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Where's my Jetpack and Flying Car?

S

Steve's Barber

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 5, 2011
773
1
I'm old enough to remember these predictions from my 2nd Grade "Weekly Reader".

By now I should be zipping around in an anti-gravity suit when not sitting in my flying and fully automated robot car. Is it too late to ask for a refund?

So... has our technology "peaked" and reached the limits of reasonable expectations? With nothing left to do than tweak and fine tune what we've already accomplished? Those damned laws of physics!
 
Reminds me of this.

Our technology has not peaked yet, our expectations were just too much. We will get flying cars or some kind of flying vehicle some time, if the technology is feasible and cheap enough to mass produce. But it will take time, though is it necessary to have such cars?

Have you ever heard of the Technological Singularity?

Btw, we progress faster with technology than with our minds, something very bad can come from this, especially if humanity is still in its childhood.
 
simsaladimbamba said:
Our technology has not peaked yet, our expectations were just too much.
Click to expand...

I think it's more of a paradigm shift. Computers and the internet offer a lot that was beyond the wildest dreams of the jet-pack and space car predictions. We just channeled our technological progress in other directions than were predicted thirty or fifty years ago.
 
mkrishnan said:
I think it's more of a paradigm shift. Computers and the internet offer a lot that was beyond the wildest dreams of the jet-pack and space car predictions. We just channeled our technological progress in other directions than were predicted thirty or fifty years ago.
Click to expand...

That's a good observation. So true
 
simsaladimbamba said:
Btw, (if) we progress faster with technology than with our minds, something very bad can come from this, especially if humanity is still in its childhood.
Click to expand...

terical.gif
 
Think about your average driver and how bad they are at looking to see what's in front and to the side of them before they make a turn or change lanes. Now do you really want to add having to look up and down to that? :p
 
It hasn't peaked, we've just gotten used to a fast pace of technological development over the past 200 years or so and its warped our expectations. Compare how long humanity used some type of animal powered transportation to how long we've had a version of an automobile. Thousands of years versus just over one hundred years.

I don't think we'll have flying cars or anti gravity stuff within any of our lifetimes. (if they are even practical--ever). In fact, I'd be willing to bet that with the gutting of NASA that we'll even see a manned trip to Mars within our lifetime.
 
IIRC the problem with jetpacks is they require so much force to lift you that you use up all the fuel in your tanks in 30-40 seconds. So really, it's a similar problem that we face in other areas: finding a better fuel that gives us a lot more bang for the buck.

Then again, there's the other little problem. As John Robinson found out, you fly around in one of those things, you tend to run into monsters.

6-Lamar%20on%20location.jpg
 
Don't forget back in 1960 those atomic energy movies. In the future (1975) electricity will be so cheap that we will all heat our homes with it. We will have coils under the sidewalks, driveways & roads to melt the snow and ice when it falls in the winter. All because of atomic energy!

I'm waiting for that.
 
Boeing and Lockheed have flying cars ready. These vehicles get the equivalent of 100 MPG, running on natural gas. The Big 3 and Big Oil conspired with US government to kill the flying car programs in order to save their interests.

</conspiracy_theory>
 
Thomas Veil said:
IIRC the problem with jetpacks is they require so much force to lift you that you use up all the fuel in your tanks in 30-40 seconds. So really, it's a similar problem that we face in other areas: finding a better fuel that gives us a lot more bang for the buck.
Click to expand...

Potentially, but, that's limiting technology to what we can currently do (use physical fuel).

What if you can use some sort of energy to cause the lift? And not eject propellant? Etc.

This is one of the reasons sci-fi is hard - you have to imagine things outside the scope of what we think is possible or feasible, because things progress in ways which are far from ordinary or even what would be considered sane to suggest.

Our phones shown to someone 30 years ago probably would have blown them away (assuming you had useable apps/etc and could interact with the non-existant cell towers and non-existant interwebs...).
 
Ahhh. the next big leap forward will probably come when the next major war hits. Wars drive innovation all the time.
And that's not likely to happen anytime soon.

Oh wait.
Uh Oh.

Oh well.
On the bright side, we might get those flying cars after all!
If we survive, that is.....


Question:

Jetsons or Flintstones?

Jetsons here.
 
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