this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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When the 1950s thought flying cars would be real they didn't mean military VTOLs or expensive and noisy helicopters.
They meant flying cars that are efficient, quiet and affordable. Flying cars that are so ubiquitous they are parked on every driveway in the country. Flying cars where you go to the showroom and test-fly one in your favourite colour, and it only costs as much as an SUV does today.
More importantly, it's not really the car itself that matters for the meme, it's the idea of the society that goes along with it. The imagined future where we have flying cars on every driveway is one where we also have robots doing all the menial labour, one of utopian prosperity, where everyone is educated, happy, and spends their days in fulfilment of personal pursuits.
That's what "flying cars" alludes to, and it's a long way from a society where people have to be warned not to eat a sandwich wrapper.
But that will always be dumb. Basic physics is against you there, and flying will always cost more energy than driving. Spending more energy will always more expensive than spending less energy. Spending more energy will mean more energy "leaks" in the form of noise.
The laws of physics dictate that flying will be expensive and noisy, compared to rolling. And that's completely ignoring things like the very simple fact that a rolling car that breaks down will roll to stop, a flying car will stop flying (and crash).
A fictional thing that stupid if you think about it for more than 30 seconds?
There's no need to give 30 seconds of thought to a freaking meme.
Well yes it's unrealistic.
It was an imagined future based on boundless optimism that things would keep getting better and better, both technically and socially.
Inventions and discoveries at that time were happening so rapidly it surely felt like some revolutionary new thing was always just around the corner. We'd probably invent some amazing new levitation technology that would let things hover without making any sound, and it would all be powered by individual nuclear generators in every car, because why not right, nuclear is the future!
It was a dream from a time of optimism that never came to pass. The current day meme isn't about literal flying cars, it's about the contrast between this imagined world - no matter how realistic or not - and the reality we actually got.
But that's my point. It could have never come to pass.
It's the sort of thinking you'll find among comicbook writers and kids running around going "zooom zooooooom". It's the same kind of "optimism" that makes people think you can take a rocket from New York to Paris for a quick croissant. The sort of optism that has cities on the moon simply just to be there for no purpose. It's wishful thinking that can't and won't ever happen, and anyone trying to seriously sell that is either lying or an idiot.
It's on a level of "What if I find a magic rock one day? I could end world hunger!" You can call that optistic, or you can call it delusional.
You're not wrong, but I only came here to try and explain the meme.
Three quarters of a century ago, a different society than ours suggested flying cars as a possibility for the world, and now we make funny pictures about it.
Whether that was at the time objectively right or wrong for them to believe is a whole new topic that I'm not equipped to get into.