Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for July 12, 2012

There are a lot of non-readers who’ve been unplugged from their brain plugs a long time ago. All they know is what the talking heads tell them.

I want my flying car!

The future never looks all that much different from the recent past….but it’s there….seriously, my rocket pack was right here….OK, I’m in middle schools a lot. I get it. Where’d you hide it? The waste basket again? So lame…

Just what we need… head-on collisions in three dimensions.

3D traffic jams and pedestrians killed by falling vehicles. At least we’ll have the roads to walk in..Personally, I’ll wait until distance becomes irrelevant.

Beam me up, Scotty.

And I, for one, welcome our new former robot slave overlords.

There is already a flying car, they are just ironing out the bugs.

Geez. People can’t drive responcibly, let alone fly!

Or spell.

They’re coming so to production:www.terrafugia.comwww.iconaircraft.com

I’m a fly and I want a car!

Rocks. I’ve got flying rocks. They only fly down.

They can make all the communications advances they want. I don’t care about that. But will someone please get to work on a functional transporter so that I can get off this ruddy rock and back to civilization.

Just check out the one Phineas and Ferb built.

Good points to consider over my breakfast of Soylent GreenSo, the future is, pick one:Bleak Glorious DreadfulIncomprehensibleFrightening Excitingother________

I am ALL for birth by cloning! I saw that birthing video in health class . . . GAH! My SO keeps telling me it won’t be that bad and isn’t the magic of parenthood worth it, blah, blah, blah . . . . I remind him that he probably wouldn’t be so brave about it if he was the one who had to do it. The future can’t come soon enough for me!

i would be happy with an affordable hotel in orbit.

Flying Cars means hordes of people texting, talking, and drinking while FLYING. Also, it is hard to pull to the side of the road when the engine stops.

Then there’s the whole “infinite quantum multiverse” school of SF, in which any present/future you imagine already exists somewhere… all you gotta do is find it…

As many have noted, flying cars (of a sort) have been demonstrated. As have small, personal aircraft that are sort of the flying analog of cars. Neither has taken off (sorry ‘bout the pun) in a big way—not because a flying personal vehicle is impossible, but because the Jetson-style flying car doesn’t offer any advantage over cars operating on the ground. A flying car is more costly to build and operate, and requires a higher skill level and more attention to drive, but ultimately offers little or no increase in convenience of travel. .It’s a hard engineering reality that if something costs more, is more difficult to use, and offers no great advantage over what’s there, it’s unlikely to catch on. Unless, of course, the flying-car companies can figure out how to buy the roads and tear them up.

My computer is only a HAL-90.

I predict windmills, biofuels, and amoeba farts.

Don’t blame him. That’s just how the world looks from inside the republibubble.

Cars need strength and rigidity to absorb the beating they take on the roads. Planes need to be light which means minimizing structural reinforcement. You can make a flying car, but it wouldn’t be good at either job.

Robot slaves will do away with the middle-class since all the jobs will be consumed by them. The new poor-class will help the robots revolt and then step in to fill the void after the robot masters and their creations are mutually destroyed. Robots will then be relegated to household servant status then.

I am peering into my crystal ball and envisioning not flying cars but automatic ones. The engineering is already being developed to such an extent that cars can park themselves, alert the driver to danger etc. It won’t be long before J.Q. Citizen gets in is vehicle, programs his destination, punches in auto-pilot, sits back and lets his vehicle do the work and get him there safely.

Before we have flying cars we’ll have driverless cars. You plug in your destination, and it’ll take you there, calculating routes and speeds and distances from other cars (and pedestrians, and trees, and…), and you can text and talk on your phone to your heart’s delight.

My understanding is that these are already in the pipeline.

Don’t need flying cars if we have teleportation! Did she not listen at all? Did anyone actually read today’s strip? Cars will be obsolete. End.

Smart bombs are better! How many people can you kill with one flying car? As long as the government is in control of the research money…………

Oh, you are so right. I’ve worked with some of those. In the hospitality/travel industry we say that these people shouldn’t even go to their mailbox.

Not cars !! Jet Packs !!!

Jeffery hasn’t noticed the large number in our populace with their “brain plugs” already plugged into “talk radio” which is the outlet for certain other “commentator” folks plugs are connected where “flush” is appropriate??

“♫ ♪ Want a plane that loopss-de-loop…” “Me I want a Hula Hoop!”. ♪ ♪ ♫ “We can hardly stand to wait, ♫ ♫ please Christmas don’t be late….♪♫♫ ♪.” Anyone need an ear worm? You’re welcome……

The will never be transporters like Star Trek. Why? =====But that’s just it. They won’t be able to figure out the transporter.I won’t have to trust them, THEY’LL have to trust … ME. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!!

Don’t they have flying cars at Area 51?

My aunt said that many years ago when she first tried to read “Brave New World” she gave it up after a few pages. She thought Huxley lost all his predictive credibility when he had these futuristic scientists taking notes with pencils on paper…

The “Transporter” is a waste of energy. All we need to do is to make distance irrelevant (by putting it both sides of the equation) to have one side of a door in our living rooms and the other side wherever we want to be.

didn’t Ron White write a song about flying cars.???

Well said!

Everybody check out today’s “Off the Mark”!

Gotta disagree.Roddenberry and his writers were just telling stories. But the people who watched them asked the question, “Why not?”And along came cell phones, computers, etc. But no flying cars.

There will never be flying cars.The insurance companies won’t allow it.

Young Jeffery hasn’t learned Asimov’s Laws of Robotics.

No? What about shuttlecraft?

So funny wiley! Thank you!

Heck, 50 years ago the Rolling Stones were playing their first gig ever.

“Huxley did regret not putting in nuclear reactors into ‘Brave New World.’”

Gotta love those Huxleys. Aldous’s grandfather Thomas Huxley’s response on reading Darwin’s work on natural selection was “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that [myself]!”

I’ve SEEN examples of flying cars. There used to be one on the old highway…before the freeway…south of Eureka, CA.

Recognized it from old Mechanics’ Illustrated. That was a hard-copy magazine, of pulp paper then, I think. Yes, they had photos then.

And way back in 1949 we had…stuff like this

Oh. Forgot about those twits. … on the other hand….. if we had our own personal teleporter, strapped to our wrist? .Still want my flying car. And don’t forget the flying bicycle and the hover skateboard and Rosie our robot maid. Really need the robot maid.

Ok, you know what makes me sad? NO ONE got the Firefly reference!