like one of a set number of models featured in a catalog.