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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: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 02 2019, @03:56PM
Big lips, watermelon.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 02 2019, @04:28PM (13 children)
Good lord, have you seen how most people drive and you want to add another dimension to it? No.
Could I have decent high-speed public transport instead?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 02 2019, @04:41PM (12 children)
What makes you think that people would be "driving" them rather than software? Heard of autopilot (the real one)?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Touché) by stretch611 on Wednesday January 02 2019, @05:37PM (8 children)
Good lord, have you seen how poorly most software is written and you want to add another dimension to it? No.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday January 02 2019, @05:58PM (6 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avionics_software [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Wednesday January 02 2019, @07:47PM (1 child)
Really, you want to try and use facts to dispute my joke... This is the internet after all. It should be a troll rage or nothing. =)
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 02 2019, @08:08PM
Joek? Don't quit your day job.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Wednesday January 02 2019, @07:47PM
Now where's the software that runs air traffic control?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 03 2019, @01:30AM (2 children)
Newsflash: I developed "avionics software" for a small drone company - they had the most horrible non-redundant safety culture I have encountered anywhere, with the possible exception of the video security company I worked for after them. Even so, we only ever lost one plane and, no, it wasn't their only plane and it didn't stop operations, but it did encourage them to not fly without trackers onboard anymore - did I mention a really shoddy safety culture?. Compare that record with the military drones that go astray seemingly all the time in the news - seems like they're not much better.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday January 03 2019, @02:05AM (1 child)
Every new car, airliner, train, etc. is controlled by software to some extent. Will shoddy software cause more deaths than human error? We'll see.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 03 2019, @03:15AM
CSX & Amtrak have been wetting their pants over fully relinquishing train switching control to software for decades. I don't think they're 100% there yet.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 02 2019, @06:34PM
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(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Wednesday January 02 2019, @08:08PM (2 children)
The real "autopilot" isn't much better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airline_flights_that_required_gliding [wikipedia.org]
"14 August 2005
Helios Airways Flight 522
Boeing 737-31S
Grammatiko, Greece
Flight crew incapacitation due to wrong setup of pressurization system
After takeoff from Larnaca, Cyprus, the flight crew continued ascent despite a cabin pressurization warning, and all on board, save for one flight attendant who attempted to control the aircraft, were eventually incapacitated by lack of oxygen. The auto pilot flew the aircraft to Athens, Greece and entered a holding pattern until both engines flamed out due to fuel exhaustion. Following this, the aircraft descended in a gliding spiral until it struck a hill in Grammatiko, killing all on board. "
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday January 03 2019, @02:21AM (1 child)
An interesting example you've given. While autopilot certainly did not save the day (it only did what it was designed to do), several human errors happened first:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522 [wikipedia.org]
It seems that the lesson to be learned is that more automation is needed, not less.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 03 2019, @03:19AM
If autopilots were more trusted, they are already capable of landing at a destination - not so great at conversing with ATC, but if you've only got one full autopilot plane in the sky at a time the human pilots can give it a wide berth while it gets the passengers back on the ground safely.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Kilo110 on Wednesday January 02 2019, @04:30PM (1 child)
Back to the future 2 took place in 2015.
No flying cars. No mr fusion. No hoverboards.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 02 2019, @07:53PM
That's the problem with hoverboards and flying cars in the movies, they don't really happen at any specific date, they're always 30+ years in the future. See also: The Jetsons, The Fifth Element, Total Recall, and all those long time ago in a galaxy so far far away that its light won't reach us for many years movies.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 02 2019, @04:30PM (6 children)
The rich have personal jets, the cops of helicopters. Those were the people who had flying cars in the movie.
You're one of those downtrodden wretches barely scraping out a living underneath the hideous corporate pyramid.
What I want is the robot that chokes CEOs to death. Give me that.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 02 2019, @04:35PM (3 children)
The trouble with that is that if you choke the CEO, then according to the corporate succession plan control will pass to the CFO, COO, CSO, etc, then to the directors, then to the VPs, and then to various plebs in order of seniority. Which means that it's not much different from "Hey sexy mama, wanna kill all humans?"
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Touché) by RamiK on Wednesday January 02 2019, @04:43PM
What's your point?
compiling...
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday January 02 2019, @05:07PM
Not really - eventually you run out of people who want the job badly enough to probably die for it. Might not happen until you run out of executives, you might even lose a few workers dedicated to climbing the corporate ladder, but eventually you'll be down to people who would rather work for a living than die. The investors can then decide whether they want to liquidate the company's assets, or restructure into something less hierarchical.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 02 2019, @05:31PM
You don't need to upsell me on the eventual death of the human race. I was already buying, man.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 02 2019, @07:55PM (1 child)
The Fifth Element had poor scum driving flying cabs.
The rich I have met have both private jets (they like the Citation for speed, but also need/usually have something bigger for cargo volume) and helicopters too.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 02 2019, @08:05PM
The fifth element was set in the 2200s. You're jumping the gun on that one.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Spamalope on Wednesday January 02 2019, @04:55PM (1 child)
That Flyer (trying to trade on the Wright brothers zeitgeist? ) looks like it's practical like a jet pack but with the added safety of a surrounding curtain of spinning blades. That way it's not just a danger to yourself! Is it a boat because over-land use was banned?
I don't see swash plates on the blades, so you can't auto-rotate for a power out landing. Hopefully they've at least programmed single and multi-engine out flying/landing modes and some way to detect and land with broken blades. In theory one of those chute recovery things would be neat, but I don't see how you'd use one without the shrouds getting into the props. (though very careful programming might work, but you'd need altitude and this doesn't seem like it'd be used high up)
From arms length it seems like the attraction of this sort of design is that it's easy to do fly-by-wire to automate stability and nobody expects manual fail safes.
If you made a fly-by-wire controlled electric helicopter and then added lots of automated stability systems to it I think you'd have something more usable. A much bigger rotor disk for power efficiency, that's above you for inherit stability and that can auto-rotate for a power out landing for starters. It might be easier to automate flying one of those than a car as you don't have idiot humans to worry about. You could do park and ride service air taxi service. Say in New York, from rooftop helipads to helipad with charging station at the airport for quick lifestyles of the rich an famous getaways. (assuming it'd need to be that to have an audience that'll gladly pay)
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday January 02 2019, @06:02PM
Yeah, I much prefer the Blackfly octo-rotor "biplane", for both engine-out safety and aesthetics. Though the bit about staring up at the sky when hovering would take some getting used to. Grandma's not going to be carrying a pot of stew on her lap in that sucker.
I would think though that engine-out scenarios would also be a LOT less likely in an electric aircraft - a motor generally has only have one primary moving part instead of dozens, and no liquids, lubricants, pressure seals, etc. An engine-out scenario is pretty much limited to a broken power cable or frozen bearing, both of which should be easily caught in routine maintenance. Even a damaged cooling system will only limit the output rather than eliminating it, and an efficient electric motor only needs to shed a few percent of the shaft power as heat, rather than more than 100%, as is normal for ICEs (even rocket engines are only about 60% efficient and they're leading the pack, most are firmly below 50%) And if the risk of an event occurring in the first place is substantially lower, you can get away with much less robust risk mitigation while still achieving the same overall risk profile.
Of course electricity does nothing for propellor-out scenarios - but how common are those, exactly? And how many rotary-wing aircraft can handle even one wing being severely damaged? After all, a responsible risk mitigation strategy has to be based on the understanding that perfect safety is unachievable, and then start mitigating the risks with the highest risk to mitigation cost ratio until either adequate safety is achieved, or the expense becomes so great that the product isn't viable.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 02 2019, @05:14PM
were up your ass, you would know where they were
(Score: 4, Funny) by Hartree on Wednesday January 02 2019, @05:24PM (2 children)
Where's my personal replicant geisha that looks like Daryl Hannah?
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 02 2019, @07:59PM
These days, I think there are MILF websites where you can meet all sorts of women who look more or less like Darryl Hannah looks, today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papa_(2018_film)#/media/File:Movie_poster_of_Papa,_2018_film.jpg [wikipedia.org]
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 02 2019, @09:10PM
This here's my brother, Daryl, and this's my other brother Daryl . . .
(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.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Wednesday January 02 2019, @07:38PM (1 child)
Clickbait nonsense article. You could say this about anything.
In 1996 NASA said we should be able to land people on Mars in 2018. That didn't happen.
Nostradamus allegedly predicted another great world war for 2018. That also arguably didn't happen.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 03 2019, @01:38AM
Malthus predicted overpopulation and starvation, he did miss the event timing by a few centuries, but I have yet to see him proven wrong.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 02 2019, @08:10PM (1 child)
Movie makers pick those ideas because they make for fun movies, not because they are likely or practical. Instead of 2D car chases, you have 3D chases.
By some accounts, Gene Roddenberry added the transporter to the Trek TV series because they couldn't finish the shuttle-craft props & effects in time. Otherwise, we'd maybe see more shuttle-craft drama.
(Score: 2) by SunTzuWarmaster on Wednesday January 02 2019, @08:59PM
(Score: 5, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 02 2019, @08:16PM (1 child)
I dunno, we haven't missed blade runner by all that much. We have a world ruled by mega-corporations. We have huge cities squirming with endless poor. We have flying cars, in part, except few people own them yet. We have cloning, though it isn't widespread yet. We have synthetic biology, though only in the lab as yet. We have self-driving cars and the beginnings of AI. And most importantly we have sex bots. Warm, cuddly, cooing sex bots.
Or so i read.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 02 2019, @09:29PM
Just wait till his wife reads that one. No matter how you look at it he's going to the dog house!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 02 2019, @10:10PM
Not so much highlighted in the movie but central in the book:
The complete decimation of earth's wildlife such that finding even a spider was worth treasuring and most pets are not real but robotic.
Score: partly accurate, we are well on our way
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday January 02 2019, @10:48PM (1 child)
I should watch the movie again, but from memory the flying car aspect of the movie was soft sci fi, wasn't it? The fact that cars fly had no impact on the story that would have changed from 2-D cars.
I'm not saying the whole movie was soft sci fi, just saying the minor scenery choice of "WTF, its sci fi, lets put in a flying car" had no impact on the story and thus was typical soft sci fi, meaningless.
Its like trying to determine the moral and ethical boundaries of what it means the James Kirk had sex with green skinned chix instead of violet skinned chix because postmodernist marxism or WTF, it doesn't really mean anything at all even in the context of the movie...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 03 2019, @01:40AM
ILM even threw in a Millennium Falcon cameo beside the flying cars...
It was a cinematic thing that showed off the city, giant buildings, weather change, flare stacks, etc. but other than that environmental expose' it wasn't a big plot point.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday January 02 2019, @10:56PM (1 child)
You can take a "flying car" from JFK to downtown Manhattan and its not really that expensive and certainly convenient. Last time I went to NYC I considered it and then crazy me I took Amtrak to Penn Station instead.
From memory its $50 in a taxi or $200 in a helo, and the helo is frankly more comfortable faster and cleaner. Supposedly takes more than an hour if you're stuck in traffic in a taxi, but the helo takes about ten minutes total.
Arguably its more mental effort to fly from the midwest to Manhattan than it is to merely jump on a train in Chicago, eat a nice steak dinner, have a quiet night in front of my laptop, wake up in NYC a couple blocks from the meeting. The train cost 4x what a plane ticket would cost, even with a helo....
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 03 2019, @01:45AM
Planes have gone mass production and race for the bottom capitalist competition. Amtrak runs as a monopoly curiosity, almost a living museum piece. In the right circumstances, trains should be more efficient than planes, but that would require infrastructure investment that just hasn't happened in the US.
We took the Silver Meteor from Charleston to D.C. - nice ride, except for the 30 minute delay prior to arrival at Union station. Cost less to fly home...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end