Transportation Retro-Futuristics

jpatokal writes "Flashback to the future with UC Berkeley's Transportation Futuristics! An excellent exhibition of amazing diagrams on how transportation was expected to evolve, featuring flying saucer buses, airplane escape pods and, yes, monorails. But where are the Segways and SUVs?"

Comments

The Future Ain't What it Used To Be

[ewhac]

Future may not be available as shown; individual fates may vary. Future not available in India, Africa, or Central/South America.
-- Tom Servo, Mystery Science Theater 3000, "Design for Dreaming"

Beg, borrow, or make a copy of MST3K episode 524, "12 to the Moon," which leads with the short subject, "Design for Dreaming," a corporate promotion film by General Motors. Produced in the 1960's, it depicts THE FUTURE! as General Motors will bring it to you. Astounding labor-saving kitchen devices! Amazing new cars! ("For the electronic highway of the future, the new Firebird-II!")

Corn-ball as it is these days, part of me still wishes the future were like this.

Schwab

Trans-planetary subway misses the boat.

[juggledean]

The trans-planetary subway http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/news_events/exhibits/f uturistics/oddities/5.html has a description of accelerators and things to take care of the g-forces but, if they'd even read Scientific American they'd know that if you dig the tunnel in a straight line, through the planet, from Los Angeles to New York, you can get gravity to do most of the work and free fall all the way in about 45 minutes, coming to rest at the surface at the far end. You just have to worry about friction and the temperature rise.

Retro-future isn't what it used to be.

Most of the stuff on the site is ugly...

[I7D]

but I seriously wouldn't mind piloting this thing http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/news_events/exhibits/f uturistics/auto/3.html

I still want my flying car!

[Roblimo]

I was born in 1952, and I remember many of these images when they were new.

A couple of weeks ago I waited for a late plane, then got jammed into one of those just-too-small Airbus middle seats for six hours. I couldn't help thinking that what I really wanted, right then, was one of the self-piloting flying cars we were all going to have by the year 2000.

Computers and the Internet are okay, but not much of the really good stuff futurists promised we'd have by the beginning of the next century is in common use yet.

I guess I might as well give up on that Moon vacation. Not going to happen in my lifetime at this rate. :(

Re:I still want my flying car!

[Saeger]

The main reasons why the flying car was a bad prediction:

1. Costs too much in comparison to a car that moves in 2-dimensions (in terms of $ and energy).
2. Not as safe - there STILL isn't enough AI computing power to control the traffic and fly the masses safely through the 3D "skyways". Maybe the idiots in the 50s really did think that anyone who could drive could surely be a pilot too?
3. Noise.
4. Parking space.
5. (Why move your body physically, when in many cases it's more efficient to do it virtually?)

What gets me mad, though, is how people like to trot this wheres-my-flying-car(!) example out every time they're waxing pessimistic about present day futurism.

I guess I might as well give up on that Moon vacation. Not going to happen in my lifetime at this rate. :(

Cheer up. As long as you've got at least another decade of life left in you, you'll make it to the crossover point where it can be extended indefinitely, because the rate of technological progress is actually exponential.

--

1950s future vehicles look like 1950s vehicles

[WomensHealth]

Isn't it strange how, when we look at designs for future vehicles realized by past designers, the pictures look old-fashioned to us? Why does the 1950s vison of a futuristic hovercar look like nothing more than a 1950s automobile without wheels? Surely, to the contemporary viewer, these vehicles looked futuristic, but to us, they just look old-fashioned. Why does it seem that the 1950s futurists were unable to come up with an image of something resembling, say, a 2004 BMW 3-series, or even a 1990s Dodge Intrepid?

The corollary to this is that, our current interpretations of what future vehicles might look like (imagine the Audi in I, Robot or the Lexus in Minority Report), will probably look hopelessly dated when 2030 rolls around.

The problem, I suspect, lies largely in our inability to predict what styling cues future consumers will find appealing. Is it impossible for us, as non-clairvoyants, to imagine what manufactured goods might look like in the future? Can anyone cite any examples of past designers who were able to successfully envision the future of industrial design?

Re:Could do it with Nanotech

[fred fleenblat]

The particles that we are made of are constantly winking in and out of existence due to quantum fluctuations anyway. It's only a matter of degree to compare that to being completely disassembled and reassembled somewhere else from different particles.

At a more concrete level, most of the chemical elements your body is made of are gradually dissolved and replaced over several years; you literally are not the same person you were 15 years ago.

In other words, you are already being subject to similar "transporter" like effects as you travel through time.

personal aircraft

[PsiPsiStar]

Has anyone ever heard of the plane Deadalus?
It was powered entirely by a person and flew across the English Channel. That'd be the perfect vehicle for me. Of course, to be light and strong enough, it had to be made of some lithium alloy so it was rather expensive.

It all could have happened

[Solder Fumes]

Most of the items really could have existed by now. It would have been possible with the hard work and ingenuity of our engineers over the last 50 years. However, the visionaries did not account for one thing:

Affordable computers.

Compare the advances in vehicles and transportation infrastructure to the advances in computing technology. Virtually all of our work has been focused on rapidly advancing semiconductor technology and computer programming ability. Imagine if that energy was instead focused on mechanical innovations like flying cars and high-speed rail. We'd have them by now.

Am I suggesting this was the wrong way to do things? Absolutely not! That vast complex mechanical infrastructure would be the result of billions of man-hours in design, and would require significant human intervention to operate. What we are doing now is getting our processing and data management development out of the way first. The ability to store vast amounts of data, communicate instantly, run complex algorithms, and develop intellegent control systems will make all other technological development much more efficient.

The Silicon Revolution has been a time of building new tools. Building the machines that will help us build better machines. No longer does this mean tying a rock to a stick in order to make a better hammer; we now work with our minds and computers are the tools we use to expand the influence of our thoughts. Computers were once an end unto themselves; now they have grown to a high level of usefulness and are already being applied to further develop other fields.

This was a little sidetrack that 1950 could never have seen, but it was a highly necessary and important one.

Magma Tunnel Transport

[serutan]

The "Planetron" New York to Los Angeles subway system shown on the site reminded me of an old science fiction story that featured an even more fanciful long-distance subway system. In the story the tunnels were straight lines through the Earth's molten magma layer, held open by force fields. The cars needed no power, they used gravity to accelerate downhill to the halfway point and decelerate up to the destination. I wish I could remember more about this story. Does it ring any bells?

Future of Transport

[digitaltraveller]

Flying Personal Transport Device's (PTD's) makes sense to me, especially when I see all those poor souls wasting their lives sitting in gridlock. I say PTD because the car is a hopelessly outmoded design, one that needs to die soon.

The PTD would need multiple safety redundancies (backup power, turbines, parachute, whatever) but the major stumbling block for consumer acceptance would be one thing: The interface.

The PTD should basically take just a set of GPS coordinates and that's it. The vehicle should be able to fly itself using a simplistic genetic algorithm, with the entire traffic system looking like a type of swarm intelligence. This would also help on the regulatory front. How could the FAA force you to have a pilot when the only control on the device is a GPS entry console?

The PTD obviously shouldn't ever have a locus of central control. Besides traffic net system failure, it would an obvious target for terrorists. A good PTD design would probably be so light that any terrorists using them to attack targets would probably do little damage and do us a favour killing themselves. Sure they could pack the cabin full of explosives but they could already do that using an RC plane.

The rise of such vehicles would probably drive a transition to buildings made of nanocomposites so tremendously strong that a little PTD bouncing off them probably wouldn't even leave a mark. This kind of infrastructure would be built automatically. Anyone who's been to Japan and witnessed the post WWII economic miracle knows it was the Japanese automotive exports that drove that economic expansion.

I just googled the Skycar and noticed they IPO'd on 21 November 2001. Poor bastards.