It's not hard to see why everyone is dreaming about the future as a place markedly different from present. Dramatic improvements in technology and a better understanding of science let people dream about a better world, and created a whole new genre of books: science fiction. Led by Jules Verne in the 19th century, these novels told of strange new worlds, creatures and ways of living, and told stories in ways that had never been seen before.Dreams of the future went ballistic in the 1950s, pushed by the technological advances of World War II. This conflict had seen the world move from basic propeller-driven planes to jet engines, introduced guided missiles that would pave the way to the moon, and demonstrated the terrifying power of the nuclear bomb. And after all the horror and deprivation of the war years, humanity was rather keen to look forward, rather than back.
These incredible advances led to some staggering views of the future and an explosion of science-fiction novels and films, all showing how we'd be living in the future. These depictions haven't always been accurate. If they were, we'd now be living on the moon driving flying cars and being waited on by robot companions.Before we get too dismissive, however, we shouldn't assume that these things won't ever happen, merely that the time frames may be quite a long way out. Over the next few pages, we're going to look at some past technology predictions and find out when we can realistically expect to see such technology in everyday life. We'll also be looking at some of the technologies that Hollywood and science fiction managed to predict correctly, and so get an idea of what exciting technology lies ahead.
The futuristic flying car.
For as long as we've had the car, we've pretty much had traffic jams. While motorways were designed to save us from the dreaded tailbacks, all they've really done is given us more miles of roads to have traffic jams on.
It's no surprise that people have dream of flying cars, so they can switch to flight mode, take to the skies and leave the traffic behind them. Flying cars have been the stock of science fiction for years, with appearances in Blade Runner (set in 2019) and in Back to the Future fart U's Dionysian 2015. Flying cars have also been the staple of future-looking articles, with research in the 1950s predicting that by now we'd be living in a traffic-free world thanks to flying vehicles.
So, with all that desire for flying cars, where are they? Well, the answer is a little more complicated than you might think. Technically, the first flying car was invented in 1949, although the Mouton Taylor Aerocar isn't perhaps what you'd expect. It was a regular street car, which towed a fold-up aeroplane section that could be physically attached to the car. Changing from driving mode to flight mode took about five minutes, and involved folding the wings out and attaching the propeller to the propeller shaft at the front of the car. Once converted, the Aerocar had a top airspeed of 110 miles per hour. So technically it was a flying car, but its conventional wingspan meant it had to take off and land at a traditional airport. It was also difficult to transform from a car to plane.
From 2013, the flying car will finally become a reality thanks to the Terrafugia Transition, a modern take on the Aerocar. While the Terrafugia flying car needs a runway at least 518m long to take off and land, its automatic folding wings make it easy to convert to flying mode. With a cruising speed of 105m ph and a range of 490 miles, you could cover most of the UK without having to refuel. However, it's still more of a car that transforms into a plane, rather than a true flying car. The closest we've come to the science- fiction vision of the future, driving like a normal car and taking to the skies without wings, is the Moller Skycar, which is designed for vertical take-off and landing, just as you'd expect from the car of the future There have been demonstrations of the car hovering, but it's never been seen actually flying. With financial problems at the company, it's looking extremely unlikely that the Skycar will take to the air any time soon.
Lots of problems have to be overcome before the perfect flying car can be made, and the result isn't going to be cheap. For the time being, the vehicle that can take off vertically and escape the traffic remains stuck in the world of science fiction.
Jet pack similar to Vice city and San Andreas.
If we can't have flying cars, how about jet packs instead, so we can take to the skies and fly to work? As well as being popular in science fiction, with heroes such as the Racketeer setting the pace way back in 1938, the jet pack has also been taken seriously by governments and aviation firms. Technically speaking, the jet pack is just one form of personal flying device. Others include rocket packs, jump packs that use compressed gas and personal helicopters. For simplicity, we'll stick with the term 'jet pack'.
Actual jet packs date back to World War II, when the Germans invented the Himmelstürmer (or sky stormer), which used two Schmidt pulse jet tubes strapped to the pilot. Using this device the jet pack operator could make jumps of up to 60 meters, reaching altitudes of around 15 meters. The device was used to help engineers cross minefields and barbed wire. After the war, the Himmelstürmer was handed over to Bell Aerosystems. Further development took place, with the technology famously making its way into the 1965 James Bond film, 'Thunder ball'. However, although the jet pack is real, it's never been very practical. Most models are difficult to control and offer short flying times, making them largely impractical for anything other than small hops.
Alternative designs, such as Yves Rossy's jet wing pack, which uses a jet pack with wings that fold out, require the pilot to be dropped from a plane and need a parachute for landing. Still, ranges are better and speeds can be impressive; Rossy managed to cross the 22 miles of the English Channel in just over nine minutes using his wing pack. A wing pack such as this might be fine for extreme sports enthusiasts, but for most people a more realistic method of transport would be a personal helicopter that you strap to your back. Several products along these lines are in development, including the Japanese GEN H-4, which has had limited hovering demos, although no firm release date has been announced. Part of the problem with any jet pack is that it will need to be licensed in each country in which it's used, and it's likely that you'll need a pilot's license to fly one. So they may be real, but don't expect them to replace your car any time soon.
Driver less cars an automatic sensor system
While science fiction has toyed with the idea of the self-driving car for years, the reality is more complicated. In an effort to get the idea up and running, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) issued a Grand Challenge for fully autonomous vehicles at the end of the last century. Autonomous means a car that drives itself with no outside guidance. It has to steer, drive, brake and negotiate hazards entirely on its own. The first Grand Challenge took place in the Mojave desert in 2004; the competitors, fielded mainly by university research departments, looked like wheeled boxes of wires, festooned with cameras, sensors and aerials. Not one of them actually completed the 150-mile course.
The 7.36-mile course in 2005 was more difficult, with 100 right and left turns, sheer drops and tunnels. Five of the 23 starters finished. In 2007, the Challenge was held at George Air Force Base in Southern California, where competitors negotiated 60 miles of buildings, vehicles, sidewalks and traffic lights against the clock, while observing the rules of the road. Six competitors were successful and the winner of the $2 million prize was the Chevrolet Tahoe, from the Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh.Although the DARPA Challenge hasn't been held since, research into making an autonomous car a reality has continued. The prize is enormous. In theory, the self-driving cars would never have an accident, never grow tired on the motorway and never suffer from road rage. It will drop you at your destination and park itself and, when you want to go home, you could whistle for it like a digital, petrol-powered version of Roy Roger's horse, Trigger. Now how much would the world pay for one of those?
So when stories of a self-driving Google car appeared three years ago, the world held its breath, while lawyers licked their lips at the thought of an accident claim against the search-engine colossus in the event of its self-driving car running amok. Google has admitted to testing the driver less car for over 300,000 miles on US roads, 50,000 of them autonomously, although two engineers were always on board in case of a malfunction.On 1st March 2012, the state of Nevada put into effect a law concerning the operation of driver less cars, allowing them to be tested on public roads provided there's someone behind the wheel, so that a htnian can take over in the event of a problem. In May 2012, it issued the first license for a driver less car: a Toyota Prius modified with Google's driver less technology.
Legal issues notwithstanding, car manufacturers have also kept working on the problem of the self-driving car. Ford, for example has kept the project alive at its research Center in Aachen, Germany. The results include intelligent cruise control systems that maintain a set distance from the car in front, and blind-spot warning systems as seen on the new Ford Focus. Professor Dr Pim van der Jagt, MD of the Aachen Center believes the autonomous car is some way off yet, however."The biggest problem is the range of different scenarios that a car might have to deal with," he says. "The average drive' will travel half a million miles between an accident and, as long as he or she is fully focused, they are probably safer than a system that, in certain conditions, might try to take over driving and make the wrong decision." Volkswagen, too, has worked on autonomous systems, and in 2006 produced the Golf GTI 53+1 (Herbie, the film-star VW Beetle, carried the number 53), which could beat a human driver over a set course.
The latest results of its research were unveiled in March 2011 at the Geneva Motor Show) when an autonomous Audi US coupe rumbled across the stage in front of scores of disbelieving journalists. The Audi is a technology demonstrator for Audi's 'Urban Mobility' project, which involves experts at VW's Palo Afto research laboratory and Stanford University, California, which itself was an entrant in the DARPA Challenges. The U was chosen because its existing systems — electronically controlled twin- clutch gearbox, drive-by-wire engine throttle and electronic power steering — are the raw requirements of a self-driving car. A measure of how things have progressed the first DARPA Challenge, however, is that the Audi looked just like a normal production car, and the computer hardware involved is scarcely larger than that in a standard laptop.
The Audi's two computers were mounted in the boot, one running safety algorithms using Oracle Real Time Java, the other running vehicle dynamics algorithms, which, with a differential GPS system, allows the car to respond to different surfaces, speeds and conditions and stay within 2cm of a Centre line on a normal road. To prove it, in September 2010, the US made its own way up the formidable 20km Pikes Peak hill climb in Colorado, USA.Michael Dick, Audi's head of technical development, said: "Projects such as these provide us with fundamental information for the driver assistance systems of tomorrow".While Google wants to exploit its maps and street-view systems in an autonomous driving scheme and the military wants to deploy autonomous fighting vehicles, for people in the real world, the legal implications of an accident in a self-driving car rule it out for the moment. So is there any point in this research?
One of the first uses of this type of technology might be in trains of cars electronically linked together to steer, accelerate and brake simultaneously. The first trial of such a system goes back to an experiment in San Diego in 1989, in which it was predicted that such 'platooning' could potentially achieve a four-fold increase in motorway capacity.The Sussex-based engineering group Ricardo is currently working with Volvo on a modern version of platooning called the Sartre project (Safe Road Trains for the Environment). This electronically locks cars together just one meter apart in high-speed convoys behind a driver in a truck or a bus, and uses radar, Wi-Fi and 3G phone systems to find, join and leave such convoys in safety. Volvo claims the system could result in up to 20 per cent fuel savings, from the consistent speeds achieved and superior aerodynamics.
As of May 2012, the Sartre Road Trains project had demonstrated three vehicles driving autonomously behind a truck for 124 miles at 50mph, with all the vehicles just six meters apart.Another result could be cars that automatically steer themselves to the side of the road should the driver suffer a heart attack. BMW is working on such a system as part of a German research project, although engineers admit that the current GPS systems don't have the millimeter-perfect resolution required and that current radar and laser ranging systems need to be smaller, more accurate and cheaper in order to make such a system viable.
For the moment, self-driving cars are way out of the reach of ordinary drivers, but the technology is constantly improving, and new models are gradually introducing more and more automation.
Teleportation from one place to another.
Why spend hours traveling when you can just teleport yourself to where you want to go instead? That's the ultimate dream of teleportation, most famously realized in Star Trek's transporter. Teleportation takes each atom in an object and sends it, without traversing the distance between, to a new location. In other words, an object disappears from one place and appears in another.The good news is that teleportation is entirely possible; the bad news is that the scale is very small and revolves around single particles. How teleportation works in the real world is down to a process known as quantum entanglement
I don't have the space here to explain it in full, even the bits we do understand, but basically two particles interact and then become intertwined. When you examine one particle and measure a single property, such as the spin (up or down), then the exact opposite reaction will be measurable on the other particle. The clever bit is that this remains the case even when the particles have been separated miles apart.Knowing this and understanding how to manipulate it forms the basis of what's known as quantum teleportation. There are drawbacks to the process, however. First, an entangled pair of particles has to be created and then distributed to two locations. Distribution is the really difficult part, as it's easy for the particles to become dis entailed. Once done, the process of manipulating the entangled particles can begin, forcing one particle to take the characteristics of the other teleportation.
The process has been successfully demonstrated in lab conditions, with Chinese physicists transporting photons over a distance of 97km. Unfortunately, it's unlikely the technology will ever apply to teleporting people, due to the complexity of the human body. A typical human body has 7*1027 atoms in it, or a 7 followed by 27 zeros. Each atom would have to be transported and assembled in the correct order at the other end — let's face it, it's going to get messy.
