FLYING SAUCER BUS: ALL ABOARD

From "flying saucer buses" to personal helicopters to
a "transplanetary subway" that would stretch from New York to L.A., this on/offline exhibit on "Transportation Futuristics" from Cal Berkeley is pretty rad. And it's more than a little thought-provoking.

Like WorldChanging says, "for those of us who make thinking about how the future could unfold our profession, exhibitions like 'Transportation Futuristics' hold an almost fetishistic fascination."

While some of the designs featured in the show are clearly hand-waving "wouldn't it be great if..." sketches, many are the result of long hours of debate, research, and informed speculation. They were not offered up in expectation of failure. These vehicles and systems were considered to be plausible -- or at least possible -- extrapolations into a future yet to unfold.

Some futurists study these failed visions in hopes of figuring out what subtle element was missing, which line of speculation had the broken link, so as to avoid making the same mistakes. In most cases, the problems arise not from errors in physics or engineering, but in the overly-simplistic -- or simply ignorant -- social and economic speculations. Those promising personal helicopters, for example (a promise which ran rampant in American culture in the late 1940s/early 1950s), never seemed to ask how likely it was that people would accept heli-cars crashing with anything near the frequency of auto accidents. And, as the exhibit points out, the proposed underground maglev train between NYC and LA would be so expensive that the entire population of each city would have to use it every day for the finances to work out...

I love looking at futures that never were as stories of how easy it is to be wrong, but also as stories of how easy it is to be wrong for the right reasons.