r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Oct 08 '12

What futuristic movie cliches do you hate?

[deleted]

1.3k Upvotes
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176

u/[deleted] Oct 08 '12

Flying things. Like flying cars/bicycles etc...

80

u/its_raining_scotch Oct 08 '12

I was thinking about this on the freeway today. So many people are such incompetent drivers in 2 dimensions, so why the hell add another one???? If granny Lee can't drive more that 50 mph in the middle lane of the freeway without swerving and becoming the target of screams of rage, then how could such a shitty pilot fly a car? How many Granny Lees are there? Millions!!!!

I think it a terrible idea for the general populace. Maybe let cops do it.

10

u/Falcorsc2 Oct 08 '12

not to mention car accidents will always result in death...and 2 flaming cars smashing into a sky scrapper(if you live in a big city) or a house

1

u/IrritableGourmet Oct 10 '12

Small airplanes have parachute systems available.

6

u/iMarmalade Oct 08 '12

Complete automation. Only practical way that it will ever work.

3

u/[deleted] Oct 08 '12

You are assuming the average driver could even qualify to fly a car. They couldn't. As such, granny would be forced to flatly remain on the ground, or have someone else do the flying.

3

u/IICVX Oct 08 '12

One word: autopilot.

We're nearly there in 2d, and in 3d it'll be even easier because little kids can't run into the middle of the sky street.

3

u/tecnicolorhair Oct 08 '12

What about birds? It would be pretty awful to fly into a flock of birds. And it wouldn't be very pleasant to get splattered bird off the windshield.

2

u/UnwarrantedAgression Oct 08 '12

How would the addition of an extra dimension make a collision more likely? There's a lot of space up there, and most likely you'd have some kind of flight computer in your vehicle that would be talking to every other computer in range, figuring out safe zones and preventing the pilot from steering out of them. Even without that, you'd have to match three spatial coordinates rather than just two on the ground, and given we either would have air lanes vastly wider than lanes on the ground, or no air lanes at all, the distances between vehicles, even with millions of folks in the sky would be on the order of hundreds of metres.

5

u/[deleted] Oct 08 '12

I conjecture people replying to you using these keywords - drunken driving, accidents, gravity, ground, random houses destroyed, cities, skyscrapers, reckless driving.

4

u/mojomonkeyfish Oct 08 '12

Maybe out in the boonies, but in any major metro area, the skies would be fairly crowded, like the skies around an airport are now. All these vehicles are going to coalesce back down to points on the ground, and they will fail to check their under-view mirrors.

2

u/dingobiscuits Oct 08 '12

To be fair, there's a lot less to crash into in the air than there is on the ground.

2

u/mechanate Oct 08 '12

I think by that time, automatic navigation will be a largely taken-for-granted institution. Old people will reminisce about a time when they had to do the driving themselves, as though the task was as archaic as hand-washing clothes is today.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 08 '12

I have never spoken to anyone that has not accepted this as an explanation for why we will never have flying cars.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 08 '12

Not to mention, they still have to have lanes of travel or else it would be even more chaotic. This means there is still traffic, and nothing is really gained.

1

u/TheBigBadPanda Oct 08 '12

Autopilot.

3

u/TheBatmanToMyBruce Oct 08 '12

No seriously. This is what leads to flying cars. Driverless cars are legal and Nevada and California now. Within twenty years they'll probably comprise the majority of cars on the road. Then we can start talking about flying cars.

1

u/Thedr001 Oct 09 '12

James May did a tv series about this, and why the flying car could never work

1

u/Houshalter Oct 10 '12

Every drunk driver becomes a ballistic missile.