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Transportation Retro-Futuristics

Posted by michael on from the meet-george-jetson dept.

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?"

10 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. monorail by Kujah · · Score: 3, Funny

    Well, sir, there's nothing on earth like a genuine, bona fide, electrified, six-car MONORAIL!
    What'd I say? Monorail!
    What's it called? Monorail!
    That's right! Monorail!

    ah that loveable Lyle Lanley...

  2. No Transporters? by Alphanos · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I suppose this was before the age of Star Trek. Much better than an underground subway between New York and Los Angeles would be a simple door you could walk through that instantly teleported you to the destination.

    --
    Alphanos
  3. Trans-planetary subway misses the boat. by juggledean · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.

  4. Park-n-ride by SimplyCosmic · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Looking at the image they have for the "flying-saucer bus", one would think that a slight part of that dream is alive in the form of "park-n-ride" bus services that many suburbs offer for their work commuters looking to get into the city without the wear on their cars and frustration of rush-hour traffic.

    Sure, the buses don't fly, but the end result is somewhat similar in a "it's 2004, but no weekend trips to the moon" kind of way.

  5. I still want my flying car! by Roblimo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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. :(

    1. Re:I still want my flying car! by Saeger · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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.

      --

      --
      Power to the Peaceful
    2. Re:I still want my flying car! by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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".

      It's not a computing power problem - it's a reliability problem. The computer on your desk has enough number-crunching ability to direct a city's traffic in 2D or 3D in real-time, especially if a simpler sub-optimal-but-good-enough algorithm is used.

      The real problem with automatically controlled cars is that the system won't be perfect, and the consequences of failure either on the ground or in the air aren't acceptable. On the ground, your automated vehicle kills a pedestrian (because of vehicle control failure or because they did something foolish). In the air, a malfunction turns your vehicle into a few thousand pounds of flying metal (plus fuel!) looking for something fragile to crash down on.

      The 2D case gives you prohibitive liability problems for the manufacturer, and the 3D case gives you accidents that are far less survivable and produce far more collateral damage than the 2D kind. All of these problems are solvable, and I firmly believe we'll end up with computer-controlled ground cars in the not too distant future, but it won't be a cakewalk.

      Maybe the idiots in the 50s really did think that anyone who could drivecould surely be a pilot too?

      That was the general idea, if I understand correctly. After all, how much harder can it be? (/irony)

  6. 1950s future vehicles look like 1950s vehicles by WomensHealth · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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?

  7. Re:Could do it with Nanotech by fred+fleenblat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  8. It all could have happened by Solder+Fumes · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.