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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."
What a great choice for a picture :)
I remember seeing ads for flying cars (well, was it really a car) in that magasine over 15 years ago.
Haven't you seen the commercial? We don't NEED flying cars!
... is television truly that dead already that mainstream MSNBC doesn't realize the existence of informative and somewhat-funny commercial advertisements that portray the Internet and IBM as the solutions to every problem we have with data storage and transportation? What do we need flying cars for?
Jeez
topreacher@signature.slashdot.org 1% rm -rf sig
It's funny how when you think about the past, you seldom think about your expectations at the time for the future. This article really made me think about how no invention becomes reality simply by virtue of some sort of inevitability. Money, the market, luck, and the tides of history all play a part in determining what will make it and what won't.
Somehow I don't think I'll ever get to use a Transporter either. Dammit!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I bought a stack of Popular Electronics magazines from the 70's on ebay a few months ago. There's some great "upcoming technologies" articles.
In the days before the magnetic strip, they predicted credit cards would have a holographic image that optically stores the credit card number. The card projects the hologram onto a sensor which reads the number into the computer for processing.
In the letters to the editor section, someone was wondering if it was worth taking a course in TV repair because with the release of the Phillips Modular design it will be easy for anyone to fix their own TV so the repair industry would become obsolete.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Truthfully, this is the biggest dissapointment out of all of the things that were listed as failed. Though, I'd like to rejoice at the idea that the military's still pushing supersonic travel, it doesn't make me all that comfortable (for more reasons than a simple sonic boom). Seeing the Concorde go, seemed like seeing a portion of the future dissapear in front of us, and all because of a couple accidents. Of course, coincidences are hardly excuses, but still, I'd like to have seen these machines continue for a while.
I can just imagine that one day I'll have the ability to be connected with family across the globe in real life, like I'm connected to them virtually. I can just hope that what the military researches, at whatever cost it may be, will eventually reach the mainstream consumer.
First, and foremost, it is the result of a tax structure that penalizes economic activity while unburdening asset concentrations -- the very things that governments protect and should therefore tax. This creates "market failures" in technology development capitalization that government then tries to solve with socialist development programs... adding futher to the tax burden on economic activity without sharing that burden with the asset concentrations protected by government from force and fraud (due to war and/or crime). This technosocialist "solution" to the asset concentration welfare system is surely the most idiotic idea ever to infect civilization.
Whenever government gets involved in technology development, as opposed to basic (unpatentable) research, it creates a monster that finds private innovation threatening. Governments failed to foresee this poisonous incentive when the post-Manhattan-project mania for government "big science" programs took off.
The one area of space development that took off and became profitable, communications satellites, is the one area of space development that Congress, at the dawn of the space age, barred government from competing with private interests. Unfortunately, the NASA act didn't bar government from competing in space transportation. Also equally unfortunately government wasn't kept out of energy development or aeronautical technology development.
Here's an excerpt from the afore-linked net asset taxation whitepaper:
CURRENT ECONOMIC CONDITIONS AND RISK INVERSION
A fundamental problem with our economy at present is what might be called "risk inversion" where households with high net worth disproportionately invest in low risk instruments while households with low net worth find their savings unwisely invested at high risk by deregulated but relatively unskilled financial institutions.
New technologies and job-creating enterprises find it difficult to obtain capital because they are caught in the horns of a dilemma: The wealthy, who have the business experience needed to manage the risks of a new enterprise, have given their money to government or corporate bureaucracies to manage while small savers find their savings accounts squandered in speculative investments by institutions which are, in reality, qualified to do little more than purchase Treasury paper, which is what they should, in fact, be doing.
Even more perverse, the government finds itself stepping away from its traditional low-risk investments in mature infrastructure in order to perform functions for which it is particularly ill-suited, such as technical innovation, while private sector businesses retreat from the very technical risk it is most suited to manage.
The government then finds itself bailing out the failed investments of insured, but deregulated, financial institutions, thus creating even more government debt which is purchased by those most qualified to capitalize business enterprise.
The current hue and cry for saving the "middle class" arises from the failure of our deregulated financial institutions to focus on their original purpose, which was the creation of affordable home ownership. Instead, they speculated in the creation of large amounts of theoretically profitable commercial real estate as young families were being crushed under the weight of sky- rocketing home mortgages and declining real wages.
The "middle class" it is currently in vogue to worry about are those people, primarily people born in the 1950's (middle to late baby boomers), whose family stability and household net worth suffered greatly as a result of these housing shortages combined with lowering real incomes.
Seastead this.
Fast low-latency connectivity to every home, via a low-cost fiber-optic cable?
The gap between first demo, hyped press releases, and widespread acceptance is very very long. Consider the very long convoluted history of video telephony. Even the people that have the bandwidth for video telephony do not use it much.
Those pesky customers -- there's not enough of them, they're all waiting for others to adopt the technology, and then they don't want to pay much for the service when it gets to them.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Although we think we're advancing so slowly in interstellar travel, just think - less than 60 years after the first airplane flew, we were walking on the moon. In the long view, much of our technological advances have occurred at lightning speed. Perhaps in a few hundred years we'll have captured the secret of intrastellar space travel and colonized the solar system. Perhaps in a few thousand years we'll have captured the secret of interstellar space travel and colonized every star in the sky. Sure, that's a long time for a single human life. But in the course of human evolution? It's an eyeblink.
"By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth." - George Carlin
isn't speed the problem with using airships for long range travel? Is anyone really going to take a two day flight across the Atlantic?
Incidentally, does anyone know how the economics compare with conventional aircraft?
Reading the article makes you wonder about non-transportation marvels that was predicted ages ago. Off the top of my head, AI (ala Lt. Comm. Data) is the most tantalyzing of these. The year 2001 has come and gone and we have yet to witness anything resembling HAL the homocidal computer. (maybe that is a good thing?) On both the hardware and software front, we are embarassingly behind where we thought we would be many years ago. Will we be reading the same article ages hence lamenting the lack of androids?
P.S. I'm anticipating that Matrix jokes are inevitable. Go ahead - do your worst.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Straight up.
NASA has been spinning its wheels ever since the end of the Apollo program. Mars Direct is a proposed path to get humans on Mars in 10 years. It's technicaly feasable, not any more expensive than the current low Earth orbit (LEO) NASA budget, and it would turn mankind into an honest to goodness spacefaring species.
Want to do something about the current lack of direction that NASA has? Check out this previous post.
Blaze a trail to the New World
Also, Airships can have awosome lifting capacity! Many airships on the drawing table right now are for large scale construction projects...we can see in Iraq just how fickle heilos are...even when professionally piloted. We have massive reserves of liquid hydrogen and helium from the cold war days anyway...the stuff is cheaper that a gallon of milk! Once you build it and fill it up, it doesn't really require power to stay up! That makes it far more effient than an airplane. Most of the new designs still use prop engines...that's how little power they require to move! But they do cost a FORTUNE TO BUILD! Many estimates of new airships for large scale construction or crusing are in the 100's of millions of $$$$.
Yeah, in a normal economy the value of goods changes--buggy whips aren't worth what they once were--but it's normally gradual, not sudden.
At this point in history, space is a pipe dream--a ridiculous and silly pipe dream. I wish that weren't the case--I'm an avid reader of science fiction, after all, and there's nothing I'd like more than to be able to travel to the stars--but it's the truth.
You're suggesting an outer skin coated in the main ingredient for rocket fuel isn't sufficient to explain a raging fireball?
I haven't seen a video of the Hindenburg disaster in quite a while, but I don't recall an actual earth shaking* explosion. I recall a big blimp-sized airborn bonfire. I would imagine (IANAChemsit) if the hydrogen had mixed with oxygen and combusted, pieces of the ship (and passengers) would have been scattered all over the place.
*Interesting side note, and thing-you-should-not-try-at-home: I had a science teacher in high school who, according to another science teacher, mixed hydrogen and oxygen in a balloon, let it float up to the ceiling, and poked it with a lit match taped to a meter stick. The explosion knocked panels down from the ceiling, temporarily defeaned the kids in the classroom so they had to be sent home, and brought people running from the other side of the campus because they thought a bomb had gone off. Good thing he was already tenured. =/
If the hydrogen from the Hindenburg really did combust, why can't I recall seeing parts of the ship flung hundreds of feet into the air from a massive shock wave?
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
Have you ever seen the film of the didaster? It didn't explode. It caught fire, then one end sank as the gas leaked out, then the middle, then the other end. Had it exploded, the whole shebang would have fallen straight down. C'mon...think about it for a minute before saying something like that. Helium has 20% of the lifting power of hydrogen, but fear makes it taboo for use in commercial aviation. We can certainly engineer containers that would keep it from catching fire today...jet fuel is explosive too.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
There's also the liability question, of course. Might just have to take it all to "no fault" insurance.
--- Ban humanity.
> Sure, there are lots of asteroids with valuable metals and stuff out in the asteroid belt, but getting them back here would be infeasible
Nope. The energy needed to smack a rock out of its orbit and toss it back this way is very small. The hardest part is getting off this rock in the first place.
> -and once they were retrieved, the market value of their contents would plummet.
I disagree with that. It still has to be mined from the asteroids, it still has to be smelted and refined, it still has to be distributed. The great, great grandchildren of those out-of-work steel workers near Pittsburgh will have jobs and there should be enough to go around for all of them. One job will create several other jobs.
> At this point in history, space is a pipe dream--a ridiculous and silly pipe dream.
I disagree here too. It is vital that we spread out from this one planet as soon as possible. There will eventually be another large meteor/comet strike and we can't all be here when it happens. If we have a strong presence in space we might even be able to prevent it.
There is also the matter of six billion Humans on one planet. At some point, we will have consumed every natural resource that can be consumed. Unlike non-sentient beings, we change the environment to suit us, not the other way around. And in the process, we are killing this planet. We need more room, and two empty worlds (Mars and Luna) and the entire asteroid belt are right there with a great big "Vacancy" sign.
Only on
Not to mention that "personal sized" passenger airships could be incredibly useful (yeah, it was in some Hardy Boys or other).
Such airships are one of the few cases where the size to efficiency ratio might be good for a hybrid/solar or all-solar onboard power generator, which would make for killer range.
Solar or not, I can't figure out why someone hasn't started trying to market these - is it safety? If I were wealthy, I'd rather have one than a helicopter - it would be almost certainly safer, it would be quieter, and it would be just flat-out cooler to go drifting over a city or wilderness. What gives?
And those lands on that far far saway island called "Australia" are useless, it's not profitable to start establishing there...
We've heard this argument, oh, continuously in history ? And it was disproved every single time.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Birth-control pills. Post WWII, immense impact on
society.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging???
Main reasons for no general use of superconductors are that: 1) Liquid He requires a fair amount of care to handle and a shitload of insulation to keep the boil-off rates reasonable; 2) HTc superconductors aren't ready for prime-time (typically not ductile enough).
The only major breakthrough that could plausibly make its way into our day-to-day lives is hydrogen fuel cells.
There have been some major changes in power electronics in the last decade - which is something that will make fuel cells a lot more usefull. Variable speed motor drives can be made a lot cheaper now than even ten years ago - these can lead to improved efficiency of refrigeration equipment - which is the biggest load for the electric grid.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.