Where Is My Flying Car? Quotes

“The leading cause of death among active pilots is ... motorcycle accidents.”
― J Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past

“Isaac Asimov’s speculation—The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course—was completely reasonable, given the physics and the rate of technological improvement up until then. We really, really should have had atomic batteries by now. And guess what? Your iPhone would never need charging, and your Tesla would have a range of 3.5 million miles. It is a possibility.”
― J Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past

“Will we, as a society, pick a comfortable, static level of existence, requiring a modest amount of production that robots could easily supply? Or shall we put a flying car in every garage, usher in the next Atomic Age, and inherit the stars?”
― J. Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car?

“For decades, Green activists have been attacking our sources of energy. Every single one has been demonized. Coal, which liberated mankind from the Malthusian trap, gave us manufacturing, railroads, and steamships; more than doubled our life expectancy; and saved almost all of us from having to be dirt farmers. Oil, which substantially replaced coal in the 20th century, made airplanes and the private automobile possible, along with the rest of the modern world. And, starting in the 1960s and ’70s, hydropower, nuclear fission, and even natural gas have come under the guns of the activists. The currently fashionable “renewables,” such as wind and solar power, have largely escaped the attacks. Battery-powered electric cars are the darlings of the Greens. But this is because they are simply not capable of providing anywhere near the energy or range that civilization depends on at a price it can afford. Should any of these, or other new forms of energy, prove actually usable on a large scale, they would be attacked just as viciously as fracking for natural gas, which cuts CO2 emissions in half, and nuclear power, which would eliminate them entirely.”
― J. Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car?

“It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty,” Richard Feynman said, “that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.”
― J. Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car?

“In today’s world, even a non-Stagnated version, the flying car is not a replacement for the car; it is a replacement for the airplane. A reasonably well-designed convertible could fit right in to today’s airspace system; it would fit right into our road system as well. Without the Stagnation there might well be a 50,000 airplane per year market, and enough licensed pilots to buy them. Remember, average family income would be well into six figures. In 1950, about one quarter of one percent of Americans were licensed pilots; that percentage today amounts to over three quarters of a million, which is market aplenty, for a start.”
― J Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past

“Nuclear power is probably the clearest case where regulation clobbered the learning curve. Innovation is strongly suppressed when you’re betting a few billion dollars on your ability to get a license to operate the plant. Besides the obvious cost increases due to direct imposition of rules, there was a major side effect of forcing the size of plants up (fewer licenses); fewer plants were built and fewer ideas tried. That also meant a greater cost for transmission (about half the total, according to my itemized bill), since plants are further from the average customer.”
― J Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past

“Hans Rosling was a world health economist and an indefatigable campaigner for a deeper understanding of the world’s state of development. He is famous for his TED talks and the Gapminder web site. He classifies the wealthiness of the world’s population into four levels: Barefoot. Unable even to afford shoes, they must walk everywhere they go. Income $1 per day. One billion people are at Level 1. Bicycle (and shoes). The $4 per day they make doesn’t sound like much to you and me but it is a huge step up from Level 1. There are three billion people at level 2. The two billion people at Level 3 make $16 a day; a motorbike is within their reach. At $64 per day, the one billion people at Level 4 own a car. (Numbers are rounded for simplicity.) There are of course parallel improvements along other axes as well, including Rosling’s famous washing machine, standard of housing, diet, and infant mortality rates. But we can use transportation as an example, given our overall subject. The miracle of the Industrial Revolution is now easily stated: In 1800, 85% of the world’s population was at Level 1. Today, only 9% is. Over the past half century, the bulk of humanity moved up out of Level 1 to erase the rich-poor gap and make the world wealth distribution roughly bell-shaped. The average American moved from Level 2 in 1800, to level 3 in 1900, to Level 4 in 2000.”
― J Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past

“As a rule of thumb over the twentieth century the other factors together cost about as much as the labor. In the 19-Aughts, the average worker produced about 5 cars per year; by the Twenties, he produced 20. It was that factor-of-four productivity jump, spearheaded by Henry Ford and the assembly line, that made the family car possible.”
― J Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past

“The Xhosa are a southeast African tribe whose economy and culture were traditionally based on cattle-herding. In the spring of 1856, Nongqawuse, a fifteen-year-old girl, a sort of Xhosan Joan of Arc, heard the voices of her ancestors telling her that the Xhosa must kill all their cattle and destroy their hoes, pots, and stores of grain. [125]  Once that had been done, the very ground would burst forth with plenty, the dead would be resurrected, and the interloping Boers would be driven from their lands. Surprisingly enough, the beliefs found fertile ground among the Xhosa and spread like wildfire, within months receiving the imprimatur of the king. The cattle were slaughtered. By the end of 1857 over 400,000 cattle had been killed. The Xhosa had refrained from planting for the 1856-57 growing season; there was no harvest. It is estimated that 40,000 Xhosans starved to death; that many again fled the country in search of food. By the end of 1858, three quarters of the Xhosa were gone.”
― J Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past

“It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to the seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics. —Robert A. Heinlein, 1952”
― J Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past

“One of the central mysteries of the green faith is the simultaneous belief that the Earth’s climate is heading for a catastrophe of existential proportions, due entirely to human CO2 emissions, and yet that completely emission-free nuclear power must be avoided at all costs.”
― J Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past

“I believe future historians will judge this irrational hatred of nuclear energy as the single greatest reason why greens lost the climate debate. The obvious contradiction between green claims that we face an existential climate crisis and their vehement opposition to nuclear power is what led me and I suspect many other skeptics to question their claims.”
― J Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past

“The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be. —Simon Newcomb (1906) The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine. —Sir Ernest Rutherford (1933) Inside was a large, shadowy hall, in which bulked a row of tall, square blocks of apparatus. They were, obviously, televisor instruments. Each had a square screen, a microphone grating, and beneath that a panel of control switches, pointer dials, and other less identifiable instruments. Kenniston found and opened a service panel in the back of one. Brief examination of the tangled apparatus inside discouraged him badly. “They were televisor communication instruments, yes. But the principles on which they worked are baffling. They didn’t even use vacuum tubes—they’d apparently got beyond the vacuum tube.” —Edmond Hamilton, The City at World’s End (1951)”
― J Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past

“The young people are there, and they are being educated in unprecedented numbers. If there is an argument to be made from education rates, it seems likely to run the other way—too many young people are spending too much time in the ivory tower, instead of doing real things in the real world. Kevin Jones, reviewing TGS for Mother Jones, points out: But there’s a tension here that Tyler doesn’t address. Technology grew like gangbusters in the first half of the 20th century, but it wasn’t until the second half that education took off. So apparently it’s not higher education that’s really responsible for dramatic technological growth. But if that’s the case, who cares about education? There seems to be enough evidence to adopt “ivory tower syndrome” as at least a hypothesis. The huge bulge in PhDs in the 20th century seems to match the Great Stagnation pretty well. A proper investigation of it would require more time than we have here (and more economic expertise than your humble narrator can bring to bear), but simply stated, too much education is bad for the economy, and inhibits technological innovation. In November 2005, attending a AAAI”
― J Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past

“I discovered, to my amazement, that all through history there had been resistance— and bitter, exaggerated, last-ditch resistance— to every significant technological change that had taken place on earth. Usually the resistance came from those groups who stood to lose influence, status, money as a result of the change. Although they never advanced this as their reason for resisting it. It was always the good of humanity that rested upon their hearts. —Isaac Asimov”
― J Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past