Submitted via IRC for Bytram
It's 2019, the year Blade Runner takes place: I can has flying cars?
Welcome to 2019, the year in which Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi film masterpiece Blade Runner is set. And as predicted in this loose adaptation of a 1968 Philip K. Dick story, we have flying cars.
The reason you don't have a flying car was explained by author William Gibson, who famously observed, more or less, "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
If you're Sebastian Thrun, you've already flown in Kitty Hawk's Flyer, which is more flying boat than flying car. If you're not, chances are you will have to wait a bit longer to live your sci-fi noir transport fantasy.
Topics include flying cars, artificial pets, voice driven photo enhancement, the Voight-Kampff machine, ad-festooned airships, space colonies, artificial organs and replicants.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday January 02 2019, @05:46PM (3 children)
Predicting the future is quite hard enough, but a lot of SF isn't even trying to do that, not really. They're trying to warn everyone, and to do it, they get flashy and dramatic. And so you get famously dystopian novels and movies such as 1984, Minority Report, Terminator, War of the Worlds and other hostile aliens coming to Earth, etc.
Flying cars are one of those flashy things that SF authors love, and usually get wrong. Most imagine it as a mechanical device, rigid much like our current cars and planes. It's basically "mech punk", which is much like steampunk. See the Jetsons cartoon for a silly example. Birds are the real masters of flight, much better at it than our clumsy machines. Our flight technology is basically overcoming our lack of finesse with sheer brute force, lots of it. What keeps our current tech mostly grounded is lack of power. If we had nuclear power in small battery sized packs, we could do a lot more flying than we do currently. And that's the way that most SF flying cars are imagined. They're the V22, or a multirotor, or a mysterious anti-gravity device, with a nuclear power source. What is far more likely is that we will get a lot better at flying, our devices will evolve from the rigid, straight mechanical stuff of today to much more flexible and articulate machinery, with rudimentary AI brains to control it, much like the spinal nerves in many animals. When we rival the birds for delicacy and efficiency, then we will get our flying cars.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday January 02 2019, @08:11PM
I don't know that "warn" is the right word. Some of it is surely trying to warn or inspire, but most is just trying to tell a fun story set in an imagined future - science flavored plausible fantasy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 02 2019, @09:47PM
Dystopian novels abound, and seem to come true eventually. Can any of y'all recommend books that have an optimistic foretelling of the future?
k thx
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 03 2019, @01:35AM
The problem with flying elegantly like birds is that our fat asses already weigh much more than the largest birds out there, and any elegant (ornithopter like?) flying machine has to hoist one or more of our keisters into the sky with it.
If hollow bones, feathers and muscles scaled to 1000 lbs, there's already be elephant birds out there somewhere.
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