In order to POWER those flying cars, we will need a portable energy source.
No, really.
Such an energy source does exist: the zero point field. Nikola Tesla was talking about it over 120 years ago. But, we don't yet have such technology. Sorry about that, Dr. T.
Anyway, I was re-reading James Gleick's great book, Chaos (which I highly recommend). In so doing, I found this very interesting passage:
"...chaos brought an astonishing message: simple deterministic models could produce what looked like random behavior. The behavior actually had an exquisite fine structure, yet any piece of it seemed indistinguishable from noise."A fine structure, yet indistinguishable from noise. Hmm.
I knew from past research that "noise" is actually a manifestation of the zero point field. So, I wondered, could the process be reversed: could we go from fine-structured noise, to coherence?
Which would give us...energy, from the zero point field.
About 150 pages further on in Gleick's book, I read about Michael Barnsley, then at Georgia Tech, who did just that: he found a way to take any chaotic data set, and recover the equation that would generate just such a chaos pattern.
It's a start, a big start. Now, I can move forward with some confidence that this is actually a solvable problem, and not the impossible dream.
We will be able to power our flying cars.