Imagining The Future: What Will Transportation Look Like?
If you take a look at the last five hundred years, you will be left amazed and in disbelief at just how many drastic changes human life has gone through in that time period.
I mean, ever since we discovered fire and agriculture, we have been on a journey as a race, that has consistently changed the way we live and go about the various aspects of life but the last five hundred years have perhaps seen the largest of changes.
Out of those five hundred years, the last hundred have seen even more changes than ever before. That's just the way technological progress works. It's an exponential progress that happens and it's only going to get faster in the future.
Imagining what the future could look like relating to the various aspects of life is certainly interesting as it allows you to get creative, taking cues from the current research and development that's going on, of course! Today, I want to talk about the future of transportation, which is one of the most important part of our lives.
Autonomous Cars
Cars that drive themselves. If you had told me ten years ago that these will become a reality so soon, I would not have believed you at all but we already have them running on the streets!
As with everything else, they will take some time before they can be 100% reliable and safe for everyone involved as they are still in the early stages of development, but it is a no brainer that one day, the world will be filled with autonomous vehicles.
Driving would be a thing of the past and hopefully even traffic jams, as these cars would be interconnected with real time information processing so as to use the roads in the most efficient manner possible.
Experts say that road accidents could decrease by as much as 90% which would be one of the biggest advantages of this tech.
Hyperloop
By now you must have already heard of Hyperloop which is a very eagerly awaited transportation technology. It is a combination of maglev trains and vacuum tubes that we generally get to see in sci-fi movies.
Basically, there are vacuum tubes through which pods can travel at great speed (even approaching the speed of sound). In other words, you would be able to travel at the speed of a plane, but on ground and at a much lower cost.
Although the concept has existed for a long time, it was thanks to Elon Musk that this technology is actually being developed now after he released the white paper about it back in 2013.
It will still take quite a bit of time to actually bring this to reality but when it does, we will all get to witness this futuristic technology bringing all of us even closer.
Flying Cars
Flying cars are yet another staple of science fiction and they are something that just can't get here fast enough. I have always loved the concept of flying cars ever since I was a kid.
It seems as though they might not be too far away into the future as Uber is allegedly working with NASA on its flying taxi project which could bring the first taxis to the sky within the next decade.
Of course there are several risks involved with flying taxis and having watched interviews of Elon Musk, I am a little concerned. If something malfunctions in the air, it would not only be fatal for the driver but also for the people and property down below.
It will be interesting to watch what the developments in this area will lead to. There are obvious advantages to flying cars but for that, critical problems and issues will have to be solved.
Teleportation?
OK, I know this one is just too "out there" but I would like to discuss it anyways. In movies and TV shows, we have seen numerous times how cool teleportation is. I mean, you just disappear from one place and appear at a different one, within seconds!
Many scientists believe that it is extremely difficult if not impossible to make this happen but if by pure miracle, teleportation ever becomes a reality, then we are in for a treat. The ultimate mode of transportation!
This would make obsolete any cars, trains, buses, hyperloops or anything else that would exist at the time. When you can just appear at places, you don't need any means of travel. Heck, you don't even need roads!
I don't see this happening in this century, but what do I know, right? Maybe it will never happen, maybe it will happen sooner than we think, but oh boy, what a future that would be with teleportation in it!
I'll eagerly wait for the cars that drive themselves as I am too lazy to drive. :)
hahah, I guess a lot of people enjoy driving but it sure is hell when you have to make your way through traffic. That alone would be a great relief when driverless cars become a reality.
Well i can believe in the other cars but for teleportation, i can't agree over it
Yeah, it is way into the future and not sure if it will ever happen. But one can still remain hopeful.
time after time, day by day, technology is all changed with little without we know, I want to be able to make a useful inspiration for the community, teroma love has shared a technology that lauar usual in our life.
Yeah, it's a constant line of progress and it's constantly changing our lives.
I'm.definitely calling.in for teleportation. I think that will happen. If Indian gods did that then there has to be a scientific way to do it. I believe that gods are nothing but an age of highly educated human beings which became extinct due to some reason.
Why would we have aeroplane like concept in Ramayana. Or bramhastra which I think of as nuclear weapons. I think teleportation should definitely be possible.
Yeah, there are lots of mentions of teleportation in the vedas and I think one day we humans will be able to teleport as well. We've always managed to surprise ourselves and who knows what surprises the next century will bring.
Let's wait.and.watch. meanwhile hyperloop will also be an interesting thing to watch.
Long live Elon
Yes, I am very interested in Hyperloop and can't wait for it to come to India. We need something like that here.
I know full well the time where we are using automated cars that drive themselves is coming but I really don't think that I could do it. I would have a hard time giving up control of my own safety that way. I do wonder though, if there are a majority of cars that are automated would we somehow be forced to give up driving? Could someone decide that the automated cars are safer and reduce accidents and that regular cars become a thing of the past completely? Hmmm
Exactly. Even if one wouldn't want to give up control, they wouldn't have any choices if every single car in the market is a self driving one. Or that in the future, autonomous cars are so safe that humans might not be even allowed to drive one by law. Only the future will tell.
Bizarrely I was discussing this over lunch today. 20 years ago when I travelled into a major city ever day for work and queued for over an hour to get to work, the common belief was that within 10 years everybody would be working from home.
Now, 20 years on there is more traffic than ever. Every day there are more cars and trucks on the roads and every day there is more roadworks and more delays. Something has got to change because this cannot continue.
Unfortunately the only solution I can see would be teleportation or near earth rockets. Most countries are too populated now to implement large scale infrastructure projects like the original railways without space scale costs.
Elon Musk has detailed his plans to allow his Mars rocket to be able to transport you anywhere on the planet in 30 minutes. Whether or not that could be brought to a cost level to make it viable for ordinary people is up for debate.
When I was 10 my friends uncle always used to tell me he worked for GCHQ in the 1960's and they had already invented teleportation but were keeping it secret. I wish that was true today.
yeah, overpopulation is a huge problem and it's stressing our resources and infrastructre out. That's why there is need for innovative solutions that can not only solve the current problems but solve them for the ever growing human population. Basically it would have to be future proof.
Telelportation is way off into the future from what I read but the near earth rockets could become a reality, thanks to the vision of Elon Musk regarding this where he plans to use the BFR rockets that are in development that will be used for interplanetary travel as well as travel within Earth. How cool is that?
Yeah, there are conspiracy theories that say we have all the tech we need to literally solve every single problems that the human kind is facing today but it is all being hidden. Who knows what the truth is though, right?
The BFR rockets are very promising, but the biggest challenge is national travel rather than international and I think it will be a long time before they are used for that purpose. Also I can't see many people being comfortable with the journey.
Yeah, another risk with BFR as my cousin pointed out to me was the security risk. Most countries could mistake it for a nuclear missile and it coule make matters very dangerous.
Great work on a great diversity of articles!they have provided an environment that brings and appreciates science contents on steam.Well done @ sauravrungta for the careful selection.thank you!
Thank you so much for the kind words :)
Technology has both aspects. Good one is that it has increased the level of comfort, reduced the labour that saves much time and much more but it has bad effects also. Nowadays we are machine dependent and average human life is decreasing. The concept of autonomous cars is good that may save so many lives. The concept of teleportation is just like a magic. Thanks for sharing this. Have a great day.
Yeah we are machine dependent and are getting lazier for sure as more of our tasks are handled for us. But the average human life expectancy is actually growing.
I think teleportation is closer than we think. People will get decomposed into data bits, then sent as a data stream (beamed, for instance) then reconstructed in the receiving side.
Yeah, the problem is reconstructing every single molecule of the human body in the exact same order or it could be disaster! Imagine pieces of one's body missing! That would lead to death, even. Such a tech would have to work flawlessly every single time.
Nice post. Apart from the teleportation part (which in all likelihood will remain a science fiction dream), most of these technologies will get common place before long. I'm almost certain that self-driven driverless cars will be as common as mobile phones in another 20 years and it's definitely going to reduce traffic related accidents given that the human element of driving is taken out. Hyperloop though excellent conceptually, may not really get mass adopted and might just remain a novelty piece of transportation atleast in the near future (I'm really not convinced of the feasibility - especially economic, of something like that for the near future). But hey, Musk might actually make improvisations that we can't see to make it get adopted easier than we think it could be currently.
And flying cars, hmm actually we'll have to see how that goes.. given that we struggle to maintain law and order in 2 dimensional roads, the monitoring of traffic on 3 dimensional paths for flying commuter cars may not just be that easy even if producing the flying cars may not be anymore.
Thanks for the write up!
Excellent points. Totally agree with everything you have to say here. Driverless cars will indeed become as common as smartphones in the next decade or two and I can't wait for that. I personally think that Hyperloop can be very feasible for long distance travel and could one day totally replace railways. Just imagine that!!