Cecil,
In the thread Why were midcentury futurist predictions — like flying cars — so wrong?, you said:
I think the oil thing will be irrelevant, once people wake up and properly harness solar or geothermal power. Now, the personal airstrip thing…that’s another story.
What are your thoughts on that, folks?
I see difficulties implementing a geothermally-powered flying car.
Several simple technical answers, and one sociological.
Most of the stuff you’re talking about was sheer fantasy when it was proposed, and it was assumed the tremendous scientific and engineering advances of the first half of the 20th century would continue - “look at atomic power, it was dismissed as nonsense just a few years ago!” etc. All of the proposals have one or more huge stumbling blocks that time and unlimited advancement haven’t solved, and in the case of flying cars, the energy costs rose as an unforeseen problem.
So the easy part of the answer is that these wonderments were based on breakthroughs that haven’t occurred and are likely to every occur… but that didn’t seem possible then.
The more subtle part of the answer is: population. Many of the propositions did not forsee a tripling of US population and a near-quadrupling of global pop. Vastly more crowded highways and much larger and denser population centers changed the place of flying cars.
Well, duh. The solution is wind power, double duh.
On a practical level not associated with technological development, for the foreseeable future all flying cars (we have had them for years, by the way) must take off and land at actual airports, so the utility of a car that can take off from your driveway will be limited. If a workable VTOL car is invented, they may be able to qualify as helicopters rather than planes, but there you’re back into the tech hurdles again.
Cars falling out of the sky would really, really suck.
Until they are foolproof and evil-intent proof, nobody wants average schmucks airborne.
Cute. But geothermal power (as well as wind power) will produce electricity just like any other power. And the first major article that saw the combination of the automobile and the airplane, “The Car of the Future,” written by C. H. Claudy and appearing in the April 1917 Illustrated World, also made the then-obvious prediction that power would be beamed wirelessly to the craft, a sensible extrapolation of wireless radio and wireless telegraphy.
Nor was it growing population that doomed flying cars. City street were *more *crowded then and moved just as slowly. There were few ways of regulating traffic, horses, streetcars, and pushcarts took up space in roads that were generally not as wide as modern streets, and none of the vehicles could move very fast. Worse, intercity roads were barely passable and there was no highway system of any value. Flying cars made a huge amount of sense because they solved a very real and very pressing problem.
Engineering realities - airplanes need to be light, autos need to be heavy - made the combination of a car and plane extremely difficult to pull off. The need for lengthy take offs and landings also made them impractical, although helicopters were forecast for many years to take over that function with landing pads on top of every city building. Few people were qualified to fly a plane in the first place, much less a helicopter. And the growing population with the growing number of automobiles forced the building of proper roads and interstate highways, making it far easier to move from place to place, again lessening the need for flight. (The growth of the airline industry lags this.)
Flying cars are silly and impractical. Fantasy, though? Maybe the masses using them as everyday transportation is fantasy. But few depictions of them ever showed fleets of flying cars in the sky Jetsons-style. Flying cars are a weird case of retrodiction. People today ask about flying cars because they have weirdly became a symbol of cool things they were promised. But that’s something new. They weren’t even called flying cars back in the day. There were dozens of names, but the generic “flying car” came along very late in the game.
The social stigma of the “carbon footprint”? Now that’s fantasy.
Maybe I should have been clearer. My thought was that we could somehow tap geothermal energy to produce electricity, which then would be stored for future use.
So what I really meant was that we would use solar and geothermal energy to produce electric power for the flying cars.
HA - and after I posted my response, I now see Exapno Mapcase’s response, which essentially said the same thing…
Implicit in my snark, but perhaps too subtle to register, is that an electric flying car has every problem of an electric ground car… multiplied by the battery-life and weight issues. I can’t see anything close to a mainstream EFV until massive breakthroughs in battery technology are made… and we’ve all been waiting on those for decades.
So yes, we can general electricity from geo, wind, solar and hamster farts… but it’s no more going to enable flying cars than maintenance-free paint.
The question, then, becomes why midcentury futurists failed to take that into account.
Powers &8^]
Midcentury futurists never promised any flying cars. The only ones who did were editors trolling for clickbait. And they knew it wasn’t going to happen.
Flying cars made for great visuals. That got them stuck into illustrations of futures. But if you go back and look at actual predictions from futurists, nobody included flying cars after, say, the 1920s. By the 1950s futurists were looking to rockets making scheduled flights to Hawaii.
The whole idea is an urban legend, a study in retrodiction. We’ve gone back and created a flying car myth where one never existed. It’s fascinating, but weird.
I doubt that battery technology can improve far enough to make an electric heavier-than-air flying vehicle practical. It’s tough enough to make electric cars, and flyers both have higher energy requirements and more weight sensitivity. If we ever get electric heavier-than-air flying vehicles, they’re either going to be based on air-breathing fuel cells, or on capacitors.
Which explains Paul Moller… how?
Paul Moller was a midcentury futurist?
Uh, no. Paul Moller is a guy who went bankrupt pursuing a silly notion that sensible people had abandoned before he started.
The world is full of guys like him. Some try to make flying cars, others tell us that 0.9999~ is not equal 1. So what? There always will be people out on the edge, either prophets before their time or cranks. I didn’t grow up believing I would get a flying car for one second. I’m about your age, and I doubt that you did either. And both of us spent our lives in the sf world. If we didn’t, who did? Just poor deluded Paul Moller.
Moller goes back to at least the early 1960s and was a fixture of those “futuria” covers until at least the early Oughts, his latest swoopy design shooting at us out of PopSci or Discovery or whatever magazine ran that stuff in whatever decade. So it’s hard to separate him from the Heinleins and Dysons who wrote future-wow articles for those same magazines.
If he’s bankrupt, it’s news to me. I’ve watched him talk millions out of gullible investors and spend every dime pursuing his cockeyed dream with all sincerity and belief - no touch of fraud or con. (I lived near him, and for a time worked in the next building over in the same industrial park… for a boss who had contributed a very large pile towards the dream before wising up.)
And yes, I suppose in my sprog days I believed it would happen… but I wasn’t too far out of sprog pants before I realized it was a technical version of tilting at windmills, and every new appearance on a magazine cover made me roll my eyes and groan.
So I have trouble drawing the line between him and a generic “mid-century futurist.”
ETA: I am pretty sure Clive Cussler is one of those who wrote big checks Moller’s way. He has a Moller AirCar appear in a late Dirk Pitt™ novel, in a chapter that reads like a sales brochure. Made me laugh.
Flying-car company founder files Chapter 11.
“As of March 31, [2009] the company had an accumulated deficit of $43.7 million.”
Pretty much by definition - my definition, at any rate - inventors are not futurists. They want stuff today, not 50 years from now. Or even 10.
Okay. I’d lost track since moving away.
I’d still say that he had as much influence on the media presentations as any other way around. That he was there, and plugging along, and endlessly shaking people down for more, led to that endless stream of gosh-wow articles.
Doesn’t have to be strictly personal.
I have friends* who live in a development where each house has a second garage in the back, that is actually a hanger for their light plane, all connected to a shared blacktop airstrip that runs through the backyards of the houses.
So you could certainly have shared spaces for flying cars. Maybe just a widened version of the alley already running down many city blocks.
But that wouldn’t change many of the other limitations of flying cars: fuel cost, insurance(!), parking, etc.
*Mostly airline pilots. They spend their working days flying airliners, then in their time off, they go and fly a small plane around! Whattt?
More on Flying Cars in this thread
…noise, safety of passengers, liability and safety of those living near ‘houseports,’ noise…
Most developments with airstrips etc. tend to be pretty exclusive and upscale. Everything about that privileged use of land, airspace, resources etc. is kind of contrary to most other visions of our immediate future - “Come the revolution, ain’t gonna be no more limousines”* - and everything about flying cars is pretty much a variation of personal limousines. Good luck with that.