How soon would you like your future to arrive?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, futuristics, forecasting

OK, so where are the flying cars? Well, junior airmen everywhere, the first commercial one recently went on sale! For a mere $400,000 or so, you can own a brand-new Aeromobile. More upscale models range up to $1.6 million. Oh, you said, an air car for all of us? That could take some time. In the meantime, you just need two licenses, drivers' and pilots', and the financing, and an air car can be yours. I wonder where you'll be permitted to use it, with anything like the same freedom you use an automobile?

I remember a brief fad of building one's own ground-effects machine ("hovercraft"). I wanted to do so, though I was about 15, and I was doing all kinds of design and planning. But I wasn't planning on earning the money required…funny how the teen brain works. I mean, I had a spare lawnmower engine, with maybe 3 hp. A typical design found in, for example, Popular Mechanics, needed 10 hp, and used a chain saw engine. I talked to my dad about it. He had a practical point: "Why use all that energy keeping yourself off the ground, when four wheels will do it without burning any gas at all?" First nail in that coffin. More would follow.

Fast-forward half a century or so. Everything has a cost-benefit analysis associated with it. What is the benefit of a flying car? Usually, not much. If there is no road between the Point A where you are, and the Point B you want to get to, then maybe it can get you there, as long as the place has a pretty good landing strip (the Aeromobile and its kin cannot land straight down). But you can get a helicopter ride to the same place for a lot less than 400 grand, and you don't need your own pilot license. So, besides the cachet of having a really fancy toy, there isn't much benefit to the flying car. Not even if it cost a "mere" $100,000.

I just had a lot of fun reading Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. Zach is the cartoonist of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal; Kelly is a faculty member at Rice University. They discuss ten "emerging technologies" in various states of emergence (and just a few others in an added chapter). Of the ten, the first two have to do with space, "Cheap Access to Space" and "Asteroid Mining". The cheapest way to get things off the Earth, like, a few thousand miles off the earth, is with a "space elevator", if you ignore sunk cost. The price to lift a kilo of stuff to orbit is presently around $10,000. Incremental cost could go as low as a few dollars. However, add the amortized price of the elevator, it would be a lot higher. How high? I haven't seen a credible projection, and neither have the Weinersmiths. Because (1) we don't yet have materials strong enough to build it, and (2) whenever we do have them, the construction cost will be greater than the total budget of all the nations of Earth for a century or so. That is a lot to amortize!

Hmmm. OK, suppose the cost is, in today's US dollars, 100 Trillion. If we gave everyone on Earth a joyride to geostationary orbit and back for, say, $1,000, and the population was 10 billion, that would only pay of the first 10% of it. Charge $10,000, and now you have it. Of course, 90% of the people on Earth can't afford even a $1,000 joy ride that would likely take about a week. And how many people could you run up-and-down the space elevator each week? How long would those 10 billion joy rides take? I'll leave further speculation and calculation to you. Trust me, people are being born faster than you can send them up and down any practically-sized space elevator.

The Weinersmiths take a great combination of lots of information and a stiff dose of humor to deal with their ten subjects. Augmented Reality, for example. A really good system would allow you to live in a single room some 20 feet on a side, that could appear as any room you want to be in, in the eyes of your AR system. That, and some Programmable Matter (a different chapter) to be instant furniture and various implements, and you could live almost any kind of life you like. Though it seems to me a lot like prison, just with better views and a bunch of cool "instant toys". Then there's the "outside" kind of Augmented Reality, where you can know everything about whatever you see using the heads-up displays in your contact lens or whatever: I foresee people at first being totally enamored at knowing everything there is to know about every random tree or building or animal or person they see, for, say, an hour or two. Or maybe ten minutes. Then overload kicks in, and they'd quit making whatever "hey, look this up" gesture or command they've been using and get on with life.

Precision Medicine seems a good thing. I hope it works out. You get your DNA tested and find out which things will cause what side effect, and if you are lucky, treatment Zed will have no noticeable side effects, for you. Maybe. I wonder, though, at the cost of medicine so utterly focused that a new drug has to be developed just for you, for anything that happens to you. How many people will find out they aren't really well-suited to using almost any actual treatment on the market? Of course, you probably knew that already. After all, that's why everything you try has side effects; if you can live with them, fine, you get cured or whatever, but you're scared to go through that again.

What will happen, and what won't? Who's to say? Nobody predicted that the first men to visit the Moon would do so on a color TV broadcast, watched all over the Earth. So at least some of the various ideas explored in Soonish are likely to come to pass. Whether we can afford any of them is another thing. And I had a kind of global realization: nearly none of this applies to the majority of the world outside the Euro-American sphere.