How Will We Get Around Near-Future Earth?

Slob Nerd points to this BBC article on future transport possibilities. It begins "The prospect of a revolution in air travel has been raised by Nasa's successful test of a 5,000mph plane. But are we likely to see similar advances in other forms of transport? Dusting off the crystal ball, what changes might come in the way we get around? What big ideas are out there, and do they have any chance of seeing the light of day?"

Whatever it is...

[Valar]

it'll be safe to say it isn't the segway... :P

I want my flying car

[richardoz]

you insensitive clod...

Transporters

[ePhil_One]

Star Trek style Transporters. The government has them in secret underground bases, but the aliens dont want us to know about them, so they force the government to keep them hidden.

Not by walking

[EugeneK]

One thing is clear; in America no one will walk. It will be too dangerous - if you aren't run over by an SUV, suffocated by smog, you'll collapse from a heart attack because you weigh 300 pounds and you're body can't take the exertion.

Re:I want my flying car

[Vancorps]

I wanna talk on my cell phone while reading a news paper with one foot out my door while I drive a flying car!

By God, the future had better include...

[paulschroeder]

a hoverboard a la Back to the Future II.

Moller SkyCar...

[m0ng0l]

One hopes that this idea might "get off the ground." I for one would love to finally have the flying cars we were all promised we'd be riding in by the 1990s' Although I doubt this thing would be able to get past FAA regs, much less be cleared to allow people to have one in their garage, to take out in the morning, and zoom off to work, vacation, or whatever...

Jason A.

Another Earth????!!!! NOOO!!!!

[Orthogonal Jones]

I can bench press a lot, me and my near-future self will bench press each other. Then we'll get around the near-future earth.

Of course, we would then have to get around Bizarro Earth. Personally, I'm assuming my Bizarro self is a terrific dancer and extremely wealthy, so I plan on crashing on his couch.

Out where?

[Kenja]

I dont go outside now, why should the future be any different?

Re:I want my flying car

[Sevn]

Considering the morons they let drive cars, the only way I'd feel safe driving the friendly skies would be if:

1) Manditory intelligence testing
2) Manditory hand eye coordination testing
3) Manditory reaction time testing
4) Hardcore schooling and licensing program
5) Very intense vehicle licensing and inspection program

I don't want to share the skies with the same people that drive beat to shit, oil burning cameros from the late 70's if they are going to drive a similar sky vehicle. By that same token, I DEFINITELY don't want to share the skies with your typical hunched over florida driver behind the wheel of a shit insane scary swerving winged cadillac.

Man

[SargeZT]

The government has a water fueled car... but man, they won't tell us, because then we'd use all the water, and only have beer left to drink. And man, beer sets your mind free!

DeLorean

[ItMustBeEsoteric]

How are they going to add the time travel feature if they don't make new models?!?! I WAS PROMISED A TIME TELEPORTING CAR.

http://www.delorean.com/

Real men...

[222]

Real men travel via |

Piiipesss!!! [1]

[pipingguy]

Pipeline Monorail [slashdot.org] anyone?

[1] My apologies to Bill Cosby's Shelby Cobra routine.

Re:Not by walking

[Anonymous Coward]

Take that back! I'm American, and I'm a trim 240!

Re:Whatever it is...

[Dutchmaan]

What if you put a scram jet ON a segway!? That's fun for the whole family!

Re:Not by walking

[Vancorps]

Or maybe we can be like China [weeklyworldnews.com] and ban walking and force everyone to run!

Solve any congestion problems and improve the health of citizens at the same time. Seems like a great idea to me

Re:Transporters

[jmv]

There should be a way to meta-mod that (Score:2, Informative) as "funny".

Re:Really big airplanes?

[Oculus Habent]

They require completely new airports - out of the question in most large cities, where the cities grew around the airport and there is no possibility of expansion.

Re:I want my flying car

[BlueCup]

1) Mandatory intelligence testing

I don't want people driving that can't spell.

All apologies if this is a spelling accepted in other countries.

I highly doubt that...

[modder]

"Nasa scientists say their experimental X-43A jet has the potential to make the world a much smaller place."

Somehow I find it difficult to believe that NASA scientists said their experimental jet will alter the size of thw world.

Re:I want my flying car

[A.T. Hun]

You forgot

6) I would be allowed to have air-to-air missiles

Re:Transporters

[MagFox]

Informative and insightful! Now that is funny.

Re:Proofreading the title yields:

[Chris Burke]

No, no, the title is correct. In the original draft, the author speculated about the effects that time-travel would have on the travel industry, and the possibility of accidentally sending the entire planet earth back in time. If that happens then before it happens we'll see an earth from the future appear in our orbit. We'll of course our earth gravitationally attracted to the earth from the future, thus "How Will We Get Around Near-Future Earth". Later editing made the submitter's title seem oddly un-proofread. Uh... I'm assuming.

SciFi ways

[gmuslera]

The nice thing about that is that a new discover could put them nearer than we think.

• Transporters a la Star Trek, or another way of instant transportation could be cool, but we must get rid of those damn flys.
• Wormholes thru earth! Cool! You could be in another place in seconds, and the rest of the world also! (is bad luck that that "another place" is called hell).
• If an orbital elevator is done, why not build a ring around the world with elevators going up and down in strategical places? You could take an elevator, round around the earth, and descend in the other side of the world with almost cost zero and probably pretty fast.
• Brain switching (i think i saw a movie about that last days :) upload your brain to someone's else brain, do what you have to do in the other side of the world and reswich to go back. The risk is with who you made the switch.
• Duplicators: what if with certain process, an exact copy of you can emerge hundreds of miles away and do what you need to do? (well, unless you want to take vacations). The problem is what you do after with your clones (at least in Rogue Moon Algys Budrys had a solution)
• Why use cars? just use rolling roads and people could go everywhere.
• Last but not least: why travel? if everywhere exist good bandwidth, maybe most tasks could be done remotely and with voip and videoconferences the need to be in other places could be relative. And if you want to travel to rest, going slow will be better than going fast.

Re:Transporters

[Ironica]

There should be a way to meta-mod that (Score:2, Informative) as "funny".

Hey, speak for yourself! I for one didn't know that the government has transporters, or that they were in league with the aliens. This information is very important to keeping my tin-foil hat in tune.

Thanks for the informative post, ePhil_One!

Re:Whatever it is...

[whereiswaldo]

What if you put a scram jet ON a segway!? That's fun for the whole family!

Sure, till the battery runs out! [batteriesdigest.com]

Jokes aside, I'm glad to read the page I linked to. If it's true, the problem reported awhile back about Segways stopped dead in their tracks when the battery runs low doesn't seem as bad as it was made out to be. However, it does still leave me with a question: what do you do with your Segway if the battery runs low and you're 3 miles from home? Can you carry a spare, or do you push it back home?

one word:

[Tumbleweed]

Arcology

Re:High speed trains

[ArsSineArtificio]

Europe has never concentrated an effort on an organized road system like the us did untill recently (if they ever did).

Actually, they put a lot of work into it, but the Visigoths screwed it up.

Re:Whatever it is...

[I_Love_Pocky!]

That's right... I think in the future we will all be getting from place to place by way of cannon. You just get yourself a nice helmet, climb down the barrel, and you're off. Easy as that. Alternatively we could all ride camels.

Re:Trains are in fine shape already.

[modder]

This goes against everything Civ ever taught me.

Forget flying cars

[KalvinB]

with all this genetic engineering go on, I want my flying monkey.

I don't care if it's a european or african flying monkey. As long as it can hold the weight and get me to work.

Ben

Re:I want my flying car

[spood]

But at least the grandparent spelled "definitely" correctly. It's a misspelling paradigm shift!

My dreams for the future!!!

[rock_climbing_guy]

My alternative transportation system was working pretty well until I ran out of hamster food. I've scrapped the project for now.

Now, I'm looking into alternate methods to power my g#4gFW43[NO CARRIER]

How Will We Get Around Near-Future Earth?

[Daetrin]

"How Will We Get Around Near-Future Earth?" Why? Is it in the way of something?

Re:High speed trains

[Jardine]

Alternatives abound, consider a ground-based catapult launch system to get the plane up to a reasonable velocity

Wait a minute. I've heard of this. It's called Elbonian airlines. But where would we find enough mud to make the landings soft?

Incomplete treatment of the subject...

[Safety State]

Although we often speak of increased efficiency in the means of propulsion and in the production of fuel, we too rarely consider the gains promised by more radical approaches.

One might, for example, achieve high-velocity subjective travel merely through a distributed effort to rearrange human definitions of location. By exchanging Surrey and Essex in the general social awareness, humans could potentially travel instantaneously between the two. With digital technology such a measure is no pipe dream; its only complication lies in the difficulty of cooperatively scheduling each individual's location at a specifically desired time.

Another approach which may alleviate the inefficiencies of travel altogether is to restrict each human corporeally to one narrow venue, preferably bounded by chain or wire mesh, within which that human may live free of geography's inconvenience. Such innovative measures are already being developed globally, and it is a simple question of how quickly all humans can be accused of terrorist sympathies before we can consider ourselves to have discovered the future of transportation.

Flying cars - from Wikipedia Brittanica (2050)

[Epeeist]

The era of flying cars started in Britain about 2010. The Smart car [thesmart.co.uk] company was the progenitor, essentially by adding a pair of wings to its lightweight vehicle. The introduction was timely, in that the minority coalition of Conservative and New Labour parties, under their "Privatise everything" policy were introducing tolls on all roads. The flying car avoided this by not using roads at all.

The concept quickly spread to Europe, causing the Channel Tunnel company to become bankrupt.

The idea was imported to America but was a distinct failure. Although the country would have seemed ideal for such an invention the inability of American companies to make a "Flying Humvee" that would do more than half a mile on full fuel load meant that it never caught on.

Re:I want my flying car

[rishistar]

I think they should all have completed Descent [gamespot.com]

Re:Trains are in fine shape already.

[turgid]

Setting aside the idiotic abbreviation "USicans" (hint: the proper term for citizens of the United States of America is "Americans", for citizens of the United States of Mexico is "Mexicans", etc.)...

...and residents of Texas are Texicans, or is that reserved for employees of the Texaco corporation?

The future

[salesgeek]

Due to the terrorism threat, travel for all non-corporate purposes using vehicles powered by flamable substances has been prohibited. Instead, we expect you to watch your television like a good lemming -er- citizen.

Please call the Ministry of Love if you have any questions.

Doesn't anyone read Heinlein any more?

[kent_eh]

All mass transit will be high speed conveyer belts! [technovelgy.com]

SUVs

[Anonymous Coward]

SUVs the size of oil tankers. We have to continue the "arms race" of who has the biggest SUV.

two and a half words:

[LordMyren]

vincent black-shadow

Empower the people

[Syberghost]

It's funny when people who insist that the PC is great because it puts the power to control one's computing destiny into one's own hands, instead of the old model of centralized computing, also insist on mass transportation, instead of owning private cars that put one's travel destiny into one's own hands.