The Absence of Flying Cars

Pragun Sharma

Crown 80A

Kristen Crouse

2 December 2014

The absence of flying cars became a wistful cry of disappointment as the millennium arrived, reflecting the failure of science and technology to live up to one of the most fanciful promises of early 20th century science fiction. Science fiction often invents such impossible technologies to serve as a plot device that serves our popular entertainment needs by helping audience fantasize the impossible while keeping the ideas grounded in reality.  I too was fascinated by the idea of space travel, and Star Wars fuelled my interest in space exploration and the remote possibility of alien life. But as I went through my high school studying physics, I was introduced to scientific truths that made Star Wars impossible. Such distortions put up by science fiction continue to exist at the scientific, industrial and even individual levels often leading to a quest to achieve the unachievable.

Science fiction is a literary or cinematic genre in which fantasy, typically derived from contemporary scientific discoveries or developments, forms part of the plot or the background. Part of the joy of science fiction is imagining all those science fiction’s coolest gadgets to exist in the real world. As a matter of fact, many of the technologies we currently possess today originally started as concepts in science fiction. One of the most popular of them all is the Mobile phone. The first concept of handheld communication was introduced by a television series called Star Trek. In fact Martin Cooper, the inventor of Mobile phones, has stated that his inspiration came from the series itself.  However, continuous achievements of science and technology in the past, which were directly inspired by science fiction, have deluded us to acknowledge science fiction’s credibility to predict our future. These continuous advancements in science and technology have also caused us to deceivingly believe that we are invariably getting closer to the fiction. As viewers, we seem to believe at some point that science has the power to bring into reality the fictionalized technologies envisioned by science fiction. But, the sad truth is that a lot of fantastic technologies in science fiction cannot ever exist in reality. Recall the impossibilities introduced in the beginning of the essay that science fiction creates for arousing aspiration in its viewers. An example would be the idea of Human Teleportation that was introduced by Gene Roddenberry to simplify filming expensive scenes such as ships taking off and landing. Human Teleportation, as the name suggests, is the capacity to beam, or teleport, humans from one location to another. But Roddenberry’s idea slashed both the budget and common sense. Although, quantum teleportation has been performed in scientific labs, but teleporting a pair of entangled photons across vast distances is a far cry from teleporting an entire human body; Moreover, the teleportation scheme involves obliterating the source person completely which further reduces its practicality. Lastly, the unattainable energy requirements of teleportation simply don’t allow for its existence.