[...] A day or two ago I happened across the online announcement of a wonderful new technological device that made me think, “That’s it. We’re finally in the future.” And then, almost as if the words were spoken aloud, I heard the voice of my friend (and excellent Science Fiction author) Chris Roberson in my head, scolding me with his oft-repeated, always cranky, litany: “It’s not the future until we have jetpacks and flying cars. They promised us jetpacks and flying cars! Where are they?” And I realized there’s no escaping this question, either from Chris or any of a myriad other sources. The future isn’t allowed to be here until we have our jetpacks and flying cars. And that’s just the minimum. Space stations, moon cities and personal household robots are also to be desired for a fully functioning future.
I pondered this dilemma. On the one hand we have this wonderful new device (the exact nature of the device isn’t important, but for the record it’s a full tabletop sized flat computer screen you can play Dungeons & Dragons on, just like they did in the Legion of Superheroes — which is definitely in the future, so far in fact that jetpacks and flying cars are already outmoded, having been replaced by Flight Rings), and we’re blessed (and/or cursed) with so many other technological wonders hardly even imagined by those who designed our future so long ago, but we don’t have the jetpacks and the flying cars. They’re our duel required tickets to the future, without which we simply aren’t allowed to enter. Lacking those, we’re confined to an eternal and frustrating now, no matter how exciting and interesting our now might become.
I pondered, and then despaired when a terrible realization hit me. We are in the future, Chris. We got our jetpacks and flying cars. We’ve had them for years. Whoever the ‘they’ are that promised us those things, they kept their promise. They delivered. Look at this:
The Moller M400 flying car. Coming soon to an abandoned warehouse near you.
It’s the Moller M400 Skycar. They built it and it works, designed to sell for something in the neighborhood of $90k when and if it ever goes on sale (I’ll predict right now that it won’t). They also have the M200G Volantor — a saucer shaped vehicle that flies ten feet above the earth at 50 mph.
These were debuted a few years ago, and they weren’t the first personal flying cars, and saucers, and jetpacks. Not by a long shot. They’ve been building them almost for as long as you and I have been alive.
So what’s the problem then. Where are they? Why haven’t we got one in every garage in the good old US of A? That’s the depressing part, my friend. We don’t have them, not because there isn’t (or wasn’t) any entrepreneur willing to make them available. We don’t have them because we rejected them. We collectively said, and continue to say, “No thanks.”
And why is that?
Because they’re not safe.
Dr. Paul Moller at the controls of the M200 X prototype of his flying car.
Sure, they’re safer than the first airplanes were in their infancy, even safer than modern airplanes are now, when not operated by a highly-trained pilot. They may even be safer than the first ground-confined motor cars. But airplanes and motor cars were invented and introduced to the public in a more adventurous age. Here’s the thing: we want more safety now than we did then. We expect it. Hell, we demand it. If cars and airplanes were introduced for the first time today I’ve no doubt that a vast hue and cry would go up about how dangerous they are. They’d never get government approval. They’d never be able to jump through all of the regulatory hoops any new product has to overcome today. The problem with jetpacks and flying cars is that they aren’t already 100% safe to all potential users. They don’t get, and never will get, the time to develop and perfect that we’ve given our airplanes and ground cars. We have our jetpacks and flying cars and we simply aren’t going to use them. [Continued]
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