Thursday, May 17, 2012
Where’s my flying car?
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| FLYING CARS: I'm still waiting for one to show up in a showroom near me! |
When I was a kid in the late ’60s and ’70s, I looked forward
to the year 2000 and the shiny new future it was supposed to bring.
Watching TV shows such as “The Jetsons,” “Lost in
Space,” “Star Trek,” “Space: 1999” and “The Thunderbirds,” I was promised a future
with robots and space travel where people zipped around in jet packs through
domed, gleaming cities floating in the sky.
Well the year 2000 has come and gone and 12 years on, I
can’t help but feel cheated.
Sure we have a host of cool new technological gadgets that
no one had imaged way back then and thanks to the Internet, we have a world of
knowledge, trivia and mindless entertainment at our fingertips. And like most
everyone else, I’ve become so attached to all these gadgets that I don’t know
if I could really live without them anymore. I know for a fact, that I would
NOT be able to earn my living if it wasn’t for the technology boom that brought
us personal computers, the Internet, smartphones and iPods and iPads.
But what I really want to know is:
Where the frak is my flying car?!
And my robot maid?
And my jet pack?
And the moonbase and space ships
and all the other stuff we were promised?
How and why did we give up on
those dreams?
Yes, I realize that some of those
things are impractical. After all I live in New Jersey which is home to the
nation’s biggest collection of bad and/or distractible drivers (a group to
which I must admit to occasionally belonging), and the thought of a bunch of “Jersey
Drivers” haphazardly flying these vehicles around and the havoc that they could
cause makes me shutter. But the technology to build a flying car isn’t out of
our reach. As recently as this past April, a Dutch company demonstrated its
latest prototype, the PAL-V. However I don’t think it will take off
with consumers anytime soon.
Like all previous attempts at
flying cars, this vehicle fails to find the perfect balance between car and
flying machine. It looks too much like a helicopter with the car part added as
an afterthought. Other attempts, like the Convair Model 116, were too much like a car with the airplane parts literally just stuck on.
So perhaps the real reason the
flying car never really took off is because it tries to combine two very
different things and does neither well.
But you can’t tell me the same is true of the robot maid.
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| ROSIE MEETS ROOMBA: We were promised Rosie the
Robot Maid but only got Roomba. Is it any wonder
that I feel cheated?
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No one I know likes cleaning his
or her own house, so almost everyone would want to buy a robot maid. We already
possess the technology to build robots that can do very complicated and
delicate work. Just ask any assembly line worker who has lost his or her job to
one. So why the heck don’t we have them?
Sure there is the Roomba, but it
only vacuums. I want something that also dusts, scrubs the bathroom, mops the
floors, does the dishes and laundry and picks up and puts away my clothes. (Thanks
to Microsoft, I’d still be doing Windows).
It’s not like I’m demanding the
thing look like Angelia Jolie in a French Maid’s outfit. (If it did, my wife
probably wouldn’t let me have it anyway!). Rosie from “The Jetsons” would be
just fine. Heck, even the WED Treadwell Septoid Repair Droid from “Star Wars” would be fine.
Yes they would be expensive at
first. But so was the television set, personal computer, iPod and cell phone.
Today all those products are nearly ubiquitous and relatively affordable. So
why isn’t some company looking into this. (I’m looking at you Dyson and dare I
say it, Apple).
But perhaps my biggest
disappointment is that the moonbases and missions to Mars everyone predicted
we’d be making by now back in the ’60s and early ’70s have never come to pass.
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SO CLOSE, YET SO FAR. Looking at The Eagle Transporter from "Space:
1999" (top) and the Apollo space capsule side by side, it's not hard to see
why I thought the fictional craftcould become a reality.
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I guess we can blame that on the
end of the Cold War. The race to get to the moon and to claim mastery over
space was really all about showing our military might to the Russians. And
while I’m thankful not to have the threat of the A-bomb literally hanging over
our heads anymore, I’m disappointed that our desire to travel to other planets
within our solar system evaporated with those threats too.
As a 10-year-old back in 1975, I
couldn’t imagine a future where we weren’t already zipping around the solar
system in craft that looked suspiciously like the Eagle Transporter of “Space:
1999.” Just image if the pace of development of spacecraft had mirrored that of
the personal computer between 1975 and 2000.
In that 25 years period we went from the kit-based computers like the MITSAltair 8800 to hand-held computers like the Palm m100. At that same rate of advancement, the Eagle Transporter, which bore a strong
resemblance to NASA’s Apollo era capsules and rockets, didn’t seem that
inconceivable.
Now as a 47-year-old with two
young nephews, I wonder what they expect of their future and if they’ll be able
to succeed in making their dreams a reality.
Perhaps they’ll be the ones to perfect the flying car or robot maid.
I hope so.
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Bravo! Couldn't have said it better myself. Now u have me looking forward 2 the Jolie Mark I!
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