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Will I Ever Get My Flying Car?

Posted on: Monday, 10 March 2008, 15:00 CDT

By WALLES, Hayden

HAYDEN WALLES wonders how long we will have to wait for the future we were promised. What happened to the future?

Fifty years ago, the world of tomorrow teemed with exciting technological wizardry. We would all be lazing about in space or on the moon with robots doing the housework.

Even those projecting a dystopian future at least set our misery against a backdrop of flying cars.

Now that the future is here, it's frankly disappointing.

So what's holding up the march of progress, and how far away are the marvels that books, movies and tech- savvy soothsayers have been promoting -- now that we need them most?

Energy wasn't supposed to be a problem, for a start, thanks to nuclear fusion.

Today's nuclear power plants use the energy from splitting heavy atoms, like those of uranium. Fusion would harness the energy released when atoms of deuterium, a form of hydrogen easily extracted from water, join to form helium atoms. One gram of deuterium could yield the energy of 12.5 tonnes of burning coal-- far more than uranium fission -- leaving no radioactive waste (although the reactor itself would remain radioactive for about 100 years).

Fusion has been achieved artificially, but the problem is sustaining it for more than a few seconds because the reaction is so energetic that it becomes hard to contain.

Sustained fusion is the goal of the planned International Tokamak Experimental Reactor (Iter) to be built in the south of France, which won't be up and running for nearly a decade. Even so, it seems possible that fusion power will be a reality by the middle of the century.

Another mainstay of the future, the flying car, may be even closer.

The Skycar M400, the result of decades of development by California- based aerospace engineer Paul Moller, looks more like a plane than a car; previous versions looked like flying saucers.

It uses lightweight rotary engines for vertical take-off and landing. Computer control is supposed to make it as easy to fly as a car is to drive, with a top speed of 600km/h. The M400 still hasn't been certified, but you can place your order now if you've got at least $US500,000 ($NZ613,000) and don't mind waiting.

Moller believes that eventually the cost, fuel efficiency and convenience of his flying car will make it competitive with both cars and aircraft.

Escaping clogged roads for the wild blue yonder may not be a pipe dream, but another futuristic transport option, teleportation, doesn't look like arriving anytime soon. Zapping from one place to another may not be impossible, but it would have to involve some very exotic physics.

One way to do it might be by warping space to bring the starting point and the destination close together, or punching a so-called wormhole from one place to the other to serve as a shortcut.

If possible, such manipulations would allow travel not just from one city to another but potentially from one solar system to another.

Alas, while these sorts of tricks with space and time are not ruled out by modern physics, performing them would involve artificial black holes, negative energy and other wildly speculative ideas, none of which is even slightly feasible.

Physicists can perform teleportation right now -- of a sort.

Occasionally reports surface of particles teleported from one side of a laboratory to another. This is quantum teleportation, and so far it has been successful only in transporting a very few particles, though Brisbane physicist Ashton Bradley last year proposed a new technique that could teleport several thousand atoms at a time.

Unfortunately, when it comes to transporting something like a human, it isn't just a question of a thousand atoms down, seven octillion to go. This is genuine teleportation, but it is intended to transfer information, not objects. It's part of the nascent fields of quantum communication and quantum computation, which may eventually result in perfectly secret communication, and computers far more powerful than anything we have today.

Which, when they arrive, may help us reach another milestone on the road to the future -- artificial intelligence. Despite spectacular strides in computer speed and power since the dawn of the computer age, the promise of a "thinking machine" has largely failed to eventuate.

In the early days, it was assumed to be just a matter of time before machines could be programmed to think like people.

During the 1960s, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology decided to sort out computer vision over a summer by building a system that would allow a computer to extract information from a video feed. Decades later, this problem is still unsolved.

It seems that the things we find hard, like calculus and chess, are easy for a computer, while the things we take for granted, like seeing and speaking, are very hard.

This means that general-purpose robots are still out of reach, too, since it is just these kinds of things -- seeing, hearing, planning and interacting with humans -- that they require. There is progress, but it's slow and faltering.

Take the Darpa Grand Challenge in America, a race for driverless vehicles that tests the cutting edge of robotics and artificial intelligence. Last November, the third such race, undertaken in an urban environment, was won by the team from Carnegie Mellon University and General Motors with an average speed of 23km/h. Of the 11 teams in the final, five didn't even finish.

Seems we needn't worry about superintelligent machines overtaking humanity. And I haven't even touched on space colonies, holographic TV, nanotechnology and the dozens of other delayed marvels.

The blame for this state of affairs may seem to lie with slacking scientists and inventors, but if anyone is at fault it is the prognosticators who raise false hopes, predicting this and that without really knowing if such things are possible.

Yet even here it's hard to make the charge stick, for without these inspirational (if rash) predictions, progress might be even slower. Given a choice between a world without robots to do the housework and a world without houses, I know which I'd rather live in.

Source: Press, The; Christchurch, New Zealand

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