Remember when Back to the Future predicted that households in 2015 will take pre-dehydrated food and turn them into a hot meal. It’s 2015 and an Isreali company has officially created something quite similar.
What you do is place a food pod (filled with powder) into the device and it will create a hot meal for you in only 30 seconds.
With this now being a real thing, nearly everything in the Back to the Future franchise short of Time Traveling Deloreans has now been made as we enter the same year the movie takes place in (even the hoverboard is being worked on by a company called Hendo). Some of it is indeed in a different form from what was seen in the movies, but the general ideas are the same.
The technology is there (there has been prototypes popping up that actually work). It just needs to be done in a way that would make flying as easy as driving and in a way that does not require a pilot’s license.
Then there’s getting the FAA to rewrite the rules of the air to allow for the travel of those things without threatening traditional aviation craft (how do you define the air lanes and how high would they be, how would you prevent random people from flying off in all directions, how would you prevent a near 100 percent fatality rate for accidents while flying?). Perhaps one resolution could be if the cars were made to be autonomous in the air, the computer would do all of the actual flying and the driver cannot reinstate control until it’s back on the ground.
I was just havin’ a little fun. As I understand it NASA, believe it or not, has been working on an air highway system.
Personally I like the idea of a vacuum airship, everyone likes their own brand eh? Mid-air collisions still pose a problem I’m sure, but engine failures aren’t a problem, if the engine fails, unlike an airliner, the craft doesn’t fall from the sky, instead it just floats there. Plus it would require a lot less energy to operate, needing energy only to move, but not to stay afloat.
The vacuum airship concept was actually originally coined by Francesco Lana De Terzi back in 1670! Vacuum airships are often considered to be the ultimate in lighter than air travel. The only issue at this point in time is material, it would require a light yet strong material, I wonder if a carbon nano-tube material might fit the bill.
P.S. The military would probably be interested in something like this, not only for manueverability purposes, but a large vacuum airship could hold enough weight to support a number of smaller craft, a flying air-craft carrier. The Hindenburg, a hydrogen airship, could lift enough weight to support over 16 F-16s, a vacuum airship could lift even more weight because a vacuum, unlike hydrogen, has no weight at all. Really it’d probably be better suited to carrying smaller drone craft though, hundreds of’em perhaps. Like the Carrier in Star Craft
