When Earth’s a smoking wasteland, there’ll always be Mars, right?
Altogether now, whoo hoo. Come on, I can’t hear you. On the count of three: one ..two … what? Didn’t you see the paper? It was there in colour. Tomorrow’s transport of delight. The caroplane. Or aerocar. Here, right here, in a paddock round the back of Timaru. Oh what a wondrous age we live in. And oh how we are blessed. Whoo hoo, I tell you, whoo hoo.
The thing’s been built by the boffins of Silicon Valley, the bright young optimists, tomorrow’s champions, the baby priests of technologism. And they in turn are backed by its archbishops, the very reverends of the internet, the Google Money Monsters, the Appleocrats. Because the caroplane may just be the next big thing.
And rather than test it in the busy skies of California where eyes pry and drones prowl and bad actors hack at the door, the baby boffins have brought their prototype down here to test it. They came because if the thing goes rogue there’s little to hit except cows and mountains, and because we’re thin on industrial spies, and because we’re nice, safe, trusting, trustworthy, modestly incomed and a string of other adjectives connoting weakness.
The thing they’ve built, the whoo hoo wonder, is wheeled and winged and electric. It takes off vertically, lands vertically and flies itself. The passenger can be skunk-drunk and the beast will fly him home, land on his lawn, throw him over its shoulder, put him to bed, and feed him an aspirin with a parting murmur of ‘Good night, Mr Jetson’.
For this is the future. All the stuff that was promised last century is now popping up with the suddenness of mushrooms. Tomorrow arrives before morning tea today. Something only has to be thought of for it to be done. Life gets better by the hour. Whoo hoo for the caroplane. I want one now.
In our whoo hooing we’re true to our species, for we are the creatures of hope. It’s our signature note. The Silicon Valley optimist is us. Whenever we hear of innovation we want it. We instantly spot its boons. We’re slower, however, to spot the opposite of boons - noobs, I suppose.
The industrial revolution was an obvious boon, and we welcomed it with arms so wide they could have hugged a steam train. But coal fed the train. And though coal proved close to limitless, the atmosphere didn’t. There was the noob we didn’t see. If we keep burning coal it’ll cook us.
The same with oil. Only 20 years ago people were fretting about peak oil. We were running out of the stuff, they said. It would start to dwindle about 2006. By 2018 we’d be waging war over the little that was left. But now we know there’s far too much of it. By the time we’ve burned it all New York will be under water.
Plastic was a wonder. It was cheap and oh so durable. But durability proved a noob. The stuff just won’t go away. It’s now in the fossil record, and in the fish we catch, and in the children we feed on the fish we catch, and we’ve no idea how to undo what we’ve done.
And oh how we flocked to the internet. Let people speak unto people, we said. Let us only join hands across the waters and the human family will skip the daisied fields in joy perpetual. But oh what noobs in social media dwelt. Trolls, bots and lies spread faster than herpes. They enabled bullying, Trump and the sexual use of children.
And the caroplane? Well, the thing is born of congestion, of the desire to soar above the traffic jam and ride the silent skies. But if you soar, I want to soar too. And if we soar who won’t? Soon the skies will be thick with flocks of caroplanes and the birds will have gone elsewhere and our cities will be uninhabitable and we’ll just have shifted our congestion into the air.
The problem isn’t traffic. The problem is us. We are too many. We’ve more than doubled in number in my lifetime alone. When I was born we were fewer than 3 billion. Today we are more than 7 billion. By 2060 we will be 10 billion. There’s no boon in that, only noob.
But, praise the lord, the wonderkids are on to it. For in the same edition of the paper I read that Elon Musk, tomorrow’s darling, is stressing the urgency of shipping people to Mars. For then, says he, when we reduce this planet to a smoking wasteland, whether on purpose or by accident, there’s gene stock available to start again elsewhere. So that’s all right then. Whoo hoo.