Flying cars are real. They do exist. You can actually buy one, for anywhere from $200,00 to about $1.7 million. Of course, for $1.7 million, you could buy two Lamborghinis, a Mclaren, A Tesla, a big pick-up, and a Cessna for the flying part, which makes more sense.
Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear
Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear
Harrison Ford's character is flying in one at the beginning of the Blade Runner trailer. George Jetson had a flying car in the Jetsons cartoon, that folded up into a briefcase. I saw them repeatedly in Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines, in the 1970's, when I was a kid. Those magazines made it sound like we would all have flying cars by the year 2000. Bruce Willis had the classic, movie-type flying car design, while playing futuristic a taxi driver in The Fifth Element, in futuristic New York City. Many futuristic movies, from some Star Wars films on down the list, have had flying cars in them.
It's 2019 as I write this, we're in "the future" Generation X kids, like me, saw predicted in books, TV shows, and movies, as kids and teenagers. But we don't see flying cars buzzing above the traffic on the freeways, or whizzing through our skyscrapers like in Blade Runner. While we're at it, there are no human colonies on the moon, also widely expected by many for our time period by people 30 or 40 years ago. There are no human colonies on Mars. We can't go to a hotel on the moon for the weekend. There are no bionic men or women who can run 50 miles per hour, or run 80.4 kmph in other countries. Scotty, from the original Star Trek Enterprise, can't beam us up to an orbiting starship. None of us has a hovering land speeder like young Luke Skywalker. None of us have a fully functioning Mach 5 like Speed Racer, or a giant robot to fly us around like Johnny Sako. Most of all, we haven't had a worldwide nuclear apocalypse that allows a few of us to wander the desert, building deadly rat rods, stealing gas, and partying. OK, our deserts are full of wandering tweekers and crackheads who pretty much do just that, but it's just not the same as Mad Max in Road Warrior.
As I looked through all of these movie trailers below, to refresh my memory about the "futures" that 20th century novelists, TV, and film writers predicted, one thing became glaringly obvious. Those intelligent, motivated, well meaning writers of the past got "the future" almost completely wrong. Take a look for yourself, these are the movie trailers and TV shows I looked at:
Metropolis (1927),
1984 (1956)
The Time Machine (1960)
The Jetsons TV cartoon (1962-63)
Lost in Space TV show clip (1965)
Farenheit 451 (1966)
Star Trek- original TV show (1966)
Planet of the Apes (1968)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Soylent Green (1973)
The Six Million Dollar Man TV show (1973-78)
Rollerball (1975)
A Boy and His Dog (1975)
Logan's Run (1976)
Logan's Run TV show intro (1977-78)
Damnation Alley (1977)
Mad Max (1979)
Escape From New York (1981)
Mad Max 2: Road Warrior (1981)
Blade Runner (1982)
The Terminator (1984)
1984 (remake- 1984)
Apple Macintosh "1984" commercial (1984)
Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
Brazil (1985)
Robocop (1987)
Judge Dredd (1995)
Tank Girl (1995- My personal favorite of all of these)
Gattaca (1997)
The Fifth Element (1997- My second favorite)
The Matrix Trailer (1999)
Minority Report (2002)
Aeon Flux (2005)
V for Vendetta (2005)
The Hunger Games (2012)
Alita: Battle Angel (2019)
The weird thing about this look at "the future" is that flying cars actually do exist. There have been many functional flying cars, for nearly 100 years now. As crazy as it sounds, Charles Lindbergh actually piloted one once, about 80 years ago. The Moller Sky Car is the closest functional, real world, flying car to the ones we've seen in so many movies, and read about in sci-fi books. The Moller Sky Car never went into production, for business financing reasons. You can see one hovering in the video at the top of this blog post. The Terrafugia Transition, the newest flying car, may go on sale this year. Flying cars sounded amazing in science fiction stories, they look cool in movies, and they actually exist in real life. But we don't all have flying cars, like those 1970's magazines I read predicted. They just didn't take off in the real world (pun intended), and become widespread.
I was born in 1966, so my first memories are from around 1971, a time when the Apollo space program was sending men to the moon. That period of the early 1970's, with repeated manned missions to the moon actually happening, was an exciting time of looking forward to the future. A lot of people then, in my formative years as a little kid, thought we would have colonies on the moon and Mars in 30 or 40 years, which would be the years from 2000-2010. Actual, intelligent adults then actually thought we would be able to take a week's vacation on the moon by now. A lot of really smart people then believed that we would be sending people on long term space voyages to other star systems by now.
Yet us humans haven't even been back to the moon in the 48 years since (officially, anyhow). We haven't sent people to Mars. There is a dummy human in a Telsa car heading to the asteroid belt, though, so that's something. We do have really cool, unmanned rovers wandering slowly around Mars, explained here, which is cool and informative. We can't go for a weekend in space as average individuals, which many smart, 1970's era people, thought might be possible by now.
Yet, like the flying cars, space tourism actually does exist. I actually met one man in the 1990's who went on to become a space tourist. Guy Laliberte', co-founder of Cirque Du Soleil, paid $20 million to go up in a Russian rocket, and spend a week on the International Space Station as a tourist. Here's actual footage of Guy and the crew in space. He's the bald guy with the red clown nose. He's French Canadian, so he's speaking French to his daughter in the clip. He's one of a very small group of actual space tourists alive in today's world.
A clown in space. Street performing accordion player, stilt walker, and fire breather. World traveler. New wave circus founder. Entrepreneur, philanthropist, high stakes poker player, and space tourist, Guy Laliberte'. He's one interesting character. I'm a little bummed I had to go to RT, the Russian propaganda channel, for this clip, but that's life.
Closer to home, for me, anyhow, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic plans to start taking people, space tourists, to the edge of space, for a bargain price compared to what Guy paid. It was supposed to be possible this year, in 2019. But years of technical delays have set the program back. The first actual space tourists on Virgin Galactic are tentatively scheduled to fly next year, in 2020, if things go well. Their base of operations is in the Mojave desert, north of L.A., about an hour from where I'm sitting now. Here's a clip of a Space Ship Two flight with crew members from early 2019. Space tourism is real, like the flying cars. But, again, it's nothing like what people imagined would be possible by now, back in the 1970's days of the Apollo missions.
Some of the amazing ideas, dreamed up by futuristic writers and film makers of the 20th century, have actually come true. If you're really rich. But they didn't become popular, like so many people predicted. Why did smart people 40-50-60 years ago predict the future so poorly? Why didn't they get more things right? What makes predicting the future so hard? That's the question I'm exploring here. Then I'll explain what kind of future I see emerging in the next ten or 20 years, and how and why I came to these conclusions.
Instead of flying cars and land speeders, we got GPS located and tracked, rental electric scooters, which, I have to admit are pretty freakin' cool to have around. These are super popular in downtown L.A., and in Hollywood, where this group was sitting in late 2019. Photo by Steve Emig
Blogger's note- 8/26/2023- I have not changed any of the wording in any of these posts since I wrote them in 2019-2020. I even left in the typos I originally missed. "Dystopia" makes a lot more sense now, after we've been through 3 1/2 years of chaos. You can read more of my thoughts on my Substack:
No comments:
Post a Comment