Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for August 14, 2024

flyin cahs!. at least we don’t have flyin cows!

It didn’t help when Back to the Future put a timeline on it.

I don’t think Danaea, that cynical little rug rat, CAN lower her expectation – there are some laws of physics that even Jeffrey can’t break.

I hope not in my lifetime!

Even better is to completely eliminate as many expectations as one possibly can. Then lower any stubborn ones remaining.

What happens if someone in a flying car gets car sick?

The rate of change increases exponentially, just not predictably

Maybe by then we can expect AI to do the laundry, clean up after the cat and pack the baby’s go-bag.

R-I-I-I-I-G-H-T

At their age, I think it’s the Jetsons’ fault.

Keep your cars. I want my commuter jet pack.

There’s a Tesla Roadster flying toward the sun right now.

We have flying cars. Cars are constantly flying off the roads into ditches and houses and…

To quote John Prine, “We are living in the future”.

What happens when two flying cars collide and drop from the sky? LOOK OUT BELOW!!!

Where ya gonna pahk all them flying’ cahs?

Captain Eddie does sometimes have a flying boat, at least according to his stories.

But the good news is: cheap clean electricity from sustainable nuclear fusion is only ten years away — just like it was in the 1950s!

Oh, so much was promised – see “2001 a Space Odyssey”. We should have colonies on Mars and on the moons of Jupiter, by now. A scifi author once remarked that he fully expected to see us land on the Moon, but never expected to see the last ! I can’t remember the name of the author, but would like to learn it if someone can come up with it. The comment seemed just so sad.

Many predictions are of things that are technologically possible, but don’t come about for other reasons. And many come about, but take a LOT longer than predicted.

One example of the latter: I recently read a 1936 article by an American composer, George Antheil, predicting we would have on-demand streaming music – by 1955!

I blame Popular Mechanics for that gross disappointment.

Darwin will have such fun with flying cars.

What will happen will not be what we guess will happen.

Remember a very futuristic SF movie from the 50s. Everything ver sleek and streamlined – even the phones… Which still had cords.

Not a bad place to start, actually.

They have probably already invented flying cars, but since people can’t seem to be able to merge along 2 axis…….

This is so true. Just check out a mechanics and science mag from the early 60’s. And if we had ‘em, there’d be a lot less highway deaths. (No flaw in this logic, is there?)

Flying cars? I want to know where my robot maid is.

Technology will change but unfortunately people will not.

Global Climate Change will force mass migration of people and if there is one thing we know about humans, we fear the “other”, especially if they look or worship differently than we do.

The US will too narrowly manage to reject a “strongman” this year, but only because he is such an easy to spot liar, grifter, coward, fraud and corrupt, unfit, incompetent Russian dupe that has no interest in the responsibility or accountability of running a government. We may still leave his shameless collaborators in charge of one of the levers of power.

In the future, humans will turn to an authoritarian not so obviously as stupid as the Reality Show Con Artist who will use this fear of the “other” to obscure the fact that the wealth is going up, not down. Demonizing others and keeping the middle and working classes suspicious of each other so they don’t band together and look up has been in the playbook of the wealthy since man started walking upright and that will not change.

“You promised me Mars colonies. Instead, you gave me Facebook” Buzz Aldrin.

“flyin cahs”? Here on the Southcoast of Mass, they’re bringing back trains, commuter and freight. I’m expecting to see steam powered sidewheel paddleboats on the canal any day now.

With this inflation, we couldn’t afford one anyway.

There was a “Flash” TV show back in the 1990s. In one episode a villian from the 1950s freezes himself to go to the future. First thing he says when he emerges from the pod is “Where are the jet packs? Where are the flying cars?”

I’ve been using that line ever since I saw it.

Yep. Having lower expectations is a good idea. I bet the GOP is already working on “Trump 2028” signs.

Flying cars were developed in the 1950s! There are three problems with them:

1) They cruise at about 50MPH. Our highways are faster.

2) If they stop, they fall out of the sky.

3) The American driver. Think about it.

They are called “autogyro”, and were a precursor to the helicopter.

Debris raining down from morons who can’t even deal with good decision making in 2D, what’s not to like!

I don’t believe any of the predictions included hordes of zombies with phones glued to their faces.

We have flying cars. They’re called Vtols. Currently, they don’t go very far and aren’t yet for the masses, but can be obtained.

People can’t drive in 2 dimensions. Adding a 3rd is just asking for carnage.

Lawd, most of y’all can’t handle driving a car in two dimensions, let alone three.

The singularity approaches, but still no jet packs or flying cars.

Drive down the Interstate and observe the cars and trucks passing you. You’d think it’s NASCAR race.

XKCD 864 has an explanation for this.

Some things didn’t work out — fusion power is another one not ready yet — but new things we didn’t expect came along. And drone-style flying vehicles are being developed that will be a lot like flying cars.

Imagine the air filled with flying cars, no one looking up from their devices, colliding and glancing off each other, littering the ground with the wreckage. And that is just five days a week when the local High School is dismissed. Assuming such buildings still exist and the autonomous aero-autos are still on the faulty side.

Just remember, Soylent Green was set in 2022.

Where’s my Soylent Green?

And colonies on Mars and cheap fusion power.

Actually I heard there IS a flying car in development, it just hasn’t been released to the public yet. Google it.

The home remodeling shows mostly end up in stark shades of black & white & grey because ‘60s scifi showed that’s what the future looked like… on the black & white tvs that were all most people had.

In the US, people can’t handle the concept of only using the left lane to pass – can you imagine the carnage (no pun intended) that would ensue letting these people behind the controls of a flying car?

I’d rather have a transporter, like on Star Trek.

Come on, Eddie! Your boat flies anywhere your want to go

We were also promised jet packs

took me a little bit to figure out how to pronounce fut-chah and what it meant.

Ever since the evolution of crows, we’ve had flying caws.

Did someone already say that somewhere above? By the time I got here, there were already 130 comments, and I admit I haven’t read them all.

We’ve had flying cars for years – they’re called helicopters.

A flying car is a helicopter. And you need a heck of a lot of training to fly one.

i want my personal jet pack!

In her future, Danae can expect to have a robot boyfriend who can deal with anything she dishes out

Flying cars exist. They’re very expensive.

“fut-chah”?? googled the phrase.. no matches, nor one-off suggestions

There’s a song about this, “Where the F… Is My Jet Pack” by the late Tim Wilson

My generation thought a nuclear holocaust was imminent and that there was no future

I’m still waiting for my rocket pack!

When I was a kid I was afraid that there would no longer be cars by the time I could drive. That was 60 years ago.

Be happy we have flying drones to torture animals with and spy on our neighbors

we could have flying cars right now except a) they don’t make sense from a business perspective and b) do you really want the idiots you see on the road flying around the sky every which way??

Aren’t they siblings? I’m thinking Danae needs to take another trip back in the time machine to see them at her age. Maybe she can invite her own sister along for the trip!

https :// youtu. be/GXqREyyG-e8

Remove the spaces.

They did tell us for 50 years we would have thin, flat-screen TV’s.

Can you imagine the carnage over Interstate 70 between Kansas City and St Louis with flying cars?

Predicting the future is always risky. The only safe thing to say is that it won’t look like the present.

We have flying cars. We just aren’t allowed to fly themDarn drunk drivers. They’re one of the reasons we can’t have nice things.

I want just a car- -ours is dead,

Some scientific pundit has said that we have flying cars. They are called helicopters.

What about electricity “too cheap to meter?” (The promise of nuclear power.) For kicks, check out the lyrics to I.G.Y., by Donald Fagan.

I hit a pothole the other day, and I’m sure my car was airborne for at least 5 seconds. Does that count?

Jet Packs! Still waiting for my Jet Pack!

Now you’re learning Danae, prognostications about the future are always overrated and driven by peoples whose knowledge is influenced too much by popular culture….. Beware of Gaslighting, it’s real unfortunately !

Notice, no promises as to affordability.

Science fiction novels, short stories, and movies have predicted a lot of things that came true, but obviously don’t always get it right. Back in 1940, Robert Heinlein wrote a short story called “The Roads Must Roll”, set in the year 1970, where moving sidewalks/conveyer belts had replaced highways and railways as the predominant mode of transportation. Never happened, and probably never will. On the flip side, I seem to recall a story by Isaac Asimov written in the 50s, where he predicted the development of hand calculators and computing devices. The only he got wrong was that his story was set several hundred years in the future.

There are several companies in Silicon Valley working on flying cars. One has gotten a prototype to the certification phase of development.

We call them crows where I come from. :)

Still no jetpacks! I want my life back!

Winky,Blinky&Noddy invented one in FLASH COMICS 1960

Flying cars are an extraordinarily bad idea. One important thing goes kaput, and then gravity exacts its toll.

Flying cars, good. That way when the engine fails we can fall to our doom rather than pulling to the side of the road (which is already difficult if the engine dies).

We did not get flying cars. We got auto-flushing toilets and social-media algorithms. Now, children, what does that tell you?

What happened to the Flying Cars? Lawyers. If you run out of fuel in a regular car, you roll to a stop. If you do in a flying car…

I remember Avery Brooks ranting about flying cars in turn of the century IBM commercia

No, you don’t! You really don’t!!! Look how dangerous it already is just driving on the ground!

I would like flying cars…even cars that hover (like the hovercraft) would be better than driving on the roads we have.

People already can’t drive in two dimensions in well-defined roadways! Do you really want to give them a third to try to manage, while also simultaneously basically taking away roads???

This reminded me of a really cool movie: “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.” It is set in the “future” as envisioned in the 1930s. Lots of neat technology. I seem to remember airports floating in the sky, supported by Zeppelins. It stars Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Angelina Jolie.