For most daydreamers, predicting the future is a business of missing more than you hit.

For example, we still haven't eliminated childbirth by inventing designer babies grown in artificial wombs, a prediction the science editor of LIFE magazine made 50 years ago.

But that same editor surmised we'd be able to grow complete human organs from cell tissue in laboratories, and most Americans now agree that this sounds like something that will happen. Eighty-one percent of those polled believe organs will be developed in petri dishes by 2064. (Hey, why not, scientists are already working on lab-grown ears and noses.)

That's according to a new Pew Research Center study that asked Americans for their feelings and predictions about the next 50 years of science.

But Americans' optimism was not evenly distributed. If they were confident in the biomedical future, they were pessimistic about space. Only a third of us now believe that we'll have colonized another planet by 2064. Here are nine other predictions Americans made.

Computers will be able to create art that is indistinguishable from that produced by humans. Just over half of respondents believe that within 50 years computers will harness the creative power to compose original symphonies, write great novels, and otherwise challenge the idea that art is what makes us human.