Our Burgeoning Interest in Flying Cars

When I read my colleague Jon LeSage’s piece on the development of flying cars in his Green Auto Digest this morning, I had the same reaction that anybody would: How feasible is this?  How far in the future does this lie, if it’s achievable at all? How safe could it possibly be?  Do we really want to take all our road rage, drunk driving, and driving while texting–and move it into our skies?

But at the same time I had another thought in parallel: Does our civilization need its affluent few flying around a globe that is soon to be populated by 10 billion people, half of which live in abject poverty, a third of which can’t get a clean glass of water to drink?  Can’t we deploy these big brains with which we’re all endowed to fashion a civilization that is little more egalitarian, and a little less indifferent to the suffering of inconceivably large throngs of miserable people?

OK, these are rhetorical questions, but if you were to answer them, let’s point out that by doing something to make this world a cleaner and more just society, we lucky Westerners are saving our own lives.  No one on Earth can be happy living, regardless of how prosperously, in a dying world in which hundreds of millions of diseased and starving refugees are fleeing from farmland desertification, deforestation, sea-level rise, etc.

We have real problems that are screaming out loud for viable solutions.  And prioritizing those problems, IMO, land-based cars aren’t in the top 500.