Slashdot Mirror
The Future That Hasn't Arrived
jonerik writes "MSNBC has this article on an exhibit starting this week at Philadelphia's Lost Highways Archive and Research Library. Entitled Radebaugh: The Future We Were Promised, the exhibit focuses on the artwork of the elusive A.C. Radebaugh, a commercial illustrator whose works promised us a glittering, shiny tomorrow from the '30s to the '50s; a helicopter in every garage, massive streamlined cars, vacations on Mars - in short, pretty much everything we didn't get. The exhibit collects examples from Radebaugh's portfolio, auto designs for Chrysler, DoSoto, and Dodge, ads, and 'Closer Than We Think!,' a syndicated weekly comic strip drawn by Radebaugh. I want my jetpack, dammit!"
Omigod ... you mean that vacation on Mars was just a brain implant? Quick, get me a JohnnyCab!
due to your karma level, the powers that be have decided that you dont deserve a flying car. or a pony.
Ah yes, articles on the ultimate in vaporware. Do we have a vaporware icon?
In a lot of cases, what we *thought* was aerodynamic turned out to not be so once we had the computer capability to model airflow more accurately, under more realistic conditions.
What works in a windtunnel doesnt always work on the road where there may be a tailwind, side winds, etc.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The future is down. A trouble ticket has beens submitted.
When we think of the future, we almost always think of technology. We think of starships and other things that are waaaaaay far off, so maybe the industrial revolution spurred this new way of thinking. Anyway, I'm justing typing randomly. I'll bet some historian will tell me I'm totally wrong.
Well at least one thing might come true if China has its way. Mining the Moon
The story of China mining the moon was on slashdot a few days ago. China Wants to Mine the Moon
William Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum".
They just auctioned one on eBay. The Moller M400 SkyCar.
"The future we were promised."
How can anyone promise a future that is certain? I mean, in almost any case there are more than 1 possible outcomes in a situation...
Next time you're driving around, note the number of cars driving like idiots, barely running, NOT running, and with dents.... ...now put them above your house.
You wanna keep them on the ground now don't you?
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
I am assuming the root of the matter is the disparity between what was predicted in art (science fiction) and what actually happened. I always felt there was too much of a preoccupation with space travel in the past. I guess this makes sense, given the Space Race took up a good amount of people's attention. However, there were two areas that were overlooked: The Internet and advancements in genetics. Both caught the forward-thinkers of the past by surprise.
There were many assumptions of huge talking robots, but not as many about the computers we have today. Our computers are not as powerful, but they're a commodity, available to everybody. Also, cloning was a pipe dream; something to happen in the year 2500 or whatever. And here we are, playing around with cloning cats.
It's not so bad, really, though I could use a good mail-order robobabe right about now.
No I'm not trolling.
Forget flying cars and vacationing on red planets, I'm still looking forward to when 640K isn't enough.
Oh, wait....
Posting as directed.
The server is from the 50's as well, so give 'em a break - they have to wait for the tubes to warm up...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Well, you're getting a glimpse of it today. After all, this story will probably be re-posted on ./'s front page again tomorrow. The only reason we can't say for sure is that ./ is governed by the reverse heisenberg uncertainty principle - ie: you'll never know either the (editor's) position or speed, since they're both indeterministic quantum states :-)
With the pessimism? Sure, we don't have flying cars or jetpacks or vacations to Mars.
Instead, we have computers literally millions of times faster than anyone imagined we'd have. Read some old sci-fi, and notice how the authors tend to make reference to people plotting the navigations by hand because it'd be too complicated for a computer?
We've got our personal communicaters, in the way of cell phones. Hell, with cell phones with cameras and video screens on them, we've already got our Dick Tracy wrist geenees, too.
We can genetically modify animals.
And, perhaps most importantly of all for the writers of the early sci-fi, we haven't destroyed ourselves as a species yet.
So why all the bitching about flying cars?
The future got slashdotted!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
First off, companies have to invest in and develop such shiny stuff, and then the public has to lay down their hard earned cash. That is the biggest reason we don't all have jetpacks and personal helicopters.
On the upside, a lot of these fantastic visions do come to some level of fruition. When car companies make concept cars, some features may trickle down into production cars.
As a public, I don't think we typically want to change how we live drastically. Few people want to embrace something like the Kyoto accord to reduce pollution because it hits them in the wallet.
A lot of Dot.Bombs went this way because they were counting on investors and the public to embrace new technology because it was COOL and drastically would change how we manage our lives. Didn't work.
...here
-pyrrho
But we weren't "lied to" or "promised" something that didn't happen. It was just a wonderful utopian vision, and like all those, it never quite happens. Tragedy of the Commons, yada yada yada.
http://www.moller.com/
Cars travel so slowly most of the time, that aerodynamics simply isn't important. What is important, is to reduce turbulance noise - wind hiss. The importance of reduced drag on cars is mostly advertizing hype. As a case in point: Look at the bottom side of a sleek looking car. The manufacturers clearly are only interested in 'visible' aerodynamics and don't care about the other half that is not visible. So it is just about looks, not drag. Those big spoilers on the back of Hondas are not to reduce drag. They increase drag. If anything, their main purpose is to provide a handlebar to push them with.
Here's a couple of links to cool historic planning maps for San Francisco and Los Angeles. The will to do these things didn't last long enough to finish though.
Another interesting "roads of future past" link is interregional highways, which shows what the interstate system was meant to look like in 1944, before it was called the interstate system.
I like my beverages with warning labels!
Art imitates art imitates art too. When I found this article a couple of days ago, I told my friend Winston Smith that I had located one of his major influences. He was so happy! He said that he had "thousands" of Radebaugh's illustrations sitting around that he'd painstakingly culled from old magazines and books (his source material), and was thrilled to find out that we'd found the creator of the famous flying cars, etc. He said he'd never been able to find or read a signature on any of the illos before.
I do believe I made his day. Maybe he'll thank me on the end page of his next book too!
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
.... is they focus on technology but forget one thing... Population... everyone conveniently forgets that the future holds TONS more people in it than now. What will that population want as far as technology goes? Futuristic cars? Pfft. Please, Houston/Dallas/LA, etc are parking lots as it is... imagine when there's twice as many people living there.
Know that empty lot next door? Wave bye bye.
That field of wildflowers? It's an apartment complex now.
I'd just like to see some fanciful futuristic art that depicts technology that looks like it was designed with a large population in mind.
It turns out that complex mechanical stuff is harder to design and mass-manufacture than formerly believed. So today's reality in terms of mechanically oriented consumer items in no way measures up to 1950s hopes.
At the same time, while 1950s soothsayers dreamt too big in regard to mechanical developments, they dreamt way too small in regard to communications developments. And, if given the choice, I'd much rather have email and web broadband access for $45/month than my own personal $20,000 helicopter. I suppose I'd rather fly to Mars than own a cell phone, but the technology behind a cell phone is in many ways more miraculous than anything that's been developed for affordable space flight.
The future we live in is in some respects a disappointment compared to 1950s hopes, but in other respects it's infinitely cooler than anyone could have dreamed of.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Promise - What we Got
EngSoc from Orwell's '1984' - Department of Homeland Security
Doublespeak, also from '1984' - Politically Correct Speech
Debate over Human Cloning from 'Brave New World' - Current debate over Human Cloning and Stem Cell Research.
All-Powerful CIA/FBI from 'Snow Crash' - Patriot Act enchanced federal bureaus.
I could go one for quite some time...
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
The sooner corporate greed and lack of compassionate visionary leadership go the way of the steam engine, the better we all will be. And folks, that time will come soon, as world opinion on the oil war is proving. The Hydrogen Economy is the future. And flying cars will arrive soon too. Only one problem to solve on that, an affordable, effficient, safe and quiet engine. But humanking will do it, we always do!
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Good lord, most people can't handle driving in two dimensions. Give them a third and there will be anarchy. ;p
"People should be allowed to keep midgets as pets."
- Gov. Jesse Ventura
OTOH, exhibits like this speak to the great optimism of human nature. Though it took Europe five hundred years from the time of Marco Polo to the time that they colonized a new continent, we were in the mid 20th century certain that we could conquer the solar system in fifty years. The same holds true for helicopters, jet packs, and everything else.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I want my jetpack, dammit!
And tens of thousands of children want just enough food so that today isn't the day they starve to death.
Think about it.
The "Closer Than We Think" series is great.
The above-ground transparent pool for example. And this one reminds me of the segway.
Ever read Arthur C. Clarke's book, "1984: Spring"? It was a collection of essays on the future and what he thought it would turn out to be. Some of it was total bollocks, but - in the early eighties, nearly twenty years ago - he predicted the meteoric rise of the cellphone and the way it would revolutionise modern living.
Well, for most of you at least. I ain't got one yet...
-Mark
Who exactly was going to "give" us these magical toys? The Government? Big corporations?
Flying cars are not largely a technological problem, but a regulatory one. One that looks less likely to be solved anytime soon as long as most people still fear things that can fall out of the sky. I would add irrationally afraid, since people seem more than willing to assume the much greater risks of getting into a car every day. Even though tens and tens of thousands of people die in cars each year, the plane crashes still make the headlines... why is that?
If you want a flying car, go make one. You'll be breaking the law, most likely, if you succeed, but you can do it with todays technology. But I wouldn't wait for anyone to hand you one... The current air traffic control system is just simply not expandable to handle the sorts of air traffic that could result from a lot of people using flying cars. The proposals of one sort or another all seem to envision very complex systems of centralized ground control, which seem untenable for wide scale use. Imagine thousands of airplanes being centralling controlled by ground computers... bad bad bad idea.
Until the governement gets out of the way on legal use of the airspace, then most of us will have to stick to the ground.
Right over there on the shelf, next to the copy of Duke Nukem Forever that it's included with.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Yesterland is a good place to see all the old, semi-forgotten attractions that seemed ahead of its time. Anyone remember those hovercraft bumper cars?.
Plus, Disney's got plenty of room to play around with right now. The old CircleVision attraction, the building right across from Star Tours, has been closed for a while and just sits there, probably only being used for storage. And whatever happened to those submarines in the lake?
Disney, take heed! Don't just devote an attraction to the newest technologies. The industry moves too fast these days to keep up. Instead, why not show mock-ups of these sorts of retro-tractions? I can think of a ton of cool interactive exhibits they could produce (think Jetsons), even with their cost-cutting mantra of recent. Now if only they'd bring back those RocketRods!
-Mr. Fusion
It's been confiscated by the Department of Homeland Security along with your jetpack and personal helicopter. These items are too easily modified to deliver weapons of mass destruction to be left in the careless hands of the average citizen. Move along now, there's nothing to see here.
Look at the second picture in his portfolio (The Exhibit --> Portfolio) of the "subway" hanging above the highway. This is pretty similar to a monorail. Look at the vehicles in the picture, they all still have drivers and wheels. The "subway" has an air intake, meaning that it uses an engine to locomote, not electricity. The cars have honkin' big attenae, but that's a small oversight. All the car bodies are curved, not boxy; anyone noticed a trend in automobile design today? Heck, Radebaugh wasn't that far off...
Did anybody predict that you could carry your phone in a pocket and send instant messages (SMS) to the people who are on the other side of the world? What about Internet?
This just shows how hard future prediction is. We overestimate progress in many field, but ignore completely some possibilities.
Rule of thumb: if a 1-litre car is going greater than 30mph or so , aerodynamics really matters. There's a v-squared term in the maths.
:-) ). BTW, Hondas really can go very fast. Most of the "rice-boy" stuff in america is american car industry propaganda - you'll find, if you go to europe or asia, EVERYONE LAUGHS AT STUPID GAS-GUZZLING AMERICAN CARS, and prefers well-designed, efficient cars like hondas.
Spoilers are to increase turbulence at the rear of the car, thereby shifting flow separation further back, and actually reducing the pressure drag. If you don't know what pressure drag as opposed to frictional drag is, then this explanation will make very little sense to you...
Properly designed spoilers really do work (but only at the particular designed speed ranges). (note: large third-party spoilers on the back of hondas don't work
A rough undersurface of the car is also actually desirable (again, to INCREASE turbulence, though this time it increases drag) - the more turbulence, the less ground-effect lift will be generated, so you car doesn't take-off!
Foils (often mistaken for spoilers) on F1 cars and some rally cars, are upside wings, designed to increase downforce (at the expense of greater drag), thus increasing traction at the wheel.
Note: IAAFD - I Am A Fluid Dynamicist. Almost all the fluid stuff taught in secondary school is at best lies-to-children, downright wrong most of the time.
Progress is dangerous. If I make a product that will kill one user in a million, and everyone in America buys one, I'll face two hundred and eighty wrongful death suits, class action suits, branding as a mass murderer, and ghod help me if one of those failures happens during sweeps week.
Flying is fairly simple, but the consequences of error are rather specatular.
Cars were invented before lawsuits were so widespread; this is part of the reason Ford isn't bankrupt from all the innocent bystanders crossing the street in front of their potentially lethal products.
But the tort system in America is biased towards the right to be stupid and my obligation to accomodate your stupidity regardless of what you're doing with my product. So no, I'm sure as hell not going to build you a flying car just so you can sue me when you fuck up.
This is not my sandwich.
"You want a flying car with gas prices where they are?"
Mr. Fusion. Duh!
The jetsons promised a really cushy future where we all sit around in chairs that move us where we need to go (like a segway with a seat -- or a wheelchair?)
...and we have little to do most of the day because robots do it all for you.
...and a single salary supports a family of four!
If people fly as bad as they drive then it would be a deathtrap. At least you can make roads and drivers have an incentive for driving on the road because most cars don't travel off road very well. Imagine some of these idiots flying out of approved lanes and doing all kinds of aerial acrobatics to shave a few minutes off their commute.
I've a book from my parents about live in the year 2000. It's from somewhere in the late fifties or early sixties and has a whole bunch of articles from then renowned people. At least most of them have impressive titles. ;-)
:-)
:-))
They wrote about almost everything: social stuff, controlling the weather, living in space, man like robots making all the domestic work and finding the final solutions for many environmental and energy problems.
They just missed one point: micro electronics, computers, internet and all the stuff that keeps most of the people here busy.
The only thing that comes near that, are robots. They are fascinated about robots. (They would like the first episode from the Animatrix.
They write lengthy about them doing all kinds of work, walking, speaking, grabing things, etc.
I'm just wondering: what did they think, the computing power behind that comes from? A room full of valves in every apartment to clean the floor and wash the dishes?
At the Smithsonian.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
Here's the thing: all those things that were promised did, indeed, come to exist. All of them.
We've got robot butlers, flying cars, rocket belts, daily shuttles to the moon (that don't blow up), cures for cancer and the common cold, cigarettes with vitamins and minerals instead of tar and nicotine, universal peace and brotherhood, slimming pills that really work (and aren't amphetamines) so that everyone looks good in their unisex leotards, teleportation, 3D TV, sex in a pill, and direct election of government officials. And we had the Internet by 1959. Actually, we sort of handed it down to you; what we've got now is... well, "virtual reality" is a crude description, but it's the closest that your unevolved "English" can come.
One other thing that we've got: big-ass cloaking devices. Next time you drive across Nebraska, or Montana... you know, those "empty" places that people started abandoning after WWII, for some reason... look off in the distance. You'll see a faint shimmering, which you'll probably tell yourself is just a "heat mirage".
Riiiiiiight.
I looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into me--and we both winked.
It would seem that a rough underside is desirable *if* you have a downforce problem. This is not something your average commuter is worried about-- nobody lifts off, even at 80mph, on their way to work.
However, a smooth underside would seem to be beneficial for air resistance and thus to fuel economy. Honda's engineers and fluid dynamicists and whatnot agree, as their most efficient car (the Honda Insight) has a smooth underside to reduce drag.
In particular, note where the article states "Another important aerodynamic detail that greatly contributes to the Insight body's low coefficient of drag is the careful management of underbody airflow." And the numbers they quote for power required to push the car through the air are equally revealing-- "In comparison, the Honda Civic Hatchback, with roughly the same 1.9 square-meter frontal area as the Insight, has a Cd of 0.36, and needs around 32 percent more power to operate at the same speed as the Insight. "
So there you have it. Without the smooth underside, rear-wheel covers, and a tapered back-end-- you need 32% more power to push a car with roughly the same frontal area. I'm not sure I'd say "A rough undersurface of the car is actually desirable" without qualifying it by adding "for a race car, but not for a normal automobile."
Looking through the Syndicated section I see a total lack of concern for safety. Mailmen with rocket pack but no helmets or flight suits. Space hospitals with no failsafe systems. etc... Amazing.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Very true, to which i would like to add one thing: The Future Is Now. The infrastructure and technology is there to allow someone to develop jetpacks or flying cars if they decided to do it.
I think we are so surrounded by new developments that we tend to ignore the most important ones because we are searching for that wow factor. If we sit down with an objective, lets say, starting a business, it is relatively simple to put ideas in motion and successfully manage the operation without even having to physically meet or talk to another person. Not only can you put the ideas in motion you don't even have to utter any words to make these things happen. All that is required are certain keystrokes, in a certain sequence and bang, you've changed the world. I only realised this after starting an independant record label. Everything from making the music on a standard PC and home studio , promoting and making contacts, ordering and pressing the CDs, to distributing them throughout the world was done without even leaving my PC. I'm not talking about small time contacts either, but being able to personally e-mail the heads of several major record labels with an idea. All this has happened in the span of three months of inital conception of the idea. It has even got to the point where I have the opportunity to quit my current tech job and move overseas and do this full-time in an untapped market where our particular music is the most profitable.
All this in three months. The technology is there, the future is now.
// The fastest Alt-Tab in the West
According to the Ford company, a pickup's aerodynamics is better with the tailgate on. With the gate on, you get a bubble of air behind the cab. With the gate off, this bubble gets deflated, resulting in more turbulance and more drag.
I think this essay by the great Bertrand Russell not only outlines the historical point you have made, but why the cult of efficiency and productivity which infects our society is so destructive and devisive.
Perhaps you read it, but for those out there who have not quite realized that the promise of technology, more free time, has not materialized, please read this essay.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
I seem to remember a story about a soceity that grew seperate, with everyone departed from the crowded cities, living via telecommunication.
Problem was the extroverts went fscking nuts.
Moral: Kill that asshole who won't shut up.
or not.
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
I think that in certain respects what really occured was a domination of introverted technologies. The _personal_ computer for instance. Yes, now with the World Wide Web we can connect with one another - but do we really? A great many technologies that have taken off are largely introverted in nature; even when they seem to make it easier for us to communicate.
Genetic engineering is another inward facing technology. I'm not saying it won't open doors to us, but it largely focused on exploring inward frontiers. This is a very personal technology - one which with augment or change us in very intimate ways.
With extroverted technology (exploring boundaries outside ourselves and immediate surroundings) taking a back seat, what do you expect to happen. Personal transport hasn't evolved too much in the last 20 years. Cars today aren't so much different than they were - and when was the Concorde designed and built? How about the Shuttle?
This probably has a lot to do with market forces. It's a lot easier to build and sell small personal things - not to mention more profitable.
Amen!
Would you want to live in the future of 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Sure they had a moon colony, but they also had a Cold War and no Google.
I see the biggest shift from the old visions of the future as the increase in chaos and decentralization. 2001 showed a Bell System videophone. Today we have anarchic WiFi hotspots. The flying cars would have been built by General Motors if they'd made it big. Instead today we have networks of volunteers self-assembling to create complex and useful products like Linux and Apache.
Well, it has, in absolute terms, but not in relative terms. The problem is that human psychology makes us view things using relative metrics instead of absolute ones. If you earn a 20% raise this year, but all your friends earn 100% raises, do you feel richer or poorer compared to last year?
If you want to have a 1950s comfortable standard of living regarding possessions, health care, entertainment, food, etc. you can do so by working far fewer hours than a 1950s human had to. But if you want a 2000s standard of living... ah, then you still have to work, or otherwise procure income. But at least work tends to be less menial and physically taxing than it did in the 1950s, on the average at least.
It's a question of whether you measure standard of living by absolute standards or relative ones. No matter what the technology level, it will be always true (in capitalist societies, anyway) that someone who works hard will, on the average, earn more than someone who works little at the same level of technology. So of course the idle will never win ... in relative terms. But if you view things in absolute terms, the idle American today can live far more comfortably than the average hard-working American in the 1950s. (The same is even true of the third world; a citizen of country X today has a more comfortable existence than a citizen of X in the 1950s, in almost all cases - calorie intake has more or less doubled, for instance, and life expectancy extended by a decade or more. Again, in relative terms the poor countries of 2000 will be behind the rich countries of 2000, but they can certainly be comparable with the rich countries of 1950 in many absolute, objective metrics.).
Nevertheless, I do agree with you on one point - there is more to life than the rat race. But you are free at any time to downshift and live a comfortable and leisuirely life, and viewed in absolute terms one has far more capability to do so now than in the past. It's only the relative viewpoint which seems to suggest that one cannot "afford" to be idle.
Terry
So from the 20s, we were promised helicopters in every garage, jet packs, flying cars, etc.
So during the dot-com era, we were promised several different things too, but nowadays, it looks like they all got integrated into other services (ie webvan, paymybills.com, etc.) I wonder if 20, 30, 40 years from now, whether we can look back to this period of time, and see "crazy ideas" that were proposed, but never delivered?
And two years ago, I was supposed to be able to take a vacation to the moon -- on PanAm!
I'm so happy to be a Beta....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Now I feel ripped off. In fact, we have all been ripped off. If this future was promised, there must have at least been an implied contract. Can you say "class action lawsuit?"
Yeah, but even the common man wore a suit when going out. Have you ever seen old pictures of sporting events or other public gatherings. The crowds are all dressed up! Not in tuxedos or anything, but in casual suits and dresses.
Ever get passed by a truck while driving a Volkswagen Beetle on the interstate? That's where lifting becomes a problem.
That's silly. It's not a circular argument-- they don't take off because they weigh a lot, not because they lack smooth undersides. Go to a Honda dealership and test drive an Insight. Take it up to its maximum speed, and do it on a hill just for some added kick. You will not take off.
Consumer cars, even ones with all-aluminum bodies and reduced weight engines and components like the Insight are too heavy to leave the road.
I'm sorry I wasn't more explicit. Consumer cars don't have to worry about lifting off because the lift-to-weight ratio in a normal car is not high enough to matter. Race cars do not have 5 seats and a large trunk with a spare tire and a jack, or a stereo, AC, heater, headlights, interior wood trim, cushy suspension, 8 glass windows, or a heavy steel frame and body. It's not just because the bottom's rough that cars don't fly into the air all the time. It's because they're heavy and not travelling at 230mph.
Now, you are correct about doing it for added traction. People who take their cars out to drag race are interested in having *additional* downforce, since your force of friction is directly proportional to the downforce, and your engine is so big that drag means nothing to you. But still, nobody except crazy high-end cars is actually worried about leaving the road.