Getting about in the Future

The title credits of Matt Groening's cartoon seriesFuturama appear amidst a future cityscape that's intricately laced with every kind of transport, from airships and aircars to elevated railways and people whizzing through transparent pneumatic tubes. But although it borrows its name from the vision of a car-driven city presented by General Motors in the 1939 New York World's Fair, Futurama, with its aircars moving in jerky stop-go jams, its pneumatic tubes spitting people agd with every kind of transport, from airships and aircars to elevated railways and people whizzing through transparent pneumatic tubes. But although it borrows its name from the vision of a car-driven city presented by General Motors in the 1939 New York World's Fair, Futurama, with its aircars moving in jerky stop-go jams, its pneumatic tubes spitting people against walls, and a spaceship crashing into a giant Blade Runner ad screen, is a thoroughly ironic take on the technocratic dream cities of yesterday's tomorrows. For we know now that while the technical advances predicted in the stories and illustrations of pulp sf have more or less come true, the future isn't as clean or convenient as our grandfathers thought it would be. We may no longer need crossing-sweepers to clear paths through horse-dung in London streets, but those same streets are polluted with smog and diesel particulates instead, and our taxis and cars are moving no more quickly than Victorian horse-drawn hackney cabs and carriages. Can bleeding-edge technologies finally deliver the funky, fast-moving future we deserve?

LAND

Everyone agrees that public transport is a good thing, but no one uses it unless they have to. Monorails, maglev trains, and all the other high tech mass transit systems designed to make travel within cities fast, clean and energy efficient are found only in shopping malls, airports and theme parks. Swiss engineers have designed highly efficient oil-fired steam engines with well-insulated boilers and modern bearings, but so far their only use is on the cute rack-and-pinion railways loved by tourists. In Japan, land of the bullet-train, engineers plan to build a high-speed Aerotrain which, carrying more than 300 passengers at 300 kilometres per hour, will ride on the "wing-in-ground" effect, the cushion of compressed air which forms under large flat objects travelling over a surface. Powered by turbofans, with paired wings at nose and tail, the Aerotrain will ride 5 to 10 centimetres above the ground in a trackway with retaining walls on either side; vertical fins at the end of each wing would produce a wing-in- ground effect against the walls, keeping it automatically on course. But it's still a train, and even trains which travel through ambitious engineering projects like the Channel Tunnel are still only trains, half of them loaded with the cars of tourists who want to get off the train and on the road as soon as possible.

Trains and buses are locked into inflexible schedules and routes; cars symbolise the seductive dream of the freedom of the open road -- why else are advertisements for British cars set in the empty deserts of the American South-West? We're still buying into that dream even as oil companies admit that petrol will run out sooner rather than later, and while at- the-pump prices increase almost weekly, the erroneous idea that there's a direct relationship between size and safety is driving an evolutionary arms race in car design. If pushed to its extreme, the use of ever larger off-road jeeps and 4x4s for shopping and the school run will mean that in ten years our city streets will look like Monster Truck Rallies, and the humps of sleeping policemen will be higher than medieval barricades.

But big cars are as doomed as the dinosaurs. In California, the heart of autopia, the internal combustion engine is under sentence of death. The Californian Clean Air Act requires that, by 2003, ten per cent of cars sold in the state must have zero exhaust emission. Only electric cars fit the bill, and that means small electric cars, because although electric motors are efficient and non-polluting, they are not very powerful. The future will belong to small, lightweight cars powered by fuel cells or solar energy and built of strong but light resins, ceramics and carbon fibre materials borrowed from the aerospace industry.

On freeways and motorways, use of smart computers will enable the little electric cars to be driven automatically at high speeds almost bumper-to-bumper; manual driving may become a forbidden sport. Automatic driving on streets, with their illogical layouts and cluttered signage, is more challenging, but BMW is developing a smart car which can drive itself by following other traffic and 'going with the flow'. Development of true artificial intelligence will mean that your car will be able to pick out the best routes on congested roads. If it looks like you're about to collide with the car in front, hard-wired reflexes based on the workings of the giant neuron which controls locusts' escape jumps will take over and steer you to safety; if you try and drive home after you've had a heavy session at the pub, your car will detect the alcohol on your breath and lock out the manual controls; it may even prevent you from using rat runs, making illegal turns, and jumping the lights. The age of the backseat driver will have dawned, and perhaps mass transit won't look so bad after all, although the truly independent will probably resort to bicycles, scooters, powered skateboards, or even rickshaws: anything rather than travel cheek-by-jowl with their fellow citizens.

As every multimillionaire with a pied-á-tierre in the city knows, the only way to avoid the jammed city streets is to take to the air. At present, that means using a helicopter, but not only are helicopters expensive to buy, they are expensive to maintain. Over its lifetime, a helicopter needs five hours maintenance for every hour of flying time, the equivalent of having to leave your car to be serviced at the garage for three or four days every week. If the canyons and skies of our cities are going to be as abuzz as Metropolis or Futurama's New New York, we need short-hop flying vehicles as cheap and reliable as cars.

To go forward, you sometimes have to go back. In the 1930s, autogiros, small, propeller-driven aircraft given lift not by wings but by a freespinning rotor mounted over the cabin, were used for military liaison and to carry mail. Because autogiros were neither as fast as a small plane nor as manoeverable as a helicopter (the free-spinning rotor creates drag at high speeds, and doesn't allow a hovering mode), they soon became the sole preserve of hobbyists, but now the autogiro has been reinvented as the gyroplane, a light aircraft that's cheaper and safer than a helicopter and more versatile than a light plane. Diverting the engine power from the rear-mounted propeller to the rotor allows the gyroplane to take off vertically; at high speed, the rotor can be tilted out of the way and small wings provide lift instead, allowing speeds of up to 800 kilometres per hour; and a gyroplane can land at a dead stop, just like a bird. These properties are ideal for rapid transit across built-up areas. A Shanghai company plans to use 200 three passenger gyroplanes for an air taxi service in China's crowded metropolitan areas, and similar services in New York or London would find no shortage of customers willing to pay a premium to soar above the gridlocks.

In the future cities depicted in sf novels of the 1950s and 1960s, people invariably got about in flying cars like those used by the Jetsons, or by Harrison Ford in Blade Runner. These weren't just dreams of optimistic sf hacks: the first real flying car, the Airphibian, was built by Robert E. Fulton Jr in 1946. A lightweight two-seater car with removable propeller, wings and tail, the prototype of this nifty hybrid logged more than 100,000 miles, but never went into mass production. Now, in Davis, California, Paul Moller is developing a true flying car: the skycar. Powered by pistonless Wankel rotary engines, guided by computer, able to cruise at 560 kilometres per hour, the four-passenger M400 model skycar will have four fan motors to create thrust and a streamlined, rear-winged body for lift. Unlike gyroplanes, the skycar will need short runways for take-off and landing, and the first handbuilt models will come with a hefty $1,000,000 price tag, but if consumer demand justifies mass production, we could all soon be flitting through the skies between rooftop vertiports, leaving the landscaped streets to pedestrians and cyclists.

AIR

So far, the only way most of us experience air travel is like this: You're in a narrow, worn and sagging seat with a fat, sweaty drunk crowding you on one side and a garrulous old man with bad flatulence on the other. Your knees are jammed because the bastard in front of you has tipped his seat all the way back, and every three seconds your spine is jolted by the kung-fu kicks of the fractious toddler in the seat behind. And here comes the dead-eyed stewardess, with her tray of freeze-blackened salad and barely warm beef stroganoff. . . .

In the last fifty years, the rise of cheap mass air transportation has changed the world, but the price you pay for becoming a world traveller is that you have to travel with all the other world travellers in conditions a Roman galley slave would find a tad uncomfortable. The new European A-3XX Airbus 'super-jumbo', designed to carry up to 650 people on two decks in rows ten seats across, will continue this commercial game of sardines, but while its seats will probably be as uncomfortable as ever, at least there will be space in its lower levels for shops, sleeping quarters, and even a gym. You'll be able to stretch your legs in an airborne Tie Shop or Our Price, as long as the rest of the world travellers aboard don't decide to go shopping at the same time.

The only real solution to the discomfort of long distance air travel is to make the journey as last as little time as possible. Concorde may be of the same vintage as the Apollo moon-landings, and it may be noisy and bad for the ozone layer, but it takes only three hours to fly from London to New York. NASA has allocated two billion dollars to develop the next generation supersonic airliner which, powered by two engines as big as railway carriages, will be able to carry 300 passengers more than 8000 kilometres -- twice Concorde's range -- at Mach 2.4, cutting the journey from New York to Tokyo from 14 to 4.5 hours.

Planes powered by hypersonic ramjets may be even faster. Conventional jet engines use turbofans to compress air before adding fuel and igniting the mixture, producing rapidly expanding gases which are spewed through exhaust nozzles to generate thrust. Ramjet technology uses the same basic principles, but instead of spinning turbines, the plane's own forward motion compresses air against a spike-like inlet. At speeds above Mach 5, shock waves would shatter the inlets of conventional ramjet engines, while the fuel-air mix would be ejected through the combustion chamber too quickly, wasting most of its energy beyond the exhaust nozzles. But NASA is developing a supersonic ramjet -- a scramjet -- with a knife- shaped, flattened fuselage which will compress air as it enters a square inlet in its belly, and a system which injects fuel closer and closer to the inlet as its speed increases. This technology could power space planes into orbit, or drive commercial airliners even higher than Concorde's 15 kilometre cruising altitude, in Mach 10 suborbital lobs which would cut the flight between London and New York to less than the time needed for checking in.

If you're not in a hurry, the most comfortable way to travel by air is on an airship. In the brief Golden Age of airships, in the 1920s and 30s, airships three times bigger than a jumbo jet supported platforms with individual passenger cabins and lounges full of potted plants and wicker furniture. But even when given lift by inert helium rather than explosive hydrogen, big, rigid-framed airships were still at the mercy of bad weather; the British government stopped constructing airships after the R100 crashed in a violent rainstorm in France. Now, Zeppelin Luftshifftechnik GmBH, the most famous airship manufacturer in the world, has put into production a small, 12 passenger airship which combines the best features of rigid airships and slower, smaller blimps. With a top speed of 130 kilometres per hour, it's the luxury cruise yacht of the future, ideal for ecotourists who want to drift a hundred metres above the Serengeti plain or the treetops of the Amazon rainforest while dallying with a cocktail and studying the cordon bleu menu.

SEA

In the 1960s, jet airliners killed off ocean passenger liners as a form of mass transport, but their direct descendants, cruise liners, are growing ever bigger and more luxurious. And now, if you can afford it, you can buy a cruise which will last a lifetime. Scheduled for launch in December 2001, ResidenSea, brainchild of Norwegian shipping millionaire Knut Kloster Jr., is half the size of the QE2 and divided into 110 private apartments which, at the cost of $1,000,000 each, will provide second -- or even permanent - - homes for the wealthy who want to spend their time visiting exotic ports and international events in continuous circumnavigation of the globe.

If all you can afford is a working life at sea, Norman Nixon plans to build a floating town of 80,000 -- 65,000 residents and 15,000 crew. An "unsinkable" flat hull built of 600 steel cells bolted together, powered by 100 tug-boat engines, a kilometre long and 25 stories high, Nixon's Freedom Ship will be too big for any harbour. With engines which can be retracted for repairs, paint and electronic defenses against barnacles, and a modular construction for easy repair, it will spend all its time at sea, reached by either high speed hydrofoil ferries or by aircraft which can land on its flat top. Unlike the Residensea, the Freedom Ship will be a working town, its society stratified between $6,000,000 penthouses and $150,000 "econocabins", its free economy ruled not by government but by its captain (unless the citizens mutiny), a possible prototype for the kind of society space colonies may develop, and certainly the ideal fictional location for the mother of all disaster movies.

The oceans cover two-thirds of the world's surface, but so far the only way to reach most of this hidden territory is by using expensive submarines or submersibles; the only truly underwater hotel, Jules' Undersea Lodge, is located just nine metres below the surface of a mangrove lagoon in the Florida Keys. Underwater tourism needs cheap and fast submersibles, perhaps something like Graham Hawkes's Aviator. Unlike conventional cigar-tube submarines, whose buoyancy must be laboriously adjusted by pumping water in or out of tanks, the two-seater Aviator has positive buoyancy and inverted wings which exert downward force to drive it through the water. It is fast and highly manoeverable, and its initial price tag of $800,000 seems reasonable once you realise that it costs $20,000 a day to run a support ship for a deep-sea submersible. Hawke's company plans to take on the adventure tourism business; pressure-strengthened versions of the Aviator could provide the ultimate getaway in the deep, dark deserts kilometres below the surface.

SPACE

Although the final frontier is only a few hundred kilometres above our heads, it's expensive to get there because you have to fight gravity all the way. US consumer surveys report that there are 10,000 people willing to pay a million dollars each to become space tourists, but if space tourism is going to become affordable for the merely well-off, and as routine as an ocean cruise, a better way of getting into orbit has to be found.

At present the only way to reach orbit is to ride on top of a rocket's controlled explosion. It's not only dangerous, but tremendously inefficient. The Apollo program's Saturn 5 burned almost three million kilograms of fuel to inject a mass of 136,000 kilograms (including just three astronauts) into Earth orbit, while just 500 kilograms of kerosene is needed to transport a single passenger across the Atlantic on a jumbo jet.

The efficiency of old rocket designs is limited by the bell-shaped thrusters through which the hot gases expand, but cutting edge aerospike thrusters would blow the gases over the surface of the nozzle, providing more powerful thrust by rapid expansion within an open exhaust plume. NASA plans to use aerospike engines to power VentureStar, the Space Shuttle's successor, a true single-stage reusable space vehicle which would not need the help of disposable solid fuel boosters to reach orbit. Other designs include space planes driven by the air-breathing Hyper-X ramjet, clad in new ceramic materials which are strong enough to enable tapering wings to resist the heat of reentry -- the Space Shuttle is shaped like a flying brick because wings built using 1970s materials would have burned away. Winged space planes could take off and land from ordinary runways, or from updated versions of a Russian relic of the Cold War, the Caspian Sea Monster, an "ekranoplane". This hybrid ship/plane is driven over water by huge turbofan motors, riding above the waves using the same "wing-in-ground" effect as the low-friction Japanese train. Ekranoplanes three times the size of the Caspian Sea Monster, travelling at 600 kilometres per hour, could launch space planes far more cheaply than rocket boosters, and even act as landing platforms.

A more radical design is Gary Hudson's Roton rocket, powered by an efficient spinning engine which, like a huge catherine wheel, uses centrifugal force to throw kerosene and liquid oxygen into its combustion chamber. The Roton would return to Earth by deploying rotors from its nose cone after it enters the atmosphere; these would be spun by air flow (like the gyroplane, or a sycamore seed) and enable the Roton to fly down to its landing site. There's even the possibility of boosting spacecraft into orbit on beams of laser light projected from the ground. Mirrors on the underside of laser- powered spacecraft reflect the laser beam into a combustion chamber, achieving temperatures of 30,000øC and thousands of atmospheres of pressure, enough to make air ignite. So far, these tiny craft, weighing only 50 grams, have only been boosted a few metres into the air, but the Wright brothers didn't fly very far on their first attempts either.

The first space tourists will enjoy the tremendous views of the Earth and the novelty of extended weightlessness experienced on brief orbital forays. But space tourism's ultimate success depends on the destinations it can offer. Although it's almost 2001, and both Hilton and Budget are planning to built space hotels, something as big and beautiful as the wheel-shaped space hotel of Kubrick's film is a long way in the future. So far, space habitats are limited to the tin-can technology of the leaky old Russian Mir (which Mir- Corp, a company owned by multimillionaire space enthusiasts, plans to refurbish at a cost of $200 million) or the austere workspace of the International Space Station.

The cheapest way of getting into space would provide its own destination: the space elevator, a concept invented by Y.N. Artsutanov in 1960 and made famous by Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who first developed the concept of the geosynchronous communications satellite. Geosynchronous satellites orbit some 36,000 kilometres above the Earth and are travelling at the same speed as the Earth's rotation, so that they always remain above a particular spot on the Earth's surface. Artsutanov's idea is simple. Once you have lowered a cable from a geosynchronous satellite to the Earth, solar-powered elevators could run up the cable into orbit at a thousandth the cost of rockets or space planes. Of course, it would have to be a very strong cable, much stronger than any material presently known, but an American engineer, Nathan Wilson, has suggested that a version of the space elevator could be incorporated into the design of the first true space hotel.

The hotel's docking platform would hang on a tether 990 kilometres below the station's centre of gravity and only 260 kilometres above the surface of the Earth, saving a useful twenty per cent on the fuel bills of visiting space planes. Passengers would ride up the tether (made from the same carbon fibre used in graphite-epoxy tennis racquets) in gondolas to a platform at the centre of gravity at zero gee, and could continue travelling up another tether hung 475 kilometres above the centre of gravity to the space hotel proper. Because it would be travelling faster than the centre of gravity (it must complete a longer orbital path in the same time), the hotel would experience an upward pull derived from centrifugal force equivalent to one tenth Earth's gravity, so that the grand panorama of the Earth would be spread above its bars and restaurants.

The best place for space hotels may not be in Earth orbit at all, cluttered as it is with spent rocket stages, lost tools and specks of paint and globules of frozen urine, all hurtling around the Earth at 20,000 kilometres per hour. Balanced between the Earth and the Moon are libration or Lagrangian points where the gravitational attraction of the two bodies is equal; any spacecraft in orbit around one of these points will remain in the same position with respect to the Earth and the Moon. In the 1970's, Gerard O'Neill suggested that huge space colonies could be built around the two most stable points, L4 and L5, using material mined from the Moon. He thought big. O'Neill habitats would be hollow rotating rings more than a kilometre in diameter, their landscaped interiors large enough to house 10,000 people: mini-Caribbean islands in the sky, the ultimate space tourist destination until the colonisation of Mars.

JUST ONE STEP -- OR NONE

Although physicists have succeeded in beaming a single photon across the length of a desk, it's a long way from constructing a Star Trek style transporter. Before you can email yourself from one place to another, someone will have to invent a way of instantly scanning the position and identity of every atom in the human body, coding all the information for transmission, and reversing the process at the other end. And since you'd make a very large email -- there are roughly 5x1027 atoms in the human body -- it would probably take so long to transmit you'd be better off walking.

The most efficient way of travelling is to get rid of the concept of distance. Imagine a piece of paper. Place an x at one end, and another x at the other. For any two dimensional inhabitant of this mini-flatland, the shortest way between these two points is a straight line. But if the third dimension, unseen by our flatlander, is brought into play, we can bring the two points together by bending the paper over until they touch. That's what a wormhole does to three dimensional space. Unfortunately, wormholes can only be opened by tremendous densities of negative energy matter, whose existence is at present purely theoretical, but the potential is limitless. Any point on the Earth would be only a single step away from everywhere else. You could have your bathroom on a South Sea island beach (provided no one else had beaten you to it), your bedroom in the treetops of the Amazon rainforest, your office in the heart of London or New York. The great age of mechanical transport would be at an end.

But if the internerds are right, we soon won't need to take even a single step. All the information we will ever need will be piped into our room via the World Wide Web, food will be delivered by robot, we could explore anywhere on the Earth or other planets using telepresence. We'd all become 150 kilo snack-fed grubs locked in individual cells of honeycomb cities, as coddled as babies and as omnipotent as gods. That is, as E.M. Forster pointed out, until the Machine Stops. . . .

First published in T3.

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