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

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.

Park-n-ride

[SimplyCosmic]

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.

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. :(

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.