Slashdot Mirror
How Will We Get Around Near-Future Earth?
Slob Nerd points to this BBC article on future transport possibilities. It begins "The prospect of a revolution in air travel has been raised by Nasa's successful test of a 5,000mph plane. But are we likely to see similar advances in other forms of transport? Dusting off the crystal ball, what changes might come in the way we get around? What big ideas are out there, and do they have any chance of seeing the light of day?"
Flying cars have got to be the classic poster child of the genre. For economic and safety reasons alone, the idea is a non-starter. Harder for people to grasp is the fact that flying cars can never exist, they would be private aircraft, an entirely different beast with different laws and different applications. If I may belabor the point a bit, can you see how the very term flying car negates itself and coerces itself into a different noun? There have been small private aircraft for decades, you'd think these people would have noticed them.
People's willingness to believe in the patently absurd is borne out in the authors list of the downsides of flying cars:
- "The prospect of horrific crashes and air rage spring to mind."
- "The British weather often prevents microlight flying, and you can only travel during daylight hours. You need an airfield and learning to fly isn't easy."
- "There is also the question of developing propellers that can safely power cars."
- "'Whilst taxiing up the road under propeller power, I met a group of cycling proficiency children who I thought I'd chop up, so stopped and pushed the rest of the way,' says Bill Brooks of an early test run."
And yet, the author appears to conclude that flying cars will indeed someday exist.No doubt some of you will trot out the same old arguments about how people said Christopher Columbus was an idiot and see how he proved them wrong, or that believing in things like flying cars means you are open minded and imaginative, and folks such as myself are closed minded old farts, and damn the evidence to the contrary. Those folks often cite the evidence that contradicts their beliefs as a perverse sort of proof that they are right and everybody else is stuck in some obsolete paradigm.
And what set this off? NASA successfuly tests an aircraft that, under highly specialized and contrived conditions, flew at 5,000 mph, well over six times the speed of sound. Immediately, pundits around the world speculate that soon passenger aircraft will do the same. This in spite of the fact that aircraft flying at mach 3 have been around for half a century. In fact, the Concorde reached the end of its useful life last year. It proved too expensive and impractical. But nay say the futurists! In the future we will all fly even faster! Even farther!
The Dark Ages were characterized in part by fanatical religious beliefs that had entire regions hypnotized and enslaved. I conjecture that the same is true today. Traditional religion melts away before pop culture, consumerism, and a vast new array of supertitious beliefs. We are all equally enslaved, toiling away as our masters enrich themselves and our planet, our precious and timeless inheritance, is burned away like a cheap cigarrette.
Highly industrialized wars are fought; nations are bombed senseless, invaded, and conquered on a whim; truck bombs detonated among the innocent and passenger planes full of more innocents are slammed into buildings filled with still more innocents; fanatics strap explosives to their bodies and detonate themselves among their peers and fellow citizens, heads filled with wild dreams; fanatics kill their enemies in the name of God, Right to Life, Democracy, Liberty, Free Trade, and endless other litanies. Societies that support such acts cheer them on with empty eyes and apparently empty heads. "Soon," they must be thinking, "Soon I will have a flying car and these terrible times will be over."