Another flying car...

For the second time this year, I have watched the maiden flight of an aircraft designed to be an air taxi.  The first was funded by the nation of Dubai.  The second was built by a private company in Germany.  To many people, the visions of writers from the 20th century are finally becoming reality.

I do not believe those visions ever left our minds.  Many technologies were developed in the 20th century that are only now cost effective.  We tend to think that the time between prototype and production run is minimal or negligible.  This has never been the case.

In many cases, the prototypes had flaws that were of great concern.  Personal "jet packs" were constructed and tested in the 1950's.  They had flight times measured in seconds.  We did not simply abandon this technology though.  We still lack an efficient fuel source in this case.  There is another issue which some people ignore but is critical.  These devices require training to use.  Imagine if you left one in your garage and a child tried to operate it.  Mass distribution of jet or rocket engines raises a great many safety concerns, and it should.  Flying cars have a similar flaw.  "Joyriding" in your parent's car can be dangerous.  "Joyriding" is your parent's aircraft is dangerous.  In the case of consumer aircraft, we again had an issue with power sources until recently.  And again, safety is a concern.  I do not believe the average driver is capable of commuting in an aircraft.  Aircraft travel is limited and regulated in ways that do not seem possible if even 1% of the population were pilots.  If, however, the aircraft are autonomous, this becomes plausible.

In some cases, the original calculations were just wrong.  If Einstein's original calculations had been used during experimentation, he would have been proven wrong.  The revised calculations were proven via experimentation in 1919.  The Alcubierre drive requires an energy source that is unfeasible, only later work by Harold White made us consider the possibility again.

There are interim steps that allow the unimaginable to become reality.  Regardless of resources, ENIAC would have never reached the performance levels available to anyone reading this.  The transistor and the integrated circuit were necessary inventions in this process and then those inventions needed to be improved upon.  Again, energy sources needed to improve.  They have.

We are not now reaping the benefits of these things because of some monumental event.  We are reaping the benefits of these things because of what we consider gradual improvement.  The span of 20 or 60 years is actually the blink of an eye, but the 20th century prepared us for leaps and bounds.  In truth, those leaps and bounds took years.  The Saturn V was not built in 1947 or 1952.

The lithium-ion battery was not instantly "better" than its cousins.  The next battery technology will not see widespread consumer use in a week or a year.  The quantum computer exists but it will take many years for it to replace "traditional" supercomputers, and may never be used by most people.

So, yes, we have flying cars.  We have flying cars because we had VTOL aircraft, quadrotors, microprocessors, and several generations of jet engines.  We we will have AI in the next 20 years, because we had the Intel 4004, Deep Blue, and currently have IBM's Watson and a host of other systems.  We will have androids and machines that pass all variations of the Turing test because of the current work in robotics.  We will travel to Mars during the 21st century because we have learned much since the 1960's.  We may never have replicators, but we do have 3-D printers that fit on desktops and are available to consumers.  We have not created a polymer with a higher tensile strength than spider silk, but we have created graphene, superconductors, and steel alloys that could easily be called "ultrasteel" if desired.

"The future" didn't just show up in 1955.  It took quite a bit of work to be designed, modeled, tested, and forged.  We have seen many of he visions crafted in the 20th become reality.  We will see many more, we may just not meet the original schedule.