Where are the flying cars?

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GIThruster
Posts: 4686
Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 8:17 pm

Where are the flying cars?

Post by GIThruster »

"We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters"
--Peter Thiel

This subject has come up for me half a dozen times in the last week. Why do we not have flying cars? To answer this, one needs to first ask what do we mean by "flying cars"?

What we don't mean is a newer sort of helicopter. That doesn't work. Especially if one shrinks the blades down to somewhat smaller size so the thing can fit into reasonable sized spaces, and ducts them to make the blades somehow safer, what you get is every pebble on the ground becomes a deadly projectile. The smaller the cross sectional area of a lifting column of air as compared to the mass it has to lift, the higher the velocity of the air forced through it, and ducted fans like those found on the F-35 and Harrier are very dangerous. Not only do they turn every loose object into a potential hazard, but they rip up asphalt and toss it around too. They are noisy, expensive, impossible to make economical enough for regular use and will always be. Fans, simply will not do.

And lets face it, that is not the Jetson's image. The flying cars from the late 50's and early 60's were a natural response to the "saucer craze" of the 50's. The longing for the flying cars came as a response to these sightings of something that seemed to defy gravity through some sort of "anti-gravity". That is the cool stuff people want--silent stuff that seems to float magically through the sky. Almost all scientists will now state unequivocally and without qualification, that "anti-gravity" is an unscientific idea, but this doesn't change what the people want.

So why don't we have it? Pretty simple really and again, Peter Thiel called it:

"Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius."

Fact is, we could have the magic that looks like it defy's gravity, except for a lack of courage.

Woodward's Mach Effect physics does enable this sort of seemingly magical stuff. It's been through peer review now for more than 20 years. It's been demonstrated in the lab for the last decade. And yet, where is the commercialization of this? What's it waiting on? Well, it's waiting on courage.

Just to remind, I am searching for intrepid souls who will invest the time to see what this is all about and in the last 9 months doing this full time (60 hours/week) I haven't had a single person commit. And the answer is always the same. "It's too big for me." Not "I don't believe it" nor "I don't have the right skills" nor "I'm too busy" nor even questions about why someone else hasn't yet done this. The only answer I've received from dozens of conversations is literally to say "I don't have the courage", and this is exactly what Peter Thiel says we're missing.

I think he's right.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

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