"So this is a new year," Calvin, of Bill Watterson's wonderful, but sadly retired, comic series Calvin and Hobbes, grumbles discontentedly, walking through the snow. "Some future this is! Where are the jet packs, and the flying cars, and the Moon colonies?"
Where, indeed? I've rambled at length about the possibilities for future lunar colonies, so I won't rant about that here. But, flying cars? A brand-new topic, to be launched into with the utmost gusto!
Paul Moller's grueling, thirty-year effort appears to be the only hope for flying cars in the near future (Moller has termed a Vertical Take Off and Landing (VTOL) personal flying vehicle a 'volantor'), and, despite enormous skepticism and serious engineering challenges, has actually managed to get a hovering prototype off the ground. It's an impressive achievement, and Moller's goal post is a flying car that can seat four people, run off regular unleaded gasoline (or possibly fuel cells, depending on how that development has progressed by the time Moller's vehicles get to the assembly line), get 20-odd miles per gallon, go in excess of 400 miles per hour, be VTOL (of course), and be simple enough to operate that Joe Six-pack could drive one. The restless future beckons, with that edgy, hopeful uncertainty that stamps 'futurist geek' in three-inch letters on my forehead. Who would say no to such a revolutionary new technology?
Lots of people, as it turns out. Deeply religious people who have a knee-jerk distrust toward any remarkable new technology. Fashionable intellectuals deploring a glaring new example of humanity's excesses. Environmentalists making pious declarations about the danger to the natural world, about the aesthetic catastrophe it would bring to our society. People worried about safety, about licensing requirements, about light and sound pollution. And while some of these things are legitimate concerns, they are not, as they are often purported to be, objections so fundamental as to call for the cessation of vehicle development.
So, which worries are valid? Religious people and intellectuals, as mentioned above, are basically having a Yuck Reaction, bemoaning the seductive evils of that sinister, creeping devil, consumerism. The intellectuals (aside from the irritating and generally nonsensical neo-Luddites) mentioned here do not usually present themselves as being anti-progress, but their actions are anti-progress in effect because what they end up saying is, We're for progress, so long as it occurs precisely as we'd like it to. Since it doesn't (and won't, and would almost always involve coercion of varying degrees of nastiness if it did), they're obstinately opposed to it, and tend to support their position with a reeking stew of ad hominems, reckless fearmongering, and increasingly shrill appeals to the emotions of the public. The same is actually true of the neo-Luddites, the difference being that they're proudly and quite openly anti-progress. But I digress; the point is that these aren't substantive objections.
Environmental concerns are certainly substantive on their face, but I'm not sure how they relate to flying cars specifically. If Moller's able to attain the fuel efficiency that he says he can, they will actually be a marked improvement over the numerous (innumerable?) gas-guzzling SUVs on the road today. Sure, a Civic might get an additional 10 or 15 miles per gallon, but only on the freeway, and for a flying car, the entire trip would be the equivalent of a freeway, which means that there would be no more gas-consuming idling at a stoplight, no more gas-consuming stop-and-go, and a lot less acceleration from 0 to x; traveling at a constant velocity consumes less fuel than constantly accelerating and decelerating. Not to mention that when fuel cells become practical, this whole debate loses a lot of its relevance (efficiency would still matter, of course, because the energy to electrolyze water to get hydrogen fuel needs to come from somewhere, but large-scale power generation is something like 90% more efficient than an internal combustion engine). Another point to bear in mind is that in the long run, if flying cars replaced ground cars entirely, roads become optional, which is good because roads take a considerable amount of resources to build and maintain, and because they're built on the ground, their construction involves paving over natural habitats, which could be entirely avoided if everyone drove flying cars.
Which leads into the next valid concern: safety. There are two separate concerns here: what would the licensing requirements be, and what kind of 'skyway' system would be used in place of roads? I suspect there will be two types of license available: an 'autopilot' license and a 'free-fly' license, and maybe an intermediate. The former would be for people who basically just sit in the car as it flies itself to its destination. Their input and effect on the flight details, aside from setting the destination, would be minimal. The requirements for this sort of license would be loose, probably akin to what is required to receive a driver's license today. (Which, in the U.S. at least, is almost absurdly easy to qualify for.) The latter would be for people who wanted total control over their vehicles, and the licensing requirements would be correspondingly strict, probably just a step below what we require from pilots today. There might also be a third tier for people who wanted the ability to fly in areas without a skyway, which would be essentially a pilot's license, and I would expect that the requirements for this sort of license and a pilot's license would be the same, if not stricter for the air-cars, due to the fact that being VTOL allows them to land anywhere. As to roads, it is clear that having a physical road system in the sky would not be practical (or desirable), so I suspect that virtual 'skyways' will exist, probably present as a glowing set of lines on the pilot's display panel, and will have a specific set of coordinates designated acceptable for a particular trip. Deviating from this set of coordinates would simply be forbidden by the air-car's hardware. The coordinates would be generated by GPS satellites, and a wireless link between the air-car and the GPS will allow the air-car's trail to be tracked and kept on the skyway if the pilot errs.
I would also like to address the concern of aesthetics. I had not initially thought much of this, but my friend and I got into a somewhat heated debate over this. I remarked that 'mere aesthetics' could not be allowed to stand in the way of such a great technological advance, but he objected, saying that whether mere aesthetics trumped 'mere convenience' was simply a subjective judgment call. This is, of course, true to some extent, but I think that a good case can be made that the benefits, in this case, outweigh the negatives. Even if you accept that air-cars flitting across the sky would be ugly (I don't think I do, but for the sake of argument, let's assume), keep in mind that this traffic is a replacement for ground traffic, and skyways do not entail the construction of physical roads, which, in my opinion, actually are ugly. It is true that the traffic would be more visible in the sky than it would be on the ground, but I think that the issue of roads more than off-sets this, especially considering the environmental benefits that would be derived from making roads unnecessary. I also think that describing the benefits of air-cars as 'mere convenience' downplays their potential importance: how different would the twentieth century have been if automobiles had never been built? At the very least, the lack of fast, easy, autonomous personal transportation would have made our personal lives much less dynamic, not to mention the economic significance of automobiles. It is easy to forget that convenience is in many ways equivalent to efficiency.
thus ranteth Pericles v. 2.0 at 7:16 PM | Permalink |
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