"As human population continues to increase here on earth, congested streets and highways will abound at a rate well beyond our current plans for solution. Something is drastically needed to relax traffic congestion. An Aircar that con be housed in your garage; can takeoff "quietly" from in front of your house without a runway; and take you to work and back every day is conceptualized herein. A design specification for an Aircar is developed herein by first identifying the impracticalities of everyone having an Aircar for everyday use and then sets forth the technological means for overcoming each of the identified impracticalities. An Aircar design concept is presented based on a design specification. The one great importance of this book is that it identifies large number of applications currently under development, many of which have not been oriented toward any specific application.. Such technologies include nanotube materials, electrogravity propulsion, Lithium Air batteries, "free energy" electrical generators, plasma actuators for boundary layer flow control and noise reduction and electronic guidance and safety control. Thus, the development of the Aircar will bring to the entire aeronautical industry the full development of such relatively "far out" technologies."

From an engineer and futurist, an impassioned account of technological stagnation since the 1970s and an imaginative blueprint for a richer, more abundant future The science fiction of the 1960s promised us a future remade by technological innovation: we’d vacation in geodesic domes on Mars, have meaningful conversations with computers, and drop our children off at school in flying cars. Fast-forward 60 years, and we’re still stuck in traffic in gas-guzzling sedans and boarding the same types of planes we flew in over half a century ago. What happened to the future we were promised? In Where Is My Flying Car?, J. Storrs Hall sets out to answer this deceptively simple question. What starts as an examination of the technical limitations of building flying cars evolves into an investigation of the scientific, technological, and social roots of the economic stagnation that started in the 1970s. From the failure to adopt nuclear energy and the suppression of cold fusion technology to the rise of a counterculture hostile to progress, Hall recounts how our collective ambitions for the future were derailed, with devastating consequences for global wealth creation and distribution. Hall then outlines a framework for a future powered by exponential progress—one in which we build as much in the world of atoms as we do in the world of bits, one rich in abundance and wonder. Drawing on years of original research and personal engineering experience, Where Is My Flying Car?, originally published in 2018, is an urgent, timely analysis of technological progress over the last 50 years and a bold vision for a better future.

The debut poetry collection from Arab-American poet Kareem Rahma-formerly of VICE and The New York Times-shows us the future in haiku. What awaits us is not the future we had hoped for or what we were promised, but the terrible consequences of we've done to ourselves. Managing to be both a hopeful prayer for change and direct warning to the reader, New York-based author Kareem Rahma makes masterful work of the haiku form to build a very possible future world dominated by corporations, an earth depleted of natural resources and humans turned into zombies, glued to their screens. Elegant but caustically humorous, even in the darkness, Rahma remains hopeful that we can still keep the promises we made in the past. Paired with Jean-Marc Côté's 19th-century illustrations of an imagined year 2000, We Were Promised Flying Cars is not just for poetry and science fiction fans, but anyone interested in what tomorrow might look like.

Humans have always wanted to fly. As soon as there were planes and cars, many people saw a combination as the next step for personal transportation, and visionary engineers and inventors did their best to make the flying car (or the roadable plane) a reality. This book is a breezy account of hybrid vehicles and their creators, and of the intense drive that kept bringing inventors back to the drawing board despite repeated failures and the dictates of common sense. Illustrated with archival photos, this entertaining survey takes readers back as far as Icarus and forward into the present day, with a look toward the future. Includes author's note, source notes, bibliography, index.

Fallows, a correspondent for Atlantic Monthly, explores future trends in commercial aviation technology that may make airline travel easier and quicker than the current hub system. He focuses on three separate groups of innovators who are developing a NASA small plane research program, a small airplane with a parachute for the entire plane, and an inexpensive jet plane for air taxi services. c. Book News Inc.

A selection of Kotler's previously published writings, updated, on pivotal and controversial advances in science and technology.--

"Flying cars, mail delivery by parachute, and other predictions from the past"--Jacket.

Explores universal questions about humanity's capacity for living and thriving in the coming age of sentient machines and AI, examining debates from opposing perspectives while discussing emerging intellectual diversity and its potential role in enabling a positive life.

Every time you chew a stick of Juicy Fruit, eat a hamburger, slip on a nylon, plug your phone into a wall socket, flick on a TV, withdraw money from an ATM, lick an ice-cream cone, switch on a computer, ride an escalator, play a DVR, watch a movie about dinosaurs, or pop a tranquilizer, you’re doing something that originated at a world’s fair or trade expo. In fact, each new technology and every novel product that rocked America and rolled the world, from the Colt revolver and the Corvette to fax machines and flush toilets, started at trade fairs, a $100 billion industry that includes world expos, trade shows, and state fairs. More than just promoting material things, however, trade fairs popularized and evangelized every social movement and cultural concept, too, including Manifest Destiny, the closing of the frontier, Nudism, Nazism, Fascism, eugenics, female suffrage, temperance, and technocracy. While there have been notable works on world’s fairs by Robert Rydell, Erik Larsen, Erik Mattie, and others, they only capture a fragment of the whole mosaic of these shows—a mosaic that makes the glitziest Las Vegas spectacle look like an Amish barn-raising. This amusing book covers, for example, the World’s Fair that featured a nudist colony (1935); Salvador Dali’s half-naked lobster women, their virtue barely secured by well-placed crustaceans (1939); a model of the Liberty Bell made of Oranges (1893); one of Thomas Edison’s lesser-known inventions, the prefabricated concrete home (1907); and the Bayer Company’s experiment with selling heroin. More memorable and culturally iconic debuts discussed here include electricity, radios, the Volkswagen and the Corvette, television, the X-ray machine, air conditioning, and even nylon stockings. Dozens of short, illustrated chapters take the reader through over 150 years of world and trade fairs, from the vibrators displayed by sexual health advocates at the 1900 World’s Fair to the first true IMAX film at Expo ’70 in Japan.

With the promise of delivery drones, personal helicopters and groceries delivered right to your refrigerator, one might think we are living in the best of transportation times. However, most city commuters would be quick to tell you otherwise. Of all the technological interventions continuously inserted into our daily travels, which ones will last? Is ride-sharing here to stay? In ten years will we all be taking autonomous vehicles to work? Will traffic as we know it cease to exist? While this volume makes no promises or predictions, it does take a step back from the hype of the new to explore more of the options from what might seem like yesterday?s solutions: busses, bikes and even trains. Perhaps remedies to our transportation woes are not all in the future but are hiding in plain and present site. 00'The Future of Transportation' is the third volume in the 'SOM Thinkers' series, conceived by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. 'SOM Thinkers' originated from a desire to start a public conversation about the built environment. Rather than frame the subject in the expected ?professional? language, the series poses today?s most pressing questions about design and architecture in a bold and accessible way.