The only thing certain about the future is that nobody knows what the future will bring. Therefore, maybe all of these inventions will be invented at some point, or maybe none of them. Yet who could have predicted that we would go from having no man-made objects in space to being on the moon within a 12-year period? Who would have thought that anyone could walk down the street with a thousand songs in their pocket? Or have a car that drives itself?

The point is that the most unlikely and powerful inventions can come along when we least expect them to, and as a result we shouldn’t ever stop dreaming up new ideas (especially when they are laughed at and rejected). So, let's hear it for human innovation and these 12 inventions that you can possibly expect to see in the future -- maybe a lot sooner than you'd see.

1. Syndrome's boots.

I'll be honest - I have no idea if these boots that were made famous in "The Incredibles" will ever be on the market, but it's hard to imagine that at some point in the future something similar wouldn't eventually be invented. Fingers crossed it's sooner rather than later.

2. Teleportation.

Some scientists believe that teleportation isn't limited to science fiction and could eventually become a reality in our lives. The catch? Probably not in the next 100 years. Incredibly, however, experiments have already been done where individual particles have been successfully teleported across several miles, so the technology to teleport something does exist (while still obeying the laws of quantum mechanics). However, if teleportation does someday integrate itself into modern civilization as firmly as, say, cell phones or computers have today, it will certainly be regulated and extremely expensive -- and maybe not as fun as we'd all like to hope. But who knows?

3. Dry baths.

Showers can be nice, and all, but they're pretty wasteful; but, as of yet, we haven't been able to think of anything else to replace them. Sure, the technology exists to sterilize surgical equipment and other instruments, but we can't use them on our skin without damaging ourselves. The question is: when will we have a way to clean ourselves in a way that's much better than we can now, and without using water? Although various prototypes of a type of dry bath exist today, my personal prediction is that by 2070 showers will be obsolete altogether and we'll be using something like dry baths all the time.

4. Living on Mars.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, has stated his intention to travel to and die on Mars and knowing Musk's work ethic, he'll be working like hell to make it happen (he's aiming for a test launch in 2018, which is certainly an ambitious goal). Assuming those plans don't work out, however, travel to Mars could begin as early as 2030, with full-scale tourism likely following a few decades later. Considering that we haven't been back to the moon since the 1970s, however, who knows how much longer it will actually take?

5. Food pills.

Admittedly, the idea of never eating solid food again and simply swallowing pills three times per day isn't very appetizing, but the benefits of food pills (they're much more portable and require almost zero preparation time) are undeniable. Scientists have publicly said that food pills are a feasible goal, but as of yet there have been no major developments to report of.

6. Flying cars.

Supposedly, these already exist. But have you ever seen a flying car before? I sure haven't, and it doesn't look like we'll be replacing ground cars with flying cars anytime soon. Yes, it would be a major undertaking to figure out how to build new parking places, airborne road signs and configure roads and traffic lights (not to mention dealing with mid-air car crashes), but there is still a certain novelty to the idea of owning your own flying car that keeps many people returning to the idea.

7. Your own personal robot.

We're getting really close with this one -- there are already robots that can clean your house, respond to your voice and even cook meals in restaurants. However, as of now, there still isn't anything like the robot from "I, Robot," where a robot can essentially interact and live seamlessly with a human while moving, thinking and speaking as if it were not artificial. These kinds of robots will probably be common within the next 50 years, or so -- if we feel comfortable enough to take that kind of risk.

8. Time travel.

Entire books and careers have been devoted to the timeless (pun unintended) idea of time travel, and as of now the laws of physics do permit traveling forward into the future. In reality, we do this every day; someone who's walking past another person who's standing still is, on an extremely small scale, traveling faster through time than the person who's standing still (we can thank Albert Einstein for developing this theory). At speeds close to the speed of light the difference becomes dramatic and, at that point, it is possible to travel forward in time quickly. The key, then, is to develop a machine that can transport people up to speeds near the speed of light, but we are nowhere near achieving that goal yet.

9. Hyperloop.

Already a patented company that held its first test run this year, Hyperloop seeks to dramatically shorten the time it takes to travel over relatively short distances (i.e. 200-400 miles) via pods acting under a strong propulsion system. The pods would travel at around 600-700 miles per hour, which would make a trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco take just over 30 minutes (the average flight takes around 75 minutes). Though proving to be costly to develop, as of now, the Hyperloop is on course to someday be a reality for everyday travelers.

10. Commercial stratosphere flight.

The aerial version of the Hyperloop, planes that can fly as high as the stratosphere already exist, but are only available to the very small group of people who can actually afford them. However, according to RantGizmo.com, if a similar plane were made available to the general public, flight times over long distances could be done in one third of the time, potentially saving billions of working hours.

11. Supercomputers with a yottaflop scale.

Um, what? Futuretimeline.net predicts that by the year 2041, supercomputers will have reached "a magnitude of processing power that enables a trillion trillion floating-point operations per second;" in other words, well over a million times faster and more powerful than any computer machine we have in existence now. The website also predicts that by 2047 we will have harnessed enough computer power to successfully model over one million human brains at the neuron level, which could eventually pave the way for "truly accurate brain simulations and mind uploading in the early decades of the 22nd century."

12. Crash-proof cars.

Automaker Volvo is leading the way on this one -- the company has promised crash-proof as soon as 2020. Though certainly an ambitious goal (too ambitious, in my opinion), producing crash-proof cars would a welcome change to the fragile cars that populate the roads of today and would save many thousands of lives. Coupled with the (so far) stellar safety records of autonomous cars, car travel appears to be on its way to being much more safer for all of us.