Tomorrow’s Tech … Today!
Many futuristic inventions have come to pass,
while some may never be realized.
[Some of this was used as content for the Program Book of
SoonerCon 24 in June 2015. Hope you like
the idea!]
FLYING CARS
From Star
Wars to The Jetsons, from Back to the Future to Chitty
Chitty Bang Bang, flying cars seem to be everywhere but in Mr and Mrs
Modern Citizen’s garage.
In 1929,
Henry Ford demonstrated a “sky flivver” but gave it up a couple of years
later. A true flying car made it to
concept model for Ford in 1956, the Volante Tri-Athodyne. Other enterprises, from the US Army to
Boeing, have proposed personal flyers, but the idea just hasn’t made it off the
ground.
Until 2013,
that is, when an American company called Terrafugia announced that the first
consumer flying car, the TF-X, should be available from them by around the year
2025.
As a concept,
flying cars embody the glittery, unrealistic expectations of populism’s
consumerist future, to the point that “Dude, where’s my flying car?” has become
a near-catchphrase, appearing as a cover story for a 2008 issue of Popular
Science. A 2014 NBC poll
reported that most Americans surveyed expected flying cars within 50 years.
One wonders
if these optimistic souls have considered the extrapolatory eventuality of the
combination of flying cars and human stupidity.
If you think impaired driving is a problem in two dimensions, just wait,
you optimists! Or, imagine a car lot
visited by a dozen radicals who want to take test drives with explosives
secreted in their backpacks. The
disaster-laden scenarios are endless!
TIME TRAVEL
Until HG
Well’s 1895 novel The Time Machine spread the meme, the only travel through time
in storytelling was one-way, as exemplified by Rip Van Winkle, or those who
visited Fairyland and returned home to find a hundred years passed, all in a
summer’s afternoon.
The idea of
traveling into the past feeds into the narcissistic notion, “How would my life
be if things happened differently?”
Voyages into the future tend to halve themselves between “We got smart —
problem solved” or “We got too smart — everyone’s doomed.”
Tech for
traveling may be as simple as a wish (Somewhere in Time) and as
complicated as a TARDIS. Whole series of
Superman stories involved sending one character into another’s past and
shunting their history to a side channel; Marvel likewise had an entire series,
What
If?
