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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."
Surprised that's not on the list anywhere ...
Where are the flying skateboards from Back to the Future?
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It was a pretty good article, but very weak on the Hindenburg details, many people seem to aggree these days that it was not the hydrogen that exploded, but the fabric.
Of course the Hindenburg is a fine example of how important a picture could be. Only thirty seven people died (97 lived), yet the burning fireball caught on film managed to kill decent method of long range travel. Of course there are a couple of other problems with airships, like they don't do too well in strong winds, and they take a lot of "man handling" at the field, but in some applications they might make good sense.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
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.
Interesting that all of these failed technologies are transportation based. Good thing we invented the SUV instead of personal jetpacks, or some nonsense.
...the prediction of hundreds of cable channels did come true and yet there is still nothing on.
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
Fast low-latency connectivity to every home, via a low-cost fiber-optic cable?
I remember Ye Olde Phone Company, back in 1995, was telling me (on a tour of the "copper racks" no less) that they planned to start installing residential fiber right into people's houses next year, and that the whole city would be wired up within 5 years...
Obviously, 5 years of Corporate Time!
So, I have my cable modem, which is nice for downloads... but still sucks for latency.
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
Why didn't "Windows Security" make it on the list? Oh wait, this is MSNBC...
quantum teleportation != Propulsion breakthroughs
Seriously, it has nothing to do with propulsion, Mr. Boyle. <grin>We'll have to wait another lightyear at least to see better propulsion.</grin>
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
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.
...we have all the penis enlargers, cheap toner cartridges, and some other Chinese-looking stuff that I can't read, that money can buy!
Who would have dreamed that thirty years ago!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
But how about totally revolutionary physics -- the kind of thing we see in "Star Wars" or "Star Trek"?
:)
You mean the kind of revolutionary physics that allows multi-ton objects to turn on a dime at insanely high velocities (with nothing to "push" against) without tearing themselves apart, and also without expending the energy of a small nuclear blast in order to do it?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
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.
Oh, wait. It's medication time. And jello with dinner!
In what way are space colonies a failed technology? Surely the ISS and Mir are both examples of succesful space colonies, well Mir is, ISS should be barring something major going wrong, that or someone patenting something like "a mechanism for launching humans into space using combustion" or such like. Even if you take colonies to mean Lunar/Mars bases then they really shouldnt be too long in coming. Assuming the US gov stops spending so much money on getting you lot cheaper petrol and starts funding something worthwhile.
Pressurized hydrogen (aka deuterium) is supposedly inflammable, and doesn't actually become flammable until it has a proper oxygen/hydrogen ratio (at which point it returns to being H).
:)
Dr. Nick: You mean inflammable means flammable? What a country!
I'll leave this one for the chemistry geeks in the crowd to chuckle over
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
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
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
I know it was imagined a long time ago (early 20th century I think), but I guess no one expected it to become a reality until recently. In 50 years, will people be writing about a space elevator as a Technological Flights Of Fancy That Fizzled?
If it does indeed become a relity, a space elevator would surely help space tourism and permanent space colonies to be realized as well.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
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.
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.
Its a good bet that the spectacular filmed crash of the Concorde greatly accelerated the demise of that program.
Compare that to how many jumbo jets have gone down and it points out something, if its flashy, and it goes wrong, then its doomed. If its nearly a commodity people just shrug their shoulders and move on.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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 ?
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.
My dad was a computer technician, in the days when computers (and computer terminals in stores etc.) would actually get fixed, like in hardware. They'd get refurbished, bad solders would get fixed, radio tubes would get switched, replace a bad transistor, that kind of thing. Now, SOP is to cycle through the cards with replacements, or more and more often just swap the entire box for a duplicate. It's basicly gone from being a real technical profession to being a mindnumbing job with hardly any skill requirements. He's retired now, got out at early retirement with 55(!), just in time.
Judging by the cost of having anything repaired compared to new electronics, I think less and less gets repaired outside of warranty. Even warranty claims are often replaced, not repaired. There's simply no money in having a $$$ specialist going over a device, finding defects, getting replacement parts, replacing them and put it back together again. That is if they're not so damn small and integrated you simply couldn't fix them except with highly specalized tools.
In particular not when the cost is the same or even higher than the costs of industrial robots producing one more unit somewhere in Asia. Then you even get a completely new device, not an old device where something else is probably going to break soon. So yes, the repair business really has died down - but not in the way the letter-writer thought it would be.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
1. Solotrek is no longer developing their Solotrek XFV. They auctioned off the existing prototype(s) after burning through their capital. At this point they're just a shell company making money licensing their vehicle for movie use. Mr. Boyle mentions the licensing, but not the near defunct status of SoloTrek.
2. The Breakthrough Physics Project always had tenuous status budgetarily, and it was finally killed off. Mr. Boyle doesn't mention the defunct status of this either. It's a shame the bean counters killed it, since it was mostly "thought experiments" performed by some of NASA's brightest and most forward-thinking scientists.
The information I mentioned above is right off the websites of Solotrek and the BPP, repectively.
A 1/3 chance of surviving a jet crash? Nope.
m .h tm
The new airships like the Zeppelin NT and the ATG machines can use vectored thrust to reduce the number of ground crew required, the power/size ratio and construction methodology is also enough to allow flight in much stronger winds than the first generation machines at the start of the 20th century. They can operate within similar weather conditions to other aircraft like helicopters and light aeroplanes.
http://www.zeppelin-nt.com/pages/D/bilder_u_thu
The airship wasn't killed from long range travel just by the film of the Hindenberg disaster, though it certainly didn't help. The much higher speed and lower cost of the aeroplanes did more damage and I don't see that changing for A->B travel in the near future.
I think however there's a niche similar to the one cruise liners operate within which I believe airships could fill. A world cruise on something like the Hindenberg would be absolutely fantastic. Then there's the obvious military/police patrol and observation platforms.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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.
A couple of key considerations:
Our own history of Jetpacks and why they kinda went nowhere...
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
It's long past time to knuckle down and get seriously pragmatic and practical about moving into space. No more billion dollar carnival shows, please. I *know* it would cool and neat and gollygeewhiz, but we need to move past that.
Why do some think it is so important to follow up the Apollo boondoggle with a Mars boondoggle? No thanks. These big time, one shot spectaculars just so a few folks in portable ecosystems can galavant around another world are what got us into this rut in the first place. It actually winds up making space look distant and elitist, like space is only for the chosen few astronauts. Trust me, I've had the oppurtunity to talk to the public in general about space, and that's the underlying attitude. A big Mars shot would only please a handful of fanatics. Many of you also overlook a lot of the difficulties in a Mars trip. Some of you act like it's not much more than a quick trip up to LEO.
We need to build solid steps into space. A good orbital space station actually IS the proper step right now.
Build a large, solid, modular, easily expandable platform in LEO. Then start placing things at MEO and move out to LaGrange points with zero-g industries- including, eventually, tourism. Leave GEO to the commsats unless someone grows the balls and obtains the funding to build a space elevator.
Unfortunately, and I agree with the Mars crowd on this, the ISS ain't it. :-( There was a guy many years back, when the ISS was still in planning, who proposed a modular approach to space stations. The modules could be mass manufactured on the ground, and then shipped up to space with big dumb boosters and basically just bolted together. It was almost like Tinker Toys, but was a brilliant idea. We'd have an enormous platform up there now, with shuttle *bays* instead of just docking ports.
Ah, it's depressing. :(
--- Ban humanity.
Seeing the Concorde go, seemed like seeing a portion of the future dissapear in front of us, and all because of a couple accidents.
The WTC towers attack killed it. While the other airliners took a serious hit, Concorde's market were mostly people who could afford to fly it, but that didn't really have to. So while the other companies got by on people that "had" to fly, like businessmen and people going away on holidays, the typical Concorde-passenger remained in their luxurious homes, feeling safer there.
It didn't help that their only line was a "sensitive" one, for some reason US people didn't like to travel internationally after that (well moreso than domestic), even though all the hijacked flights were domestic airlines. Most other companies had flight lines inside either Europe or USA to rely on, while Concorde had nothing. The accident was just the final blow.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There's your flying car. I think a couple of the early prototypes *were* converted cars.
The autogyro was cool. If you've ever seen the old archival footage of them, they were almost crash proof. Your engine could drop out of the vehicle, and you could still pull off a safe landing.
--- Ban humanity.
Come on, everybody knows that like several other companies, PanAM fell to the BladeRunner curse:
Someone once noticed that a number of the companies whose logos appeared in BR had financial difficulties after the film was released. Atari had 70% of the home console market in 1982, but faced losses of over $2 million in the first quarter of 1991. Bell lost it's monopoly in 1982. Pan-Am filed for bankruptcy protection in 1991. Soon after Blade Runner was released, Coca-Cola released their "new formula", resulting in losses of millions of dollars. It is interesting to note that since then, the Coca-Cola company has seen the biggest growth of any American company in history. Cusinart filed for bankruptcy protection in July 1989.
From the BladeRunner Faq (one of many copies)
Heute die Welt, morgen das Sonnensystem!
There's also the liability question, of course. Might just have to take it all to "no fault" insurance.
--- Ban humanity.
Sure, Trekky Warp Drives aren't a happnin' deal, but then neither is Artificial Intelligence. Minky and Kurzweil and that bunch have been selling that snake oil for decades and yet my Windoze box still goes goofy if it wakes up with a blank floppy in its mouth.
So yeah: thinking machines are another one of those dorky myths that haven't happened, and probably never will.
What other nonsense of THE FUTURE ! (tm) have we been sold over the years?
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Forget flying cars and colonies on the Moon! I'm still waiting for Duke Nukem Forever!
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
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?
Computers are more than capable of piloting (takeoff, cruise, and landing) and navigating (planning routes, following tower commands) planes. Have been for a long time. Bring on my flyin' car that says "Destination?", listens to me say "Work" or "Home" or "Las Vegas", goes there at 200 MPH, and wakes me when we land. Hell, for that matter, bring on my regular car that does that (albeit probably not at 200 MPH, but still).
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Why do we need landing on Mars and building colony?
Did You think about this?
If we cannot manage to get off all of Mao Ces and Husseins, why are we so sure about colonizing any other planet?
In fact, if we control another planet, the another 'independece war' will start and after all we get even more 'regions' on the world.
So, until we get a sunstainable civilization on earth, is there any reason to go beyond? Technology is one point, but what about the social system of the earth?
We are not mature enough, I think... It's not matter of technology...
If you haven't seen it already, watch The Flying Car immediately. From director Kevin Smith starring everyones favorites Dante and Randal
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
Over a 3 year span following the first moon landing the US *did* go back a few (5) times:
Apollo Lunar Missions (w/successful landings):
Apollo 11
Launched 16 July 1969
Landed on Moon 20 July 1969
Sea of Tranquility
Returned to Earth 24 July 1969
Apollo 12
Launched 14 November 1969
Landed on Moon 19 November 1969
Ocean of Storms
Returned to Earth 24 November 1969
Apollo 14
Launched 31 January 1971
Landed on Moon 5 February 1971
Fra Mauro
Returned to Earth 9 February 1971
Apollo 15
Launched 26 July 1971
Landed on Moon 30 July 1971
Hadley Rille
Returned to Earth 7 August 1971
Apollo 16
Launched 16 April 1972
Landed on Moon 20 April 1972
Descartes
Returned to Earth 27 April 1972
Apollo 17
Launched 07 December 1972
Landed on Moon 11 December 1972
Taurus-Littrow
Returned to Earth 19 December 1972
Granted, it's been a while; but I wouldn't say "Never. Went. Back."
Any spoon would be too big.
The future ain't what it used to be. Alas we have no paper clothes, moving sidewalks, flying cars, or orgasmatrons. Yet no one could have predicted the spork. Look at how it revolutionized our fast food industry. NOT a day goes by when I think about all those sporks I got at Kentucky Fried Chicken (before they changed their name to KFC). Truly a failure of imagination on the part of our futurists and science fiction writers.
If there is one unpredicted technological gadget that we must all worship and bow before it is the beer widget. A miracle! Of the widgeted stouts I've had both Beamish and Guiness. And Boddington's is pretty tasty too.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
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.
At least one was.... (let me go to the bookshelf to pull out "The Great Dirigibles, their Triumphs and Disasters" by John Toland) ... thumb, thumb... There's a picture with the following caption: "Tail section of the Shanandoah, which was torn in three parts by a storm, near Ava, Ohio, on the morning of September 3, 1925." Another caption notes that the nose section landed 10 miles away.
I suppose if only they had had Internet service back then with the local weather radar updates they could have avoided a lot of grief.