Interlude: Flying Cars

It's 2012! Weird. Where are the flying cars you ask? Actually, that's a dumb question because smart phones exist. Think about how crazy that is. Your phone (assuming you, Imaginary Readers, have a smart phone) can communicate with dozens of satellites which function based on the principles of special relativity, is a more powerful computer than a PC from five years ago, and is also a really nice camera, phone, and musical device. It is also more advanced than any communicator ever shown on various Star Trek series which are all set three to four hundred years in the future. I think that is absolutely amazing. And that's just consumer technology. Think about all the crazy shit that must exist in labs and for military and academic use right now that we, as consumers, won't see for several year if at all. We are living in the future (except not really because then it wouldn't be the future and we as of yet have no evidence of time travel that I, as a random mid-westerner who would never be told of it's existence outside of seeing something posted online, am aware of).

This will never happen

Also, the sheer amount of energy required to generate enough lift to make a car fly precludes the possibility of having "flying cars" because they would never be efficient enough to be economically viable (which is saying something because stretch Hummers exist). All current concept cars, based on a brief Google image search for "flying cars" seem to operate based on the idea of having a small plane with foldable wings whose cabin has road wheels. The problem with this is that it is essentially an airplane, which requires a decent amount of space for take-off/ landing, as well as not being able to hover. Anyone who has ever driven a car on an actual road (racing notwithstanding) knows that driving requires a good deal of standing still waiting in traffic or at a light or stop sign. There is a very good reason why there are no plane equivalent of a stop sign: much like sharks, planes cannot stop without dying (in this case falling out of the air). (I should probably say at this point that I actually know nothing about the logistics of flying or planes, I just like to talk about things with authority about things I know nothing about and back it up with some intro physics level physics knowledge.)

Additionally, driving is difficult enough with only two dimensions to worry about. Think about what it would be like if you also had to worry about what the people above and below you were doing. And the existing infrastructure would never be able to support flying cars. We would need three dimensional lanes/streets, which would require some sort of holographic technology or the ability to paint lane lines on the air.

Realistically, flying car technology would be nothing like in the movies where one or two zoom around sky scrapers or just overhead in an establishing shot. There would be just as much traffic, probably more, but it would completely encase you in a three dimensional cage of cars. Like in that Doctor Who episode "Gridlock."

Currently, when you drive, you have eight distinct positions around your car that you have to worry about, shown in Figure 1, which form a square of immediate spaces around your vehicle where various obstacles could be. This is just the immediate spaces that your car can occupy in the next instant, and does not include the ever extending 2D disk of space you need to worry about and keep track of.  Now extend that to three dimensions. That means that you know occupy the center of a cube rather than a square and have 26 distinct spaces surrounding you to worry about, plus a sphere extending to infinity of possible obstacles and whatever the flying equivalent of pedestrians are to contend with. That means that in heavy traffic, you are surrounded by 26 cars, with little to no visibility. Think of the mirror system required to cover the blind spots alone. How do you keep track the cars/lanes directly below you? At what point does the human neck reach it's craning limits? These are questions that proponents of fly cars have yet to answer (and by proponents I mostly mean science fiction because no one cares about futurists).

Figure 1: Or: I Should Stop Ranting And Go To Bed (also that double colon is somewhat questionable)

It seems I have spent far too much time thinking about why flying cars aren't viable, because what started as a "I have nothing better to do tonight than to attempt to post with a time stamp from midnight on New Years" post turned into a rant about flying cars including diagrams and some math. It's possible that I am just a little bit bored during break. I should probably try to find something a bit more productive to do...

Anyways, Happy New Years! Here's hopping that the Mayans didn't really have it all figured out and that the world doesn't end this year! (Spoilers: It doesn't). ((Double Spoilers: I know this because I'm a sane, rational human being, and not because I'm a time traveler, but bonus points to anyone who thought that last comment was because I'm a time traveler.)) (((Also, double and triple parenthesis are definitely questionable punctuation, and I'll stop now.)))