A Future with Flying cars and Teleportation

             A Future with Flying cars and Teleportation 

We know technically it is possible for a car to fly but is it possible to paint a picture for us of what a world with flying cars will actually look like. Consider that an ordinary car whose engine fails just slides over to the side of the road waiting for help, a flying car whose engine fails is a lethal projectile and for whoever happens to be underneath it. so it would be a disaster for the whole concept of this car. so here is the thing we already do have the flying cars they are called helicopters, now think of it as flying car but it just lifts up goes wherever it wants to and lands, where it wants to provided there, is space. Not many people know this I don't think that Langley Air force space was a pioneer in research on heavier air flight and it was working right up to the late 1800s to the early 1900s and what was available to them was a significant producer of energy. He was thinking we have got a steam engine so let us make an advanced steam engine that can produce enough power to fly. So he failed in all his attempts. He showed that you cant make a flying steam engine because the size of the engine you need to get the power you need weighs too much to actually lift the engine in the air. The physics and the engineering of that didn't work out. What helped is the internal combustion engine which was smaller and had much less weight for the power that it was generating. Comparing that what does a steam engine needed a fire and a cauldron and you need water and it got steam and dirt and turbine all of that energy it produces is not sufficient to lift it off the ground. So internal combustion engines helped but by then we had the wright brothers and they were clever and they did it in 1903. My point about Langley is we can elevate something as heavy as a car if we are allowed to do that. But the sound it will produce like a helicopter can be terrible to handle because that's the thrust necessary to lift the weight of something like a car is. So a helicopter is a flying car and we have all seen the video of drone cars. they are larger and they have got four blades but is it carrying your whole family? no. It is like one person in it. But we can also say maybe not today but in the future, an electric engine can be the future as they are small enough and powerful. the real bottleneck here is battery tech. as batteries are heavy they come to us from the 19th century so here we are in the 21st century. So there is this basic question why do we want an electric car basically? How is it the New York City can move billion people a year in mass transit because we are moving in a third dimension, we have underground flying cars and they are the subway? the subway moves in the same direction as the traffic does except in a third dimension underground. So flying cars are nothing more than the access to the third dimension in your movement and we kind of already have that explicitly in the design of our transportation systems and you don't need to be in full 3 dimensions if you don't have to be in three dimensions that's why there is not a continuous overpass over you, you just need an overpass where that other road is. So flying car is access to higher dimensions. 

Even If in theory, we solve the piloting difficulty issue with automatically flying cars then we solve the noise issue with these incredibly efficient propellers that have amazing energy density in these future batteries and we solve every logistical physical problem it still isn't necessary to have flying cars. So where did that obsession came from? I think we always wanted to go faster and faster and what happens we go from propeller airplanes to jet airplanes and in some way their we break the sound barrier and then we have rockets to go to the moon. So the idea that in the future we would be moving faster and faster to get to our destination was built into the fabric of our understanding of the future that we were approaching. And one of the things we got wrong was the expectation that our access to energy would continue to ascend in lockstep with access to our imagination. you take a look in the 2001 space oddessy the ship that went to Jupiter with all energy. Energy is expensive, it is hard to produce, and it is hard to transport to bring it where you want it. all of these pose challenges and no one saw the rise of information technology. So now I don't have to go from A to B to bring information I can send it and so need to travel fast to be somewhere that got little reduced but also if have access to information technologies I can get on an airplane today that's flying slower then the airplanes of '90s. So the urge to go fast is probably faded in the face of other amenities that we have access to by traveling slowly. flying cars are not such a great logistical idea. Now talking about hoverboards, that electrically driven skateboard called hoverboards. The hoverboard stays within 6 inches of the ground. it quite convenient than walking at twice the speed. There are still people thinking about innovative ways of transportation. There is a newer type of actual teleportation being worked on, research called quantum teleportation. With quantum physics, there is something called tunneling which is a fascinating fact. So if you think of a hill sliding down then it gets to the bottom of it and vice versa it will be like a roller-coaster.