SyFy Q of the Day: Flying Cars

Before I even started this blog, I would occasionally pose a SyFy Question of the Day to my facebook friends. Sometimes, it was directly related to what I was writing, and I really did want some input to help me decide what direction to take with the story. Other times, it was purely fun.

Here’s one of my favorites, from May 2011:

SyFy question of the day: If flying cars were technologically practical, would we really need them? Or other methods of transportation be more reasonable?

Kirk Like all modes of transportation the practicality depends on the distance they can travel, the restrictions on speed, how easy they are to power, the cost of operating them and how many of them are congesting the travel paths

AB When I see them in movies, it seems way too congested. Stuck in traffic in the air would be far worse than being stuck on the ground!

Kirk If everyone had them it would suck.. if there were both ground & air transportation it would suck less.. especially if you have different cruising altitudes established

I think heavy transport & cargo should remain on the ground, then have an altitude just above the city for landing/taking off/short distance drives.. bit higher than that have a close distance zone which moves faster but not super fast (would have like 1 on/off ramp down to the lower zone per city) then above that have an even faster zone for longer distance, like say one entrance/exit per county.. and then a faster higher altitude for real long distances like 1 per state.. could seriously reduce traffic this way

Shane So, ever had, say, a serpentine belt snap on the road and cause you to pull over? Hard to pull over in midair….

Kirk Well assuming you had this advanced technology you could have the predefined “roadways” & then have a span on each side for emergencies which you could coast over to and it would lower you in stages

Shane I think I’ll just wait for teleporter technology to catch up.

Geri Meh – I think by the time technology makes flying cars even remotely practical, public transpo is going to be the norm. Particularly since our population is likely to have grown to the point that having that many individual vehicles will be a logistical nightmare

Shane In the future, all transportation will be human-powered. We will use them to pull our rickshaws, chariots and plows. Cyborgs Rule!

Geri No teleporter for me…I’m with Bones on that one. I’d rather not have my component bits and pieces turned into bits and bytes and scattered across theoretical space thank you!

Shane Especially if the transporter is powered by Microsoft.

Processing…please wait…..

Geri ROFL Would you like to initiate recovery?

Kirk I think wormhole/portal technology would be more plausible than flying cars.. but I was doing my best to answer the question

Geri I’m also going to point out that the average human is apparently a complete moron behind the wheel – adding the ability to change your direction unexpectedly in the vertical plane seems like begging for trouble.

Kirk No arguments there… I’m a drive a tow truck picking up Insurance Totals all day… they do serious damage traveling on one plane

Shane Humans are stupid. Travelling in three dimensions is giving them too much freedom. Maybe worth trying when they can get their population down to a billion or so worldwide and control it.

AB It’s easy for a movie to show “Look! See the flying cars? It’s the future!” And, yes, flying cars would be fun… but I think the logistics make it impractical.

Like Kirk’s rules above… there would have to be an extensive set of parameters and regulations to make it safe, and the “idiot factor” grows exponentially.

Josh I think they would be impractical, but hipsters would still drive them anyway.

Nessie I wanna be a hipster!

Shelley Me too me too!!!

I would love to hear what you think! Even if you are reading this post a year or more after publishing, I hope you will leave a comment with your own ideas on this topic.

Post Script: I’ve wavered back and forth about the whole SciFi vs SyFy thing for a long time. Saving just one little letter in a tweet isn’t really saving much, and the Polish translation is a really strong argument against SyFy! I’m not one to make changes lightly. But I think that, at the end of this year, along with other structural changes I might make to the site, I will change SyFy Question of the Day to the name SciFi Question of the Day.

Joe will be happy.