Terrafugia, a company based in Woburn, says it’s getting close to putting a flying car into production. Terrafugia’s Transition is really an airplane-that-rolls more than a car-that-flies, but still, you will be able to fly it between airports and also drive it on streets and highways. Among the features that can be yours for a list price of $279,000 are patented elecro-mechanical folding wings, an airframe parachute, all-wheel hydraulic disc brakes, and a golf club storage compartment. Also, the company’s promotional literature adds, “you can call it your ‘flying car.’ ”
This development should make any remaining fans of the future very happy. There used to be a lot more of them. As other commentators have recently pointed out, including Edward Rothstein of The New York Times and Virginia Postrel of Bloomberg, Americans used to be high on the future. Its reputation boomed during the first two-thirds of the 20th century, from the era of horseless carriages, skyscrapers, and global expansion through the golden age of World’s Fairs and science fiction, the rise of robotics and aviation, and the postwar era of “The Jetsons” and the space race, arriving at a climax in, say, 1969, the year of both the first moon landing and the final season of the original “Star Trek.”
Comments
An apocalyptic future is no more probable than a Utopian one. Utopia means 'nowhere' for a reason. And extrapolation, which is to some extent all we've got to define the future, is the very Devil's work: there will always be completely unexpected game changers. We don't have flying cars these days, but neither do we have computers that grew in size from basement-filling Univacs to whole cities or planets. And they haven't taken over, and artificial intelligence remains not only a distant goal but one whose very definition, even the possibility of its achievement, remain the subject of dispute.
Problem is, there's an element of self-fulfilling prophecy to all this. An apocalypse is nothing if not a breakdown of civil order and relations. In the fifties and sixties, one thought of nuclear war, and, perhaps, built a fallout shelter. Now, people imagine zombies. But those zombies all too often turn into Ayn Rand's moochers and looters, and, all too often, people buy guns. They buy ammunition. They practice with them sometimes, and every shot fired reminds them that they're preparing to defend themselves against the Other, who becomes dehumanbized. Trying to understand the Other is not only useless, but a sign of weakness. Coming together to solve problems is not just a betrayal of values, but bringing a guitar to a gun fight. Talking to someone with whom you disagree--negotiation, it was once called--is, as in the Bush-Cheney administration, viewed as concession to an enemy, rather than something adults do.
Me, I'll take a flying car over all that...