The switch to communist economy.

[Sig]

You can mark this post....

Depending how old you are, you will see flying cars in our lifetime.

Infrastructure spending on roads and bridges is the biggest waste of money of all time.
I'm not saying it's going away, our interstate system will always remain intact, as will our rails... but you are being very short-sighted with regards to what is coming down the pike.

5G, 6G whatever.... "the network"..... if you want to go to Krogers or wherever, you will back your lightweight, electrically powered, drone-like vehicle out of your garage, punch in where you want to go, and then not touch a thing. "The network" will get you there safely with no risk of any type of airborne collision or anything else. 100% hands-off.

I know it sounds crazy, but its gonna happen.
30 years tops.

As a former professional pilot I'm obviously biased, so keeping that in mind:
The technology to allow self-flown aircraft and even helicopters to go from takeoff to landing and automatically avoid hitting other aircraft has existed for more than a decade and is pretty mature. That's not what's stopping us from the Jetsons flying cars utopia. A little secret, pilots are largely superfluous 99.99% of the time. The problem is there are 42,000 flights a day in the U.S. alone, that .01% of the time they are needed represent 4 flights a day. Turn that into everyone with an aircraft in their garage and that .01% turns into hundreds of flights a day. Those are situations where systems fail, unanticipated weather shows up (you can't fly any aircraft invented in many convective systems), or you run into things like bird strikes. Things we can't easily invent solutions for. We're not as humans in a place where we're OK with even 4 autonomous aircraft falling out of the sky every day, let alone several hundred. Even if it was safer than driving, we're not in that place. It's not intellectual, it's visceral and no amount of explaining will make it more acceptable to folks, both those who will use those vehicles and everyone else who doesn't want to get hit when one falls out of the sky on them. So it's not technology that's holding us back, it's a much harder problem we have to overcome.

 

[vanzandt]

As a former professional pilot I'm obviously biased, so keeping that in mind:
The technology to allow self-flown aircraft and even helicopters to go from takeoff to landing and automatically avoid hitting other aircraft has existed for more than a decade and is pretty mature. That's not what's stopping us from the Jetsons flying cars utopia. A little secret, pilots are largely superfluous 99.99% of the time. The problem is there are 42,000 flights a day in the U.S. alone, that .01% of the time they are needed represent 4 flights a day. Turn that into everyone with an aircraft in their garage and that .01% turns into hundreds of flights a day. Those are situations where systems fail, unanticipated weather shows up (you can't fly any aircraft invented in many convective systems), or you run into things like bird strikes. Things we can't easily invent solutions for. We're not as humans in a place where we're OK with even 4 autonomous aircraft falling out of the sky every day, let alone several hundred. Even if it was safer than driving, we're not in that place. It's not intellectual, it's visceral and no amount of explaining will make it more acceptable to folks, both those who will use those vehicles and everyone else who doesn't want to get hit when one falls out of the sky on them. So it's not technology that's holding us back, it's a much harder problem we have to overcome.

That's why I said it's 30 years out.
I understand the 100's of unknown variables, wx is obviously a biggie . But we must also look at the exponential evolution of technology. We're at the the very tip of the iceberg here. We really are.
So yeah, maybe the wife won't be heading out to WMT when towering CU and their associated micro-bursts are in the area, and maybe she'll just have to stay home and wait for a vfr day, and maybe we won't eliminate the unending cycle of asphalt resurfacing.... but I can promise you Sig.... we will see flying cars on a city by city basis as the "network" itself evolves to the extent that its reliability is 101%. And just as it evolves, I have a feeling the weather guessers' tools will evolve too; as they go the way of the dinosaur.

 

[Overnight]

You can mark this post....

Depending how old you are, you will see flying cars in our lifetime....

On this I will disagree with you sir. Give the flying car genre deal another 100 years to mature. And even by then we still have the problem of the people behind the yoke.

 

[vanzandt]

On this I will disagree with you sir. Give the flying car genre deal another 100 years to mature. And even by then we still have the problem of the people behind the yoke.

There will not be any human input.
Zero.

And Sig.... I 10,000% understand the wx factor. If there's ANY variable here that will slow things down, that's it.

Mechanical reliability, it'll be 99.999999% there. As will collision avoidance. You can open up a 3D design program now, build a room, fill that room with 100,000 randomly flying bee-bee's, each talking to each other, but at the same time determining their own pathway in the absence of a correction, and not one will hit another. If we can do that on a desktop now, ya gotta see what that means. That's why I say its all about the network, and the brains behind it. Instantaneous calculations that even today may take 10 seconds, tomorrow will be done in better than 1EE-6 ms.

The weather..... ?
You're basing your determinations on what you know today.
These vehicles will have 1000's of sensors on them. And all those sensors will be all talking to "the network". A decent driver today has two car-lengths between themselves and the car up front. You roll over a point on the road a split second after the car in front of you. Now, envision this an xyz set of coordinates. If each and every car is picking up the most minuscule variation in one of 1000 meteorological variables, and its sending those off in one/one millionth of a ms to the all knowing network, and that network has had a decade of drones feeding it non-stop with a trillion bits of data per second, correlated to instantaneous weather conditions for ANY given point in space... and decades of models, it will bring that reliability to a level of safety 10-fold of that which exists on our roads today.

 

[VicBee]

There will not be any human input.
Zero.

And Sig.... I 10,000% understand the wx factor. If there's ANY variable here that will slow things down, that's it.

Mechanical reliability, it'll be 99.999999% there. As will collision avoidance. You can open up a 3D design program now, build a room, fill that room with 100,000 randomly flying bee-bee's, each talking to each other, but at the same time determining their own pathway in the absence of a correction, and not one will hit another. If we can do that on a desktop now, ya gotta see what that means. That's why I say its all about the network, and the brains behind it. Instantaneous calculations that even today may take 10 seconds, tomorrow will be done in better than 1EE-6 ms.

The weather..... ?
You're basing your determinations on what you know today.
These vehicles will have 1000's of sensors on them. And all those sensors will be all talking to "the network". A decent driver today has two car-lengths between themselves and the car up front. You roll over a point on the road a split second after the car in front of you. Now, envision this an xyz set of coordinates. If each and every car is picking up the most minuscule variation in one of 1000 meteorological variables, and its sending those off in one/one millionth of a ms to the all knowing network, and that network has had a decade of drones feeding it non-stop with a trillion bits of data per second, correlated to instantaneous weather conditions for ANY given point in space... and decades of models, it will bring that reliability to a level of safety 10-fold of that which exists on our roads today.

All that may be, but I think it will first come and need to be validated on terrestrial vehicles.

 

[Sig]

All that may be, but I think it will first come and need to be validated on terrestrial vehicles.

Things like collision avoidance are actually far easier in the air where you can mandate that at least all the other human made flyers have the same TCAS system and you can usually move in 3 axis to avoid collision. Much harder to deal with pedestrians, bicyclists, and other random moving objects on the ground, especially when you can only go left/right and not up/down and when the objects on the ground can pop out from behind solid objects you can't see through in any way. There actually aren't any insurmountable collision avoidance technology issues with aircraft except with respect to birds, I think there are insurmountable issues with terrestrial vehicles. The bigger problems are equipment failures (including maintenance issues) and weather.

 

[vanzandt]

Things like collision avoidance are actually far easier in the air where you can mandate that at least all the other human made flyers have the same TCAS system and you can usually move in 3 axis to avoid collision. Much harder to deal with pedestrians, bicyclists, and other random moving objects on the ground, especially when you can only go left/right and not up/down and when the objects on the ground can pop out from behind solid objects you can't see through in any way. There actually aren't any insurmountable collision avoidance technology issues with aircraft except with respect to birds, I think there are insurmountable issues with terrestrial vehicles. The bigger problems are equipment failures (including maintenance issues) and weather.

lol.... Sig I was going to make that exact post, its way way safer up there as long as the mechanical reliability is there. Which it will be. The network will know what each and every 'vehicle' is doing and where its going. I thought about the birds too. Hmmm. Not as much of a mechanical threat as sucking one into the turbo-fan on a jet, and I would think material science will eliminate any external structural damage on a hard strike, but there is the environmental factor. Migratory patterns etc.

I'll have to do some digging into that, I'm sure Amazon and some of these other companies experimenting with drone delivery have done research on bird-strikes. It'll be interesting to read their thoughts on the matter.

 

[bone]

Self Driving Cars >>>> Road Head

 

[Windlesham1]

lol.... Sig I was going to make that exact post, its way way safer up there as long as the mechanical reliability is there. Which it will be. The network will know what each and every 'vehicle' is doing and where its going. I thought about the birds too. Hmmm. Not as much of a mechanical threat as sucking one into the turbo-fan on a jet, and I would think material science will eliminate any external structural damage on a hard strike, but there is the environmental factor. Migratory patterns etc.

I'll have to do some digging into that, I'm sure Amazon and some of these other companies experimenting with drone delivery have done research on bird-strikes. It'll be interesting to read their thoughts on the matter.

So we just need robot birds