Dear Science, Where the Hell Is My Flying Car?

Jetpacks, moving sidewalks, flying cars, flying submarines – America and science teamed up to promise us all these things in the future like 50 years ago.  Now it’s the future.  Where are my godd*mn jetpacks?  CNN investigates:

At the 1964 New York World’s Fair, people stood in line for hours to look at a strange sight.

They wanted to see the “Futurama,” a miniaturized replica of a typical 21st century American city that featured moving sidewalks, computer-guided cars zipping along congestion-free highways and resort hotels beneath the sea.

Well, we do have those weird flat escalators in major airports, but those are usually blocked by a guy with a big rolling suitcase.  And we do have Futurama, a moderately successful Simpsons spinoff.  But what about all the other inventions we were promised?  Where did we go wrong?  

“I feel entitled to have all this technology that’s been promised at a certain time,” says Wilson, author of “Where’s My Jetpack?” “I look up and say, ‘Where’s all this stuff?’ ”

It turns out that some of these things have been invented already, they just sucked more than we had expected:

Visionaries actually invented objects like flying cars, but they could never work out the real world applications, Wilson says. Other inventions had the same problem. Ordinary people didn’t want to have anything to do with them.

These futuristic follies include everything from “Smell-O-Vision,” an invention that helped moviegoers smell as well as see movies; Sanyo’s “ultrasonic ultra-squeaky clean human washing machine” (it was dubbed the “human washing machine,” but wouldn’t fit in an ordinary bathroom) and, of course, the jet pack.

Flying cars: great, but really, we’ve got our hands full with the regular-cars situation right now.  Smell-O-Vision: I don’t think anybody ever really wanted that.  Human washing machine: Seemed promising until it was discovered you couldn’t really have sex in it.  And the jetpack, for its part, was developed – a man in Colorado last November flew across a 1,500 foot canyon with one – but it has proved difficult to fuel.  Though perhaps no longer:

A New Zealand inventor recently invented a jet pack, which weighs about 250 pounds, that reportedly can run for 30 minutes.

Teleportation also exists:

 A group of international scientists successfully transported a photon — a bundle of electromagnetic energy — from one side of a room to another in 1993. Physicists routinely conduct teleportation experiments today, Wilson says.

As do robots that recognize up to 10,000 words and help old-age home residents choose which pudding they want.  CNN ends the essay by positing that some technology is evil, like in Battlestar Galactica, some technology hasn’t come around because it can only be discovered by the pure of heart, and some technology just came out of nowhere, so back in the day, no one was even thinking about it.  The last part, I think, explains the bulk of why our science fiction future hasn’t materialized.

’50s folk dreamed of cooler versions of the coolest technology they already had, not cooler versions of the most useful, entrenched, workaday technologies humans have long had.  We were looking at jets and cars and dreaming of jet cars rather than looking at telephones and music and dreaming of a Motorola RAZR V3 that plays “Turn My Swag On.”  

Additionally, our forebears were essentially fantasizing inside the box, taking existing technologies to their logical conclusions and assuming that the desires of the time would remain static enough to see those technologies through to completion in the future.  When the cutting edge in leisure was discussed, for instance, ’50s hearts sighed at a future of underwater resorts, because “leisure” meant a discrete vacation from work.  We instead veered in the direction of Grand Theft Auto, 420 million pages of pornography sitting on our desks, and Xanax. 

The essay is worth a read.