this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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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.