I remember excitedly reading “Popular Science” as a kid and seeing the cover adorned with the flying cars that were promised in “just a few years”. That was 30 years ago and those flying cars never really left the drawing board.

When I was a young physics student I did the math and realized why there were no flying cars – there’s no practical way to build a genuine flying car. There are lots of technical challenges, but the energy budget is the biggest challenge – a flying car would require a portable energy source *multiple orders of magnitude* more space and weight efficient than anything humans have developed.

As an older engineer, I now realize that technical problems aren’t the biggest challenge for flying cars – the bigger problem is that there’s no practical way to *operate* a flying car. Even if the technical issues were solved, each of these vehicles would require many hours of maintenance for even a single hour of flying. [*1]

This brings me to my second point – “Star Trek” is as much fantasy as “Lord of the Rings” is.

“Star Trek” as fantasy is hard for people to accept, given that most of us have grown up with space explorers on TV. We were promised that someday we would go to space and walk among the stars. I dreamed of exploring the universe, meeting new aliens, and seeing amazing places. I wanted to live some place clean and safe where my needs were taken care of by the magic of automation.

Those amazing ships full of automated systems that do all the work of feeding, housing, and transporting humans in space – they don’t exist and they will never exist. The “magic” of automation is actually *labor*, hidden behind the scenes – the labor required to imagine, design, build, operate, and maintain that automation.

The real promise of automation is that once you’ve added up the cost of building and operating that automation, the total output will exceed the total cost. Engineers like me make those promises because we are hopeful and optimistic. And sometimes the promise of automation is true – for example, assembly lines are very often cheaper than bespoke assembly is.

Increased cost efficiency is not magic – even after paying the upfront expense of automation, there is still ongoing expense (often referred to as CapEx and OpEx). Most importantly, both CapEx and OpEx require labor that CANNOT BE AUTOMATED. That’s where the “magic” of automation meets the real world – automation requires human labor to operate and maintain it. There is no such thing as a fully-automated factory. That’s something I would like to write about more, but the TL;DR is that we exist in the natural world and nature is constantly breaking down automation. [*2]

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, furiously doing the work of keeping the magic going.”

In the natural world, automated factories are fantasy. Flying cars are fantasy. Star Trek is fantasy. Pretending that automation will solve all of our problems is pure fantastic magical thinking.

You’re not going to have a flying car. You’re never going to have a flying car. Fantasy is fine, but your fantasy doesn’t change the real world one bit.

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[*1] I’m not interested in arguing. Go build your own flying car if you don’t believe me – given enough money you can probably build a prototype, but it will never reach production because the operational cost will be laughably high.

[*2] Again, I’m not interested in arguing – go prove me wrong if you think your uneducated ass can build a fully-automated factory.