Where are the flying cars?

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the whole concept of flying cars is up in the air at the moment.

In some places, it has taken wing.

ruveyn

But at the moment, there are just not enough flux capacitors available for getting the plan off the ground.

if wings are taken, then that is why the idea never took off.

This concept is over my head.

We don't have flying cars for the simple reason that we don't need them. Same goes for jet-packs.
Check out the most recent edition of Wired Magazine: "The Future That Wasn't".

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8W6_0UcQWA[/youtube]

Sadly - I believe that the only way that some of the things visionaries/visual-spatial thinkers (processors) predicted (created/invented/designed)
will not come about until the 'mindless masses' or one very rich 'mindless one' decides it would be a great idea and they NEED one NOW.

As for the flying of one my thoughts are -

If an individual can learn to fly a plane with a simulator
and
If children can use mind control to play video games
then
Adults should be able to use mind control to fly cars

DarthMetaKnight are you a visual-spatial processor?
If you are, then you should be able to 'see' why things like this take soo long to happen. Most 'think' in words and need clear step by step instructions.

For me, as a visual-spatial processing person, it is like I are in a room filled with people, and we all decide we are going out,
I say I am ready to go now, all the others say they only need a few minutes.


Hours, days, weeks, months, and even years, pass by and I feel like I am still waiting at the door for everyone to be ready.
Occasionally one will catch up, but we cannot leave, until everyone is ready.


Some people complain about another person taking two or 3 hours to get ready, because it only takes them 10 to 15 minutes.

I have left people behind when I have said I am leaving in 30 minutes, ready or not and they are not ready.
That is 3x longer then it takes me to get ready. It is more then I get to translate 'my language' into auditory-sequential thinking 'language'
So if I have to translate 'languages' in 1.5x, they should be able to dress themselves in 3x what it takes me.
If they can't, well to bad, I am not waiting around.

Unfortunate, I can't do it with everything.

Does that work for your 'idea' of the term 'mindless masses'?

We can't even handle a 2D traffic grid, we keep crashing in to eachother. How would we go in 3D?

I think the flying cars are in the same place as the wooden boats with hundreds of birds tied to them that we don't fly to the moon with.

Just because something can be imagined doesn't mean it can be made, and just because something can be made doesn't mean it would be a good idea to make it.

Our current, landbound, relatively slow speed cars kill enormous numbers of people each year. Imagine if drunk drivers weren't restricted to roads, and could fall out of the sky into your living room. At 200 miles per hour. With a full tank of gas.

welp, maybe if we get antigravity...

Watching the idiots on the road in 4 directions is enough, without having to watch all 6...

More room to dodge in 3 D.

The sky is really rather empty except near terminal control areas (regions of the sky where traffic is stacked to await landing).

ruveyn

This topic reminds me of two things:

The comic book Doktor Sleepless where one theme is a near-future society where they have more technology than we do but still don't have "THAT future" and graffiti starts popping up over the city of "Where's my flying car?" and "Where's my f*****g jet pack?".

Also reminds me of the They Might Be Giants song with pretty much the exact same theme. The song is titled "The World Before Later On."

if flying cars were in operation, and used as a viable traffic alternative, then the skies would be crowded like the roads are with vehicles.
land cars must follow a route that is predetermined by the available roadways, and there is only 2 dimensions necessary for a driver to pay attention to. land cars know they are not going to be t-boned if they are driving on a street between intersections (unless someone backs out of their driveway with ill consideration)..
sky cars have 3 dimensions of necessity for vigilant driver attention, and they would travel fast if they used a wing assembly to maintain their flight. if they did not use wings, then they would have to have a hover ability which is outrageously energy hungry.

i think that it would not be possible for hundreds of thousands of sky cars to fly where they wanted with a human pilot.

there would have to be skylanes that were predetermined, and a human could not see those lanes as they are only inferential, so they would have to refer to a manual the whole time that they were driving whilst being hyper vigilant as to possible incursions into their trajectory. humans could not drive in 3D so it would have to be governed by a computer.

so it would only be possible with computer guidance and control via GPS determinants of location meshed with the skylane allocation of the aerial grid that is designed for traffic flow in 3d.

since the sky car has momentum, then it will behave differently given it's power with whatever weight it has on board. if the navigational and reactive computer sees a need for deflection from a particular vector due to nearby occupation of a vector, then it will apply a certain amount of reactive thrust to shift the vehicle into a different vector, that must be computed to be vacant at the same time.

the amount of reactive thrust must be attenuated by contingent calculations of the on board mass, and also the atmospheric air pressure and wind direction.

if this is to be the case then there must be at least 1 mile of separation between vehicles to ensure that the conglomeration of erroneous data that is processed will have little likelyhood of causing an accident.

and so if there is 1 mile between every skycar, then there can not be a large volume of them that is competitive with the number of landcars that can be driven by automatons (people) on the simple 2 dimensional roads of today.


i have had 2 drinks because someone asked me to and i both can not think well enough to post a good reply, and i can not think well enough to prevent myself from hitting submit.

Somebody did build a flying 1971 Ford Pinto in 1973 but the wings came off and it fell out of the sky and crashed into the ground.

We do have flying cars. They're called airplanes.