[nine_k]

It took 15 if not 20 years to commercialize even such obvious, low-tech thing as radio telegraph, which can literally be built form common house supplies. It happened about 60 years after Maxwell predicted the electromagnetic waves theoretically.

Red LEDs were invented / discovered in 1920s, became commercially successful as indicators in 1960s. Optical fibers were invented in 1920s or so, became a commercial success in 1980s.

Certain things just take time. Do not dismiss a good physical effect, they are much more rare than so-called good ideas.

[bastawhiz]

It's a good physical effect that doesn't obviously solve any real problems. Consider: 5D optical storage is thirty years old and SOTA transfer speed is about as many megabits per second. By the time it's fast enough to even approach a speed that's commercially useful, all of the other tech we have will have continued to progress. That's not to mention how fragile the quartz disks are. It's a real physical effect that doesn't solve problems.

We already have zero retention energy storage. The phenomenon in this paper isn't even all that new by the author's own admission—that's how it got to the fifty third revision. The tier 2 setup described here is purely speculative. Producing a single square centimeter of pure "fluorographane" (sic?) is still a task that would be exceedingly challenging for a research lab. And it's not clear how much energy it would take to read and write the data, or support the hardware necessary to do it at a speed that's makes it uniquely useful. Even if all of these problems are solved, and the cost is made reasonable, it's still completely unclear if it would be substantially better than what we have today.

[nine_k]

> all of the other tech we have will have continued to progress

These other techs also came from somewhere, often brewing slowly for decades until the conditions align for a commercial success. This one may be, or may not be, one of these slow-brewing techs of the future, suddenly displacing the SOTA of the (future) day.

Hell, the steam turbine was in principle invented in like 300 AD, and first commercialized (or, rather, militarized) by the end of 19th century. Leonardo da Vinci invented the helicopter, the submarine, and the tank, in principle; it took about 500 years for them to become large commercial and military successes.

[bitexploder]

It feels a little disjointed to compare old tech. Computing tech iteration cycles and adoption rates seem more interesting than things at the dawn of communications technology.

[staplers]

Communication technologies have been evolving for billions of years

[bastawhiz]

Amazing how technology existed before sentient life!

[nurettin]

It doesn't take long to commercialize feasible new tech in this day and age. If someone invented an electromagnetic hovercar tomorrow, it will be available for sale next week and regulations will follow after.

[TOMDM]

Waymo has cars that drive themselves and are dramatically safer than people in most conditions and yet they're only in select cities.

Do you just think Google hates money, or does this only work for hover cars

[antonvs]

> Waymo has cars that drive themselves

With the help of “remote assistance”, that is. Which is probably one of the reasons for the limited rollout.

[rossjudson]

Perhaps you could clarify your definition of "remote assistance", or describe scenarios.

[antonvs]

It’s been widely reported, and there were US Senate hearings about it. See e.g.: https://philkoopman.substack.com/p/waymo-tap-dances-about-re...

[nurettin]

I don't know the costs and logistics of such an operation. Maybe you do?

[antonvs]

> It doesn't take long to commercialize feasible new tech

“Feasible” is doing some heavy lifting there. The whole point of the comment you replied to is that it can take a long time for some new physical technique to become commercially feasible.

[atoav]

What advantage would hovering have?

[mastermage]

No Street Infrastructure needeed to drive anywhere (kinda).

[atoav]

Ok, and where does the energy to consistently keep a weight in the air come from and is it really worth spending?

I know flying cars are some sort of futuristic trope, yet I cringe at it every time I see it. They always assume magical infinite power. In the real the reason we do not have flying cars is the same why you don't use a drone as a coat hanger at home: It is just more practical to use a mechanical solution that holds your coat for infinite time without any energy use or noise/heat emissions and it is much cheaper.

Lifting stuff against gravity is not free, but a piece of wood, a brick or a rubber wheel does a pretty good job at it. One way to do it is magnets, but that means you need even more complicated roads.

We are living on a warming planet where only the naive and the evil pretend that energy use is something only the poor have to think about. We all have to think about it.

[shiroiuma]

>I know flying cars are some sort of futuristic trope, yet I cringe at it every time I see it. They always assume magical infinite power.

No, they assume magical anti-gravity technology. "magical infinite power" implies they're basically a hovercraft, forcing air downwards to hover. Without a shroud, even with infinite energy available, this means constantly blasting high-speed air all around the vehicle, which has some really obvious practical problems. It works for drones because they're small and lightweight and not near the ground and not even that close to each other.

>Lifting stuff against gravity is not free

It's close to free when you have magical anti-gravity technology. Similarly, traveling to other star systems hundreds of lightyears away in a couple days isn't so hard when you have magical FTL propulsion technology that somehow warps spacetime.

[ufocia]

You're misunderstanding fundamental physics. Things staying in place do not require energy. The reverse is true, things falling give up the energy they already have. The aim is to prevent them from losing energy. We already do this, they're called geostationary satellites. Also, it's not weight, it's mass.

[mastermage]

My entire answer exists in the context of a hpyothetical we were not discussing the realism of it.

It was in the context of if someone would invent this technology. To which then the question was what advantage does this have.

Now going and posing the question wheter this is realistic or feasible is making this argumentation circular.

[volemo]

What do you mean “we don’t have flying cars”? What are helicopters then?

[atoav]

Deathmachines that in their mechanical hubris angered the gods?

[Keyframe]

smoother ride, no need for wheels so no road friction and fewer parts that wear, no need for shock absorbers as well, no need for roads clean of snow and ice which would make them both more practical and safer.. if we're talking star trek hovering, not rotor blade / hovercraft noisy shit with rotating parts that waste a ton of energy.

[atoav]

Aha, and which of the fundamental forces in our universe would it work with?

[Keyframe]

You asked what advantage would it have over rolling rubber, not how would one do it (you wouldn't with current understanding of physics and energy density/portability). Any at advantage vehicle like that is still in the realm of scifi.

[atoav]

Yes but it collides with our understanding of physics as well. Floating anything with significant weight within an air atmosphere requires constant power, you will at least have to profuce an upwards force that is equivalent to the downwards force. Depending on how efficiently that force is transfered you may need much more. A wheel made of rubber or steel (trains are freakingly efficient!) does give you that much cheaper.

Now theoretically one could envision some energy form that is so abundant it doesn't matter anymore that you constantly fight gravity, sure. But what most people seem to imagine is some magical tech that decouples the vehicle from the force of gravity, while still coupling it to the planet (or whatever the next relevant relevant frame of reference is) somehow. This kind of magical tech makes sense in films or scifi books, but if we just collect together what it would need to be, it is hard to envision any actual potential mechanism short of "we live in a Matrix and we lesrn to control the program".

[shiroiuma]

That's a good question. When (if) we figure out how to practically travel at FTL speeds with a "warp drive", we might figure out the answer to this question too.

[atoav]

To be honest I think FTL is likelier than magical "sticks you to a fixed point in space relative to a rotating planet"-technology.

Sure you can do that with pushing air and a global positioning system, so if eventually we invent an eventual anti-gravity drive or something that may be used for the same thing. But wether such an entirely fictional device could be then made to (1) fit into a car sized vehicle and (2) be powered by whatever the most powerful mobile energy source is at that time and (3) become affordable to anyone outside of the 0.01% is another question.

[noosphr]

The only technologies that are commercialised quickly today are the ones that can be commercialised quickly. The ones that can't won't be for decades yet.

In short, if a tech takes 40 years to be commercialised it would have been invented some time in the 80s.