J Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past, Kindle Edition., 2018.
These days when the Biden administration is planning to spend two trillion—yes, two trillion—dollars on America’s crumbling infrastructure, it is refreshing to read is book about flying cars. It was recommended to me by a friend, Larry Kummer, Iowa based proprietor of the well regarded Fabius Maximus website.
On his website, Hall describes himself as a “writer.” Judging by the text, though, he knows plenty about engineering/robotics/high tech and flying a light aircraft (he is a licensed/pilot). Above all, he has a consuming interest in innovation of every kind; one who takes nothing, not even the most obvious “truths” the media keeps flooding us with, at face value. Drawing as it does on technology, science, science fiction, history, economics and sociology, the book is far too wide ranging to summarize. Let alone evaluate, in a few hundred words. Instead of trying to do so, therefore I shall simply quote a few passages in the hope that posting them will make some others buy it (it’s very cheap), read it, and yes, take it as seriously as, in my opinion, it deserves to be.
Page 536: “[Contrary to the doomsayers,] the major problem in the Second Atomic Age –[meaning, when restrictions are finally lifted and nuclear power, which the author considers the safest, cleanest, most plentiful, source of energy on earth, is allowed to come into its own] era is most likely to be too little CO2 in the air rather than too much. Go look at a cornfield: as I write it is still weeks until the Fourth of July, but in these parts the corn isn’t just knee-high, it’s more than head-high. All of that plant material was created by molecular machines, powered by energy from the sun, out of carbon from the CO2 in the air. In still air on a clear, sunshiny day, a cornfield depletes all the CO2 in the ambient air in 5 minutes flat.”
Page 537: “Just by way of context, too little CO2 in the air is a lot more dangerous than too much. Current levels (400 ppm) are much lower than are optimal for green plants; commercial greenhouses operate at 1000 ppm. If we cut CO2 in half, we would be in serious danger of starving all the green plants of Earth. So when everyone starts carrying a pocket iPrinter capable of conjuring up anything from snacks to items of clothing out of thin air, we may have to reopen the coal mines and pump out CO2 just to keep our ecosystem from collapsing.”
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Page. 550: “The one invariant in futurism before roughly 1980 was that predictions of social change overestimated, and of technological change underestimated, what actually happened. Now this invariant itself has been broken. With the notable exception of information technology, technological change has slowed and social change has mounted its crazy horse and galloped madly off in all directions. H. G. Wells’ image of the feckless Eloi, a lampoon of the effete idle English upper classes of a century ago, describes us better than he could have imagined.”
Page 551-52: “In the 1970s, the centuries-long growth trend in energy (the “Henry Adams curve”, which shows that any advance in material civilization is ultimately the result of greater per capita use of energy] flatlined. Most of the techno-predictions from 50s and 60s SF had assumed, at least implicitly, that it would continue. The failed predictions strongly correlate to dependence on plentiful energy. American investment and innovation in transportation languished; no new developments of comparable impact have succeeded highways and airliners. Also in the 70s, academia became a major locus of counter-cultural fervor, as it morphed into a largely virtue-signaling institution driven by competitive self-deception. This set up a classic Baptists-and-Bootleggers bedfellowship between those who really believed that progressive prescriptions would improve the world, and those who mostly enjoyed the new money, prestige, and policy-making influence. Public spending, and PhDs granted, tripled from 1960 to 1980. The war on cars was handed off from beatniks to bureaucrats in the 70s. Supersonic flight was banned. Bridge building had peaked in the 1960s, and traffic congestion now is 5 times as bad as then.
Around 1980, developments in liability law destroyed the private aviation industry. Regulation exploded; a significant proportion of decisions in business went from being made by people who were forced to balance costs with benefits to being made by bureaucrats with no concern for costs. Increasingly in our economy, the cost disease replaced the learning curve. The nuclear industry found its costs jacked up by an order of magnitude and was essentially frozen in place. Interest and research in nuclear physics languished. Over the period of interest, Green fundamentalism has become the unofficial state church of the US (and to an even greater extent Western Europe). Its catechism is a litany of apocalyptic prophecies, each forgotten in detail as it failed, but adding in vague spirit to an overall angst of original sin and impending doom. This has contributed in no small part to the neurotic pessimism of our current culture, by objective measures the richest, safest, and healthiest in history. In technological terms, bottom line is simple: we could very easily have flying cars today. Indeed we could have had them in 1950, but for the Depression and WWII. The proximate reason we don’t have them now is [because, instead of using existing nuclear- solar- and nano- technologies to produce more energy and put it at our service], we have let complacent nay-sayers metamorphose from pundits uttering “It can’t be done” predictions a century ago, into bureaucrats uttering “It won’t be done” prescriptions today.”
Page 553: “Yes, we should have power too cheap to meter [as some nuclear power enthusiasts argued back in the 1960s]. Yes, we should have orbital hotels and a base on the moon. Average family income in the US should be $200k by now, and growing at a sustained 6%. But what has actually happened is that cultural reaction and regulatory ossification have combined to dam up the normal flow of experimentation in high power technology.”
Page 556: “At a weighted average, the world could be 16 times as wealthy as it is now, if only our political systems were honest and competent. 15 times the world’s output is an enormous value, simply sitting there waiting to be reaped. As a futurist, I will go out on a limb and make this prediction: when someone invents a method of turning a Nicaragua into a Norway, extracting only a 1% profit from the improvement, they will become rich beyond the dreams of avarice and the world will become a much better, happier, place. Wise incorruptible robots may have something to do with it.”
Is that provocative enough to make some people think?