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Nowadays, the typical presentation of a futurologist is a near-infinite roll call of possibilities. Sometimes more than a hundred slides create something like a stop-motion film. They consist of photos and drawings that are randomly attached to any combination of various kinds of possible advances in nano-, bio-, and information technology. This leads to the creation of myths, which come to life in the imagination and thus attain a strange quasi-existence. The intelligent fridge (iFridge anyone?) that communicates with its contents and the supermarket is such a case in point. Nobody needs it, nobody has it, nobody can buy it, but it is hard to think of an example of our vision of the future that is so ingrained in our mind. A lot of predictions of the future that were made in the 1950s and 1960s now seem quite childish: the colonisation of the oceans and outer space, factories at zero gravity, gigantic magnetic monorails, and enormous supersonic aeroplanes that bridge the continents.