Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for July 11, 2012

I’ve never seen a flying cahI hope I’ll never see oneBut if I ever do,I’d rather see than be one !

( With apologies to Ogden Nash )

Could have sworn I left my rocket pack around here somewhere…….

That is one pretty vehicle, isn’t it? I’d worry about the strength of the wings in turbuence, though.And I admit I’d rather have a Pilatus PC-12. But that’ll have to wait for a BIIIIIG lottery win.

The idea of today’s motoring public having the ability to fly sends chills though me.

Thinking about them having that ability flying over or through my home while using as much focus and concentration as I see used on our roads… in a word — SCARY

The future just ain’t what it used to be.

Maybe we don’t have the flying cars, but we do have the phones that broadcast pictures that Stanley Kubrick promised in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ thanks to Skype.

I’ll just wait for the food replicator and the translocator interface.

I don’t think many people took the idea of flying cars seriously. I remember a MAD Magazine once where they predicted every car would have a motor scooter on the back so no one would have to walk anywhere. The scooter hung from the tail fins… I could see some version of that happening..Cars that drive themselves was another idea. That’s been invented. Right now there is a BMW that can drive itself almost anywhere in Berlin. It does have trouble finding parking spaces though.

the problem is not making a car that flies – it’s making an Affordable car that flies.

Homage to Tim Wilson.

on the other hand… the flat tvs that for Decades were just 10 years away according to popular science have arrived and are now ubiquitous so… you never know.

I would settle for the Cure for Cancer and so many other diseases, that have been 10 years away for decades.

And they are usually telling the rest of us that we are the ones who cannot drive.

And where’s Moon Bas Alpha?-——-Don’t you remember? The nuclear waste dump on the Moon blew up in 1999 and hurled the moon out of orbit. The UN then commissioned a multitude of Starving Artists to create a new one.Lots fewer Starving Artists running around down here nowadays.

Good ole Yankee engine-uity ingenuity.

Dig those crazy tail fins. :-)

Reminds me of watching Back to the Future II where there are flying cars, holograms, biotic humans, etc. It’s set aaaaaaaallll the way in 2015 . . . we have three years to develop all that stuff to be on target. Quite frankly, I’d settle for some decent mass public transportation, but I"m not holding my breath on that either.

It’s not exactly a flying car, but how about an autogyro? It’s pretty close, and it’s available (and affordable) right now.

I was enamored of ‘ducted-fan’ vehicles…with a motorcycle engine? the only one I’ve seen since looked pretty tippy.

But a powered hang glider? that has possibilities, one of the reasons I keep working on my legs, because you gotta run some to take off…and land…

Just where is Danae going with all this now? We had better look out…..

Forget flying cars. When are we going to get our personal Star Trek transporters?

Anyway, Doc Brown says we’re supposed to get our flying cars within the next three years.

Lowering expectations is a great way to stay happy!

Isaac Asimov, Robert Heilen, & many many others had me certain the year 2010 would give each of us an opportunity to take a ride into orbit to one of several large orbiting stations & from there to stations all over the star system and beyond. At this point I’d settle for an active metor/comet interception and diversion program to protect us from incoming ELAs. We have the technology and have landed man made objects onto meteors and into the wake of comets so if we get hit by a rock from space, its our own lack of will and resolve that will allow it.

A very good friend of mine was on the team that cured Non-Hodgkin T-cell lymphoma, a deadly form of skin cancer. So maybe flying cars are on the horizon.

Linguist: In the effort to head ‘em off at the pass, The Ketchup Bottle was by Richard Armour. However, Nash did do the masterful narration to Saint Saën’s Carnival of the Animals.

Right now a real-alternate fuel vehicle that is cheap and effcient would be nice. Hydrogen looks promising but I hear that they get the H from oil. I wonder what would the impact be of too much O2 in our air?

Make that, “Lower my expectations a lot.” Maybe it’s just because I’m a huge fan of cyberpunk, or it’s that reality is going that way (corporations rule the world, mainly), but I see a very bleak future ahead. On the other hand, I’ll be first to test cybernetic implants. Anything to further divorce myself from humanity.

As an engineer I can tell you the EXACT reason there are no flying cars: No matter how idiot-proof something is designed, nature always creates a better idiot.

I’ve seen 2 working versions of flying cars. Both were saucer shaped, cost over 1/2 $M,ill,ion, and weren’t allowed past their driveways by highway patrols or FAA

I’ll take the DeLorean from the back to the future movies!

Back in 1970 the dream of those “flying” the early Regallo wings was to have a powerless personal that could go UP, not just glide down. Today’s wings, and parasails, catch thermals and literally “fly with the birds”, cheap, no carbon footprint (except for the chase vehicles), and relatively inexpensive.

Yes, we DO have flying cars, for some time actually, but “driving morons”, are a scary thought on wings!!

I don’t think you can blame the lack of a space program today on religion. It came down to politics and money . . . I don’t think religion was ever even brought up in that decision.

Well, at least the tail fins are functional…

Had flying cars, but they’d shed the wings in flight and then…..

“I will be most grateful if you will show me one, single, solitary HUMAN advancement, HUMAN achievement, HUMAN growth, HUMAN benefit, that came from, is dependent upon, or has otherwise resulted from ‘religion’.”

The university. Such centers of learning were first established by the medieval Catholic Church and had no parallel in any other culture. That system facilitated most of the basic scientific research that we still build on today.

Ha Ha Ha, that is Hi-lar-i-ous!!!Way to prove someone else’s point!You are sooooo dogmatic…. do you even realize? Careful, someone might accuse you of being Religious- chuckle, chuckle….

androgenoide: Nuclear fusion is even less real than flying cars in every garage. It always ignores the cost of extracting the H2 and 3 from seawater, the amount of electricity required to get a fusion reaction, etc. They have been trying since the ’70s and stuck at a quarter the way there (pressure containment, duration of reaction, net cost, etc. Put the money into something that works – a combination of a half dozen sources. Three fossil and a fission got us into the problem. It will take sun, wind, hydro, geothermal, biomass, ethanol, etc. to keep us going. Save the fossil sources for lubricants and maybe plastic.

Lord of the Exacto: It is broader than Roman Catholic. Modern medicine, astronomy, chemistry, etc. came from Islamic Spain (with major contributions from Jews there). There were three major universities in Timbuctu [modern Mali] when it fell to Moroccan invaders. Cataract surgery was done routinely there in the 13th century. I hope readers can remember what museum has a letter written (in Arabic, of course) by a refugee after the fall of that city to a friend in Alexandria (the mail manages to get a ride on caravans!). He said that they are in good health, but lost everything. Most of all, he misses his library – it was small, only 10,000 volumes, but he still misses it.

Not only Moon Base Alpha, but Sealab 2020. Oh… Never mind that’s still eight years away.

Where’s my JETPACK?!

Tom Smith had the best take on this that I know of:“I Want My Flying Car”http://filkertom-itom.blogspot.com/2006/08/001-i-want-my-flying-car.html

Actually, Gelett Burgess wrote the poem about purple cows.

that’s right. What happened to my George Jetson flying car? And what about Rosie? She cooks, she cleans. She does the grocery shopping. AND she’s a robot!!!!

I do remember the promise, and I’ve actually seen a few flying pick-ups and SUVs — mostly they land upside down on the other side of the expressway. With luck, no one gets killed. Seriously tho, I don’t see why they can’t develop a “hovercraft” that works on land.

One single thing?: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Jesus Christ (Matt. 7:12 aka “the Golden Rule.”). A finer philosophy the world has never known. And there are more…but YOU MISS THE POINT!

The point is: no matter what the discussion is, you blame it on religion! I will not debate the culpability of religion in ALL the blood shed throughout history, as it is indefensible! If not causing it, religion should have done more to prevent it!

But that does not mean that ALL religion is as ignorant as you presume. I read sci-fi and rejoice at scientific advancements, believing in my heart that God wants us to know what he did and how he did it. This OPENS scientific knowledge, not closes it!

Your premise is flawed. You ask for HUMAN (your caps, not mine) achievements. Look around you…see what humans have done to the earth, often in the name of religion. But look at God’s achievements, the very existence of beauty, the universe, you and I together. It’s staggeringly wonderful.

Do not “throw out the baby with the bathwater.” Religion is not the reason we don’t have flying cars. And even if it were, God is not the reason we don’t have flying cars.

Honestly, there are some folks here, and you are one of them, that I would dearly LOVE to get into a discussion of the Bible with….not religion, but the Bible. It is so different than what greedy and dishonest religionists have represented it to be.

I am one of humanity who hopes to go to the stars, actually believing it is God’s will that we do it! (After, of course, we get our own mess straightened out.)

Just quit blaming religion for the common cold; it’s stale and old and hopelessly biased.

MOI

Many thanks to Hippogriff and Sharuniboy for your excellent and well reasoned argumentation and historical accuracy and Saskfan for bringing in the Jixia.Vonne Anton, were I to believe in an anthropomorphous God, all I would say is, I’ll bet that She’s a bit disappointed in mankind.