"Where Is My Flying Car?
By J. Storrs Hall
(Stripe Press, 325 pages, $24)
The science-fiction writers who flourished in the postwar era, like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein, promised a glittering technological future. A lot of what they imagined has come true, from powerful pocket phones and a global library to synthetic foods and self-driving cars. "The Jetsons," which premiered in 1962, depicted a futuristic life of extraordinary ease. George Jetson's flying car folded into his briefcase, while his job at Spacely Space Sprockets consisted mostly of resting his feet on his desk while machines did the work.
The question for J. Storrs Hall is why some of those visions have materialized but others have not. Air travel remains a tedious business of driving to the airport, flying and then driving to the ultimate destination. Space travel languished for decades until a recent private-sector boom. And the way we generate, transmit and use energy remains antiquated.
Mr. Hall is a research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing and an associate editor of the International Journal of Nanotechnology and Molecular Computation. "Where Is My Flying Car?" is a handsomely designed hardback published by Stripe Press, owned by Stripe, the ragingly successful payments-infrastructure company. The press publishes "ideas for progress," and Stripe is to be applauded for trusting old-school printing to disseminate ideas. The combination of Mr. Hall and Stripe makes for an unusual kind of book -- argumentative, ornery, and technical yet ultimately inspiring.
Mr. Hall focuses on three scientific advances that he believes are within reach but remain unfulfilled: flying cars, nanotechnology and cold fusion. "The reason we don't have flying cars today isn't technological feasibility," he writes. "We have had the means to build, manufacture, and improve flying cars for the better part of a century."
Similarly, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a talk in 1959 titled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," in which he described an achievable pathway from large-scale to nanoscale manufacturing. Such a shift, he said, would allow us to make ever smaller sets of tools to make ever smaller products. The path was followed intermittently by a few brave souls. Had it been pursued more rigorously, Mr. Hall argues, "the entire physical paraphernalia of The Jetsons' world would be here now." The same thing happened to cold fusion, which promised enormous gains in energy use and efficiency but was never seriously pursued.
The author gives several reasons for this dispiriting phenomenon. The first is the "Machiavelli effect." In "The Prince," Machiavelli wrote that innovators are opposed by "all those who have done well under the old conditions." In scientific research, the academy tends to be full of people who have done well under the old conditions and resent novelty. They're protected by a centralized funding system that rewards incumbents and "makes it easier for cadres, cliques, and the politically skilled to gain control of a field." These established players "are resistant to new, outside, not-Ptolemaic ideas. The ivory tower has a moat full of crocodiles."
There are also what Mr. Hall terms "failures of nerve" and "failures of the imagination." Failures of nerve happen when the facts are known and the challenge clear, but somehow an experiment risks yielding a result that seems outlandish -- a flying machine, a rocket, factories the size of a pin. Failures of the imagination occur when we assume we know everything and rule out the vast possibilities of the unknown. Without accepting the limits of our knowledge, we will never exceed them.
Mr. Hall also blames a work-shy culture nourished since the 1960s, when Americans became so complacent about the satisfaction of their basic needs that they began to denigrate the value of technological progress. He argues that environmentalism has "essentially superseded Christianity as the default religion of Western civilization, especially in academic circles," and has "developed into an apocalyptic nature cult, centered around climate change." Skeptics are treated like heretics, an attitude that has frozen the science.
Another major obstacle to innovation has been regulation. The rise of product liability in the 1970s essentially killed the manufacture of private planes. Even as accident rates fell, product liability costs rose, limiting the growth of the business and killing the possibility of flying cars. Mr. Hall quotes Wilbur Wright, who said that "if you are looking for perfect safety, you would do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds." Had the Wright Brothers had to deal with today's Washington, D.C., they would likely have never tackled the improbable.
Flying cars, nanotechnology and cold fusion, Mr. Hall argues, would together blow away the "neurotic pessimism of our current culture." He imagines nanotech engines in lightweight aircraft, powered by abundant hydrogen, soundlessly whooshing into the air. These aircraft would zip through the sky, liberating the planet for more interesting uses than highways and parking lots.
With advanced manufacturing, we might dig out vast trenches of earth from under the oceans and pile them into new islands, all accessible by flying car. "What I would really like to do," he writes, "is float along over the ocean at about 3,000 feet in an open-decked airship, mai tai in hand, watching the endlessly fascinating cloudscapes, the spectacular sunsets, while being wafted from island to island by the trade winds."
Philosophically, Mr. Hall believes that we are constrained by a zero-sum view of the world, where we fight with one another over limited resources and reject any expansion of the possible. He craves a world of dynamism and increased productivity, one of "makers instead of takers" in which "everyone can afford a million-dollar flying car and vacation around the rings of Saturn." In this moment of physical and psychological constraint, it is hard not to get carried away." [1]
1. Waiting For the Future
Philip Delves Broughton. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 27 Dec 2021: A.17.
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