The future cannot be stoped.
Enjoy what you can before you leave this planet.
Take Care Everyone.
Best Regards,
Mr. Michael J. Morrison
37yrs Canadian

As I said its an emperical observation. My proposed explanation was declining marginal utility. The computer industry is a good example. New PCs used to be upwards of $3,000 fully loaded. Those prices have been lost forever. The market will no longer support them, and will no longer support much R&D. Dell the market leader does none.

“Oh, and a good counterexample is the telephone. Introduced in the 1870′s, it entered a period of relative stasis after the AT&T monopoly was granted, only to begin generating new revolutionary developments after new players were let in and some publicly owned spectrum was released for use in cell phones.”

Bell patented the telephone in 1876. “In 1877, construction of the first regular telephone line from Boston to Somerville, Massachusetts was completed. By the end of 1880, there were 47,900 telephones in the United States. The following year telephone service between Boston and Providence had been established. Service between New York and Chicago started in 1892, and between New York and Boston in 1894. Transcontinental service by overhead wire was . . .[begun in] 1915.”

“In 1889, Almon B. Strowger a Kansas City undertaker, invented a switch that could connect one line to any of 100 lines by using relays and sliders. . . An associate of Strowgers’ invented the rotary dial in 1896 . . . ” which was universal by the 1940s.

That pretty much describes the system as I found it, growing up in the 1950′s. The Bell system started installing computerized hybrid digital/analogue switches in the 1960s and started offering touch tone service. Cell phones became possible because of other technological advances and the willingness of the FCC to allocate spectrum in the mid 1970′s. It was not until cell phones became digital devices in the 1990s that they could be universal pocket communicators, because analogue cell phones were far too heavy and power hungry to be practical.

What I see with telecommunications is a mature infrasturcture that is being destroyed and replaced by a new digital system that will be vey different physically (based on fiber and coax running to computer hubs and thence via VOIP) and economically (all new players).

I don’t know. There are still ongoing developments other than ever-faster CPU’s, with improvements in networked portable computers (notably the fold-up variant with a cell phone built in), wireless networking, and continuing improvements in software production tools and available software. Whether this counts as a separate “technology” with its own 60 year lifespan, I don’t know.

And where does that 60 year span come from? Is that how long it takes most societies to regulate a new technology into stasis? Is that how long it takes the most talented people to get bored with it and work on something else? Is that how long it takes for the product to get to a point where most consumers figure it’s “good enough” and stop upgrading regardless of further developments?

Oh, and a good counterexample is the telephone. Introduced in the 1870′s, it entered a period of relative stasis after the AT&T monopoly was granted, only to begin generating new revolutionary developments after new players were let in and some publicly owned spectrum was released for use in cell phones.

At any rate, even if further revolutionary developments in personal aircraft aren’t technically feasible, then loosening controls on their use in lightly populated areas still won’t really hurt anyone (at least, not anyone who doesn’t deliberately accept a risk) or cost any real money, and it seems likely to allow some improvements in price and quality that benefit society. I don’t see any way we could lose, and we just might win big – I suspect we would once a relatively deregulated industry manages to attract more talent to the task. Can’t hurt either way…

No, but I have an empirical observation that may indicate a law of economics/technology. The observation is that the exponential growth phase of a technology from the time that the first useful implementation is produced until a mature implementation is about 60 years or two generations.

The observation conceptualizes the growth of a technology in three phases like a yeast growth curve an initial, perhaps long linear take off period, the short exponential growth period, and then the slower more linear growth of the mature period.

Example airplanes. Lots of experimentation and tinkering throughout the 19th century. In 1903, the Wright brothers. The 747 flew 66 years later in 1969 and the SR71 63 years later in 1966. The A380 is an advance over the 747, but it is an incremental and linear advance, coming 36 years later. 36 years before the 747, saw the introduction of the first planes that became the DC-3 series of twin engine prop transport planes that could carry 24 passengers. That is the difference between exponential and linear development.

We may be seeing the same phenomenon in computers. Just last year Intel announced that it would not be producing a 4 GHz Pentium IV because it could not solve current leakage and heat dissipation problems. We are approaching the 60th anniversary of the invention of the transistor. Is this a coincidence?

The economic law that may serve to explain this phenomenon might be the law of diminishing returns.

I think this is the incident you are think about.

I don’t think care actually flew, although if he had hit a steep enough hill going up slope…

I hope one or two of the above “facts” are more or less true.

Technically, you could fly a brick these days if you have the right stuff (of course the Impala owner didn’t quite have the right stuff) but, just like cars, why would you want to?

Actually, I really meant that different problems present themselves at different scales.

For example, a small insect like a bee expends about 10% of its power getting airborne. That is why bees to so much VTOL. Its easy for them. But, moving forward against air resistance cost a takes 90% of its thrust. On the scale of a bee, air is quite viscous. For a bee, flying is more like what we would think of as swimming. The almost floats on the air.

As the size increases this ration changes, for large birds the ratio is around 50/50. Big birds just can’t leap into the air, they need a running start.

By the time you get up to something a human will fit in the ration is 90% of thrust to get you in the air and 10% to move forward. That is why VTOL craft, including helicopters are very inefficient.

That is why supersonic aircraft like the Concord, the SR-71 or even supersonic missiles are very large. Once you get them moving its more efficient to be big at high speeds.

Even given all the objections I mention I really think that making a flying car is well within the capabilities of contemporary technology.

Its making a LANDING car that’s the bitch.

When the weather turns cool I get under the hood and remove the belt that drives the compressor. As long as the AC isn’t actually slowing the engine down I get 28 MPH in the city, 34 or so on the highway.

When it gets hot I put the belt back on. Then the compressor is always on no matter what. My gas milage plummets to 22 MPH city, 25 highway.

Think about that for a minute. My car, which is broken but still runs, nevertheless travels along the ground at a little better than 20 MPG.

Look at the Moller website and you’ll see that they’re predicting that their M400 passenger Skycar sedan will get 20 MPG.

20 MPG even though it’s a VTOL aircraft. 20 MPG even though (they say) it will still run on the same gasoline that I put in my car. 20 MPG even though it’s cruising speed is 205 MPH.

Shannon has a very good comment up above this one, where she points out that physics dictates aircraft design. I’m not even sure that you can get 20 MPG with a ground car travelling at 205 MPH, let alone a VTOL aircraft! But that’s what Moller wants us to believe.

I dunno, guys. Sounds like someone’s willing to say anything in order to drum up investors.

James

Because the only thing I see them really trying hard to achieve is courting investors.

When I started to blog about flying cars, they didn’t even have a working prototype. But, even so, they wanted people to invest while promising untold riches if you sunk some cash into the company.

Years go by, Eventually they have something they say is an early model, but it looks an awful lot like a reproduction of the 1950′s Avro Car to me. (And you can get plans of an Avro Car online.) Then, finally, they have a video of an anchored hover test of their Skycar. i still don’t see anything that says they’re ready for production.

But they claim that they are ready….almost. Just need some more money. Pay them $100K USD and you’ll get put on a list so you can buy one of the first 25 Skycars to roll of the assembly line, delivery date sometime in 2006. Pay less and get further down the list.

Or you can get in line for your very own dealership. Just pay the Moller people some money and you’ll get down on the list for preferential consideration when production is ramped up and the vehicles are finally (finally!!!) ready for delivery.

Or you can buy an artist’s rendition of a Skycar in flight, or a T-shirt, or a model. Yeah, sure, they’re not the real thing, but at least they’re willing to ship this stuff immediately instead of some unspecified time in the future that never seems to actually arrive.

Like I said, when a dealership opens near me I’m gonna go for a test drive. ‘Till then…

James

I didn’t think so.

Well, then I expect we wouldn’t be using car sized aircraft. That’s where increased sprawl pays off – we won’t need car sized aircraft when we’re spread out the way we can be with aircraft.

Yep. Just the point I was trying to make, only with a whole lot more words :)

The real work for our side is getting people to realize that the regulatory state retards technological progress. A lot of people seem to have the idea that the regulatory state facilitates progress!

Well, I’m game to keep posting and plugging away at the job of persuading people otherwise until Hell freezes…

I think the real obstacle to flying cars is simply the fact that the regulatory state took over before they became technically feasible. I expect the only reason they even let us have cars is that they’re grandfathered in.

For example, cars started off barely more than a four wheel bicycle. By the 1950′s they reach land yacht sizes and then pretty much stopped. Even giant SUV’s are the size of utility vehicles of the 50′s. Cars stopped going in size because they hit a functional upper limit. If you drew a graph of car size from 1890-1955 you would extrapolate that we should all be driving something the size of semi-truck down to the Quicky Mart. Conversely, successful car designs have a certain minimum size as well. (the top speed of vehicles flattened out around the same time)

Aircraft have similar constraints at the upper and lower ranges of size and speed. Looking at the conceptions of what people in 1955 expect air transport to look like in the year 2000 you see expectations of giant, supersonic aircraft. Yet aircraft size and speed stalled out in mid-70′s. They did so because cost of increasing size and speed increased non-linearly. A plane that was 50% faster cost 10 times as much.

Similar problems dog smaller aircraft. The smaller an aircraft gets the less efficiently it flies. The ratio between the size of the aircraft and the size of its cargo plummets. Speed and range fall off in a non-linear fashion as well. Small aircraft are more sensitive to poor flying conditions meaning they have proportionately less up time. (These are problems of physics by the way, not technology per se. That is, given the same technology a mid-sized aircraft will always fly more efficiently than a very large or very small aircraft. Just like a flapping wing works well on the scale of bug or bird but fails at larger sizes. It doesn’t scale.)

I don’t see any of these limitations changing anytime soon. A car sized aircraft will be to inefficient for most purposes. Even if you got some kind of super-engine with such great weight-to-lift ration you strap it onto your Honda accord and fly it to work, the noise it would generate would make it useless for widespread use.

I’m sure me and the other locals will be able to make kill zone that will discourage UAV’s, personal flying cars, and all manner of other pests.