Dude! Where is my flying car!?

^ The city of Pueblo, Colorado (nearest urban area to me) has bus service but it is pretty limited (only pre-arranged stops and the buses go once an hour starting at 6 am and stopping around 7 pm) and it is not free.

Colorado Springs is the same way but it has some more buses. The only real public transit systems in Colorado are in the Denver Metropolitan Area. They're the only place that has better than limited bus service. (They have light rail to a few places and bus service to a hell of a lot more but the city's 30 miles wide.)

Forget flying cars, where's my flying motorcycle?

Is there any public transport system that doesn't suck donkey dick?

At our current level of technology, flying cars is probably not at all out of the realm of possibility. If they can make a thousand-ton aeroplane fly, I reckon they could probably make a two-ton car fly. That we don't have flying cars is probably more due to Ontological Inertia than anything else. Switching from cars to flying vehicles would be pretty costly and time-consuming (as others have explained), and there's no reason to go to the effort of making the car un-happen in favour of flying vehicles when it has proven to be such a successful design.

^ They built flying cars 50 years ago as a proof of technology. They were just horrendously expensive.

I want rocket boots.

Red ones, of course.

My aunt-by-marrage (whom we are not really friends with) recently tried to justify the fact that her reckless driving could cause an accident by saying "Don't worry, if I get into an accident and wreck my truck, the city will pay me for it."

This is a form of logic I would like to keep below ten feet, never mind five hundred.

Divert the funds from the current flying car projects and put them towards creation of robot butlers/maids. Roombas are fine, but they have a fatal flaw in that they can't do my laundry.

Also, besides flying cars. What other inventions do you think have dissapointed us?

Also, how do you think people of the 1950s would react to us if we showed them our vision of the future? Like how they grew up with Retrofuturism and now we have iPunk. What would they think of that.

iPunk? I like that term. As for the first question, there's still people born in the 50s around.

When I was a kid I too thought it would be awesome to have flying cars. Then when I started learning how to drive I realized that the stupid people you have to put up with while driving on the ground are the last people you would want around you when you're hundreds of feet off the ground.

3D PRINTERS!

I'd be too poor to afford a flying car anyways.◊

And I'm kinda disappointed we're still not at the point where we have robots smart enough to overthrow us. Had my shotgun prepared and everything.

edited 16th Apr '13 6:22:13 AM by Raidouthe21st

What I am most disappointed by is not the idea of the flying car, per-se, but the idea that everyone could afford helicopters in the future. There was a time, around the time helicopters started to get really popular, that they were seen as the more practical alternative to the flying car, that soon there would be a "volkswagen" of helicopters that people could afford and use on a regular basis. Sadly, that has yet to happen.

It's very likely any flying cars would only be allowed to operate in an environment where there was some sort of automated system to control all the traffic and prevent anything dangerous. The real reason any flying cars have not (pardon the pun) taken off is that they effectively require a pilot's license to fly them- at least in the UK.

I think as well it's a fruitless idea, given the amount of energy required to keep that many aircraft up at any one time, which would not be good in an era where fossil fuels will soon start to be scarce and global warming is an issue. Unless there is some means of flying them via electrical power via some sort of wireless power transmission (Tesla FTW?) and viable fusion power...

Dude, where's my Cyberspace?

Flying cars as a common luxury? Not gonna happen. Flying busses capable of taking Mass Transit to the air and allowing bus systems to be more efficient? That'll happen when electromagnetism and sustainable energy are advanced so we can have magnetic walls to prevent collisions with buildings, and solar cells to recharge the system daily.

Think an above above-ground subway.

You're in it.

Neuromancer-style cyberspace, I'm guessing. I want that. Also simstims (implants/drugs that allow you to effectively "possess" another person and feel everything they can feel—which sounds awesome, until the person you're linked to breaks their leg) and true artificial intelligences. The book also hinted at aliens.