Dude! Where is my flying car!?

So, have you ever asked yourself this? Were you ever hoping that the year of 2000 would look like some Zeerustic futuristic world full of flying cars and other gizmos? What do you think?

I was born in 1992... So I don't think I quite had the time to formulate such dreams about what the future would be like. I do, however, regret that our greatest technical accomplishment in 2013 is the iPhone and that some people still drive stick.

I think the future needs to get here already >:C

*He typed on his laptop connected wirelessly to the massive computer network that houses almost all of human knowledge at once from a small room in South America*

I actually don't care about my flying car. I mean, the majority of us possess what man has tried to gain for hundreds of years.

Unlimited knowledge in the palm of our hands. Our ancestors would imagine us fulfilling quests, solving pressing matters, using the knowledge we have.

But no. We watch videos of animals doing funny things.

Flying cars do actually exist. Jetpacks too. They're just extremely expensive and not practical as car replacements.

That's not true! We do other stuff too! Some of us sit around analyzing the tropes of fiction all day!

edited 22nd Mar '13 5:34:04 PM by TheJester

If flying cars were publicly available we would probably crash them. :V

That hoverbike that one guy made does look really cool though. :o

That's another thing, having widespread airborne travel would be hell for the transit authorities.

Oh come on, we're not all slackers watching cat videos. That's just me. The information age has revolutionized man's quest for knowledge.

And to be fair, the present in general is pretty damn impressive. I've seen a robot, operated by a surgeon, do heart surgery, with such deftness that the surgeon apparently swore he would never do heart surgery by hand again. We actually have jetpacks, they're just kind of Awesome, but Impractical.

People tend to disregard the present because it's not quite like what they thought the future would be. Few science fiction writers predicted anything like the Internet, and none guessed how damn big it would be.

Personally, I'm more depressed that the cyberpunk dystopia didn't happen. There's still hope for that, though.

Cyberpunk dystopias are overrated.

Post-nuclear apocalypse societies, on the other hand? Kickass. Can't wait for World War III

edited 22nd Mar '13 5:42:30 PM by ThatOneGuyNamedX

The two are potentially complementary.

...

[Muffled YOR'S WORLD playing in the background]

Wait, what's wrong with driving stick? Better gas mileage and all that.

Anyway, yeah, it's officially been the future for about 3 years as far as I'm concerned, so good affordable jetpacks need to occur.

FUCK DRIVING STICK. ONLY ANIMALS DRIVE STICK.

Stick cars are also highly likely to be older cars in Australia, which I will officially outlaw when I am queen because goddamnit, this is the future and no one should drive a busted-up rusty wreck. WITH A STICK.

edited 22nd Mar '13 5:57:01 PM by Alma

Steering wheel? More like PANSY wheel amiright.

B...but humans are animals...

I would make a point that ground-based transport is hard to regulate in itself. You would need to craft however many times of legislation, and to be honest, humans generally think in two dimensions for distances (except for gradients and hills). Flying cars are not going to be great for traffic management.

But yeah, I'm convinced we live in the future. I mean, the very fact I am sitting in a house in the middle of Britain, and yet having a casual conversation with a South American, a Canadian, an American, and various other persons who I could not feasibly talk to without the use of technology is in itself amazing. The fact that TVT is a community itself is amazing.

We have RPGs. That's close enough, right?

edited 22nd Mar '13 6:29:42 PM by Malph

Listen guys, I know this is gonna sound bad but I am actually very glad we dont have flying cars. I mean, have you noticed how much we manage to fuck up Driving in two dimensions? Flying cars would kill so many people the guy that invented them would be executed for crimes against humanity. There is no way in hell we should giving control of a powerful machine that can lift its own hefty weight to a drunk stupid teenager. Or a drunk stupid adult.

I personally think automobiles, planes and boats are all obsolete, or will soon be. Vactrains and personal rapid transit are the future baby! :3

edited 22nd Mar '13 6:46:31 PM by CassidyTheDevil

The vested interests are too entrenched to allow such develops, even if they were feasible. Urban environments are built around the car, train, and the bus, and vested interests in the status quo would outweigh any future development. Except for driverless cars. That's probably going to be a thing in 10-15 y.

Eh, every time I get those thoughts, I look at my phone.

My phone, which is about the size of my hand, can browse the internet, display comics from halfway around the world, play music that was released on another continent yesterday, keep me in touch of my friends and emulate games that previously would have required a console weighing five pounds. Unplugged.

I can wait a little more for flying cars, really.

I don't want a flying car.

I remember a conversation I had with my mom when I was around 8.

Mom: I wish we had flying cars!
Me: Why?
Mom: So that we could fly over all this traffic.
Me: ... But if we bought flying cars to fly over all this traffic, so would everyone else, and then we'd have traffic both on land and in the air.
Mom: We could fly higher...

edited 22nd Mar '13 7:40:40 PM by Bunnie

Vactrains sounds like it could go very bad very fast. :V

... Come to think of it, yeah. I mean, what if someone broke through the tunnel or something? And how would you build it without sucking in your workers? Its usual for a few workers to die on construction projects. Building a vactrain system would probably kill so many workers that the company doing it would be sued to hell and back.