Five or so decades ago, when I was a child, I heard (I read only duress as a child) that the future promised flying cars and personal jet packs. Hmm, we are still working on those. If you have ever been in a major traffic jam, can you imagine all of those cars replaced by flying cars? Sky jams. Jetpacks still prove hard to control, though computer controlled vectored aircraft have become a reality. Think of the $100 rechargeable drone (I had an early one that ate a tree) there has been amazing progress in just the past five years.)
Above is a Bell (yes Bell Aircraft a real manufacturer of helicopters) vectored thrust vertical take off and landing aircraft. The next generation of helicopter? And this is not a mock up, it is the real thing, that has flown. It is more stable and more controllable than the helicopters of the past 70 years.
A personal drone is being tested, it would fit into the light sport aircraft category.
Let me think back, in third grade the science book said the world's oil reserves would be exhausted in 20 years. It should have read the "known" oil reserves. "Get Smart" led us to think that we would need to take our shoe off to make a phone call without a cable connected. But here we are with phone in our pocket. Oh and it has about a million times the computing power that the lunar lander had in 1969 (likely an understatement - it might be a billion times more power.)
I remember the first time I saw an HD television, something we take for granted, but 32 years ago it was a lab experiment. The Smithsonian had one set up, next to a CRT television, playing the same video loop, the difference in quality brought tears to your eyes.
What will the next 30 years bring? I am optimistic.
I know politics are weird right now, but so where they in the 1960's and 1970's, and we passed the Civil Rights Act, and Medicare, went to the Moon, and ran Tricky Dick out of the White House. Innovation is happening at a pace I can only imagine.
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