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Technological Flights Of Fancy That Fizzled
prostoalex writes "MSNBC's Alan Boyle takes a look at seven futuristic dreams for the past that never managed to materialize into anything substantial in this 21st century. At the top of the list are flying cars, with personal jetpacks, passenger airships, supersonic commercial flights, space travel and colonies, with propulsion breakthroughs completing the list."
Given the uproar created by the Segway, its not surprising that flying cars and jetpacks never "took off." This is not an issue of what engineers can do technologically, but an issue of what society says they can do in public.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
You know what irritates me? Pres Kennedy said we're going to the moon, and 8 years later we did it. We landed Humans on the moon, we walked around, planted a flag, parked a hoopty, took some snapshots ........ and then .... We. Never. Went. Back.
WTF? Thirty friggin years later and no one has ever gone back? Instead we're pouring money into a useless space station for political feel good points.
There are enough metals, water, and WEALTH orbiting just past Mars to make every living Human a trillionaire, and we're still fighting wars over oil, diamonds and pieces of land measuring a few hundred square miles in size.
All the eggs are still in the same basket. It's only a matter of time before a great big rock flies into it and breaks every damned one of them.
Only on
We have flying cars (1). They're called "Helicopters". They're expensive because they aren't mass produced on the scale of cars, which is because fuel costs are prohibitive for wide-scale use.
We have personal jetpacks (2). Earlier attempts ran out of gas too quickly to be useful, but this appears to be a solved problem now.
We have supersonic planes (4), but the fuel costs are prohibitive for commercial travel.
We have the technology to put people and equipment in space (5 and 6), but fuel costs are prohibitive for anything other than military applications and government funded scientific research.
The aerospace breakthroughs that occured in the early 20th century were all driven by the availability of mass-produced gasoline-driven engines, which brought the cost and weight of energy down by a large margin compared to coal burning steam engines. Jet and rocket engines became practical in the 30s and 40s, producing another round of breakthroughs. Steam engines lead to a round of breakthroughs when they first became practical.
The reason we've only been seeing incremental improvements is because we're still using the same basic technologies. As soon as a new power source which allows more power for less money and less weight, we'll have flying cars, personal jetpacks, space tourism, and space colonization.
I don't think it'll be fuel cells, since there's no order-of-magnitude improvements in power density there. My money is on a breakthrough in Uninterruptable Power Supplies.
A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
I for one am glad the flying car has never made it. Some people can barely keep their cars on the road. Imagine if a distracted individual talking on his/her cell phone, screaming at their kids, eating a meal, and watching a DVD movie slammed into a chemical storage tank.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Given the vast energy required for most of these devices, their approach really isn't that practical.
If you think that modern cars get bad milage, just imagine the fuel bill for one that takes off vertically. Likewise for the personal jetpack and for supersonic flight. Fuel cost is also a big problem in space exploration.
I'm guessing that these technologies will find a niche if, as - and when - renewable energy costs come down a couple of orders of magnitude. Only then will these extravagant methods of transportation be practical and likely only as niche markets given that there are vastly more efficient ways of getting from A to B.
But in many cases technology has already eliminated the need for many of these advances.
For instance, one of the driving forces behind supersonic flight were the "high-powered" executives who found that they could attend two board meetings on opposite sides of the atlantic on the same day - and be home again in time for dinner. But with advances in broadband teleconferencing, they don't even have to leave their home.
Tesla and many scientists who furthered his work kept announcing that the fantastic technology advances seen in their time were just the beginning. Think about it: in a few decades we got phones, radio, generalised air traffic, television, nuclear power, premices of computers, and then ... it stopped.
What common appliance do you use everyday, that is not just an incremental improvement of the some invention, or mix of two+ inventions, discovered before the end of WW2 ? What happened to inventions since then ? There are no general public usage of supraconductors, of the technologies that put a man on the Moon... Even the Internet is just an improvement of commuted networks, though it is binary instead of analogic.
The only major breakthrough that could plausibly make its way into our day-to-day lives is hydrogen fuel cells. Where are all the other Breakthroughs ?
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Do you recall an airline company called "Pan Am", the biggest one of their time?
They were the victim of this little incident above and in Lockerbie. You may want to check out the results for Pan Am shortly afterwards, to see how well this turned out.
We're getting off topic here, but PanAm filed for bankruptcy because of airline deregulation.
In the 1980s the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) was shut down. It was the federal regulatory body that regulated airlines. The CAB was not the modern FAA, but instead regulated such aspects of the airline industries as prices, routes, and destinations. PanAm was the greatest beneficiary of the CAB, considering it was the largest US airline during the 50s through the 70s. PanAm basically didn't have to compete with rivals because the CAB's regulations basically guaranteed it profits.
In the past the only way an airline differentiated itself was with service. Only a few people could actually afford to fly, and as a result airlines were sort of a "luxury" form of travel with full service (throughout the cabin) and amenities.
The the CAB was dissolved airlines realized that they didn't have to compete with service, but could do so with prices. For a while, it seemed like airlines were popping out like wildflowers (remember TrumpAir?). Again, as a consequence of deregulation consumers had more choice in their airlines, more choice in routes, and more choice in prices.
When the things change, usually the largest and most entrenched entities are slowest to react. PanAm basically didn't know how to compete in this new environment. Airlines lowered prices to the point where anyone could fly. Today flying is not reserved for the privileged few but to most everyone in the US. In the early 90s, PanAm basically found itself barraged with "new" lower cost airlines and went out of business.
Some big airlines managed to survive thanks to smart management. American Airlines today is the one of the world's largest carrier. Some other big airlines wound up dying but not dead. TWA is a shell of its former self. The big winner in the industry is Southwest, whose low cost model is replicated with other airlines such as JetBlue.
Many of the airlines that sprung up thanks to deregulation no longer exist. Trump's airline is one example. When all the cards fell into place only about ten major airline remained in the 90s. But even so air travel demand kept going up, and prices still went down. Every major airline today has filled for bankruptcy in some for or another (United, American, Continental, US Air, Delta) or bought out by another airline (US Air, TWA). Ironically Southwest, although a "discount" airline is 1) the most successful 2) posts profits even post Sept. 11th.
Many people have complained that airline deregulation ruined air-travel. I don't believe this is true. Complaints are usually about travel delays, long lines at terminals, passengers being treated like cattle, and that was before Sept. 11th! [With airport security a big buzzword today it's probably even worse.] But keep in mind what has happened thanks to deregulation. Airlines are flying to more destinations, especially those with large markets. Airline prices have dropped to almost nothing compared to the past. Passenger ridership has increased significantly in the last twenty years. I would contend that most of the problems seen today with air-travel (not a result of security measures) are a result of the "old" regulated mentality that some management still have.
If you look at the patterns of technological predictions that have failed, they tend to cluster into several groups, such as:
1) Lack of advances with energy storage. For all the technological advances elsewhere, a tank full of gasoline or jet fuel is still one of the densest energy storage media known.
2) Lack of advances with energy production. Going along with the previous limitation, many of the glowing predictions for the future involved each individual's having access to -- either directly or indirectly for manufacturing purposes -- many times more energy than they do now, for much less money. Nuclear power was supposed to be the genie of infinite energy -- but that hope died with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. How many people remember the NS Savannah?
3) Cultural shifts. Look at the images of the Family of Tomorrow, living in the City of Tomorrow. Aside from clothing, they were identical to the popular image of the ideal family, living in the idealized Suburbia. You got in your aircar and flew to work, your wife zapped dinner from frozen to steaming in seconds, their home would be made entirely of synthetic materials -- but society still had all the same values. Ignoring for the moment that this was the white, middle-class future (turning a blind eye to the race-based inequities of current society), the society that made these predictions was, on the whole, considerably more responsible than today's society. The predictions expected that, with the advances in technology, mankind would become rational, well-educated, and responsible, able to face the challenge of a sky filled with aircars and devise a solution that everyone would agree on. Now contrast this with the people you see around you on the roads, and imagine what things would be like if they had three dimensions to be stupid with.
4) Modern business management. How long do you keep throwing money into a project before you expect to get a return? For many years, this was the single biggest advantage Japanese business had over American business -- they were willing to engage in R&D programs that wouldn't even begin to pay off for a decade or more, while in the US, an R&D program that wouldn't pay for itself in two years already had two-and-a-half strikes against it with management. Business practices have improved, but research programs that don't have a hope in hell of paying off in less than twenty years, or which, despite producing results quickly, will be hugely expensive without producing anything marketable, fall by the wayside in the eternal chase for the almighty Bottom Line. And even governments, with the ever-increasing amount of panis et circenses, err, entitlement programs, are finding it harder and harder to commit the money that such research requires, particularly when failure -- or repeated failure that is inevitable in research -- constitutes grounds for yanking your funding.
5) Paradigm shifts. People make predictions by extending what they already know; they can't predict changes that alter the underlying premises upon which those predictions are made. Technological advances can go off into directions that render a prediction useless. For example, Robert Heinlein, one of the world's most renowned science-fiction writers, described fusion-driven starships -- torchships -- that were navigated by teams of astrogators taking star sights by hand, manually converting the sight data into binary using large reference books, entering this binary data into a huge computer (again, manually) that crunched the sight data, returned a solution that had to be (manually) converted back from binary, and then applied to the engines. That was Heinlein's experience with computers; that was how he predicted their future. The invention of integrated circuits and the microcomputer rendered that prediction ludicrously anachronistic, as if you went into an FAA control tower and found the air-traffic controllers guiding planes by pushing little model planes around on a map, a la RAF Fighter Command in WWII.