<
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds>
'As a science fiction writer, I find it weird that some sf tropes – like space
colonization – have become culture-war touchstones. You know, that whole "we
were promised jetpacks" thing.
I confess, I never looked too hard at the practicalities of jetpacks, because
they are so obviously either used as a visual shorthand (as in the
Jetsons)
or as a metaphor. Even a brief moment's serious consideration should make it
clear why we wouldn't want the distracted, stoned, drunk, suicidal, homicidal
maniacs who pilot their two-ton killbots through our residential streets at
75mph to be flying over our heads with a reservoir of high explosives strapped
to their backs.
Jetpacks can make for interesting sf eyeball kicks or literary symbols, but I
don't actually want to live in a world of jetpacks. I just want to read about
them, and, of course, write about them:
https://reactormag.com/chicken-little/
I had blithely assumed that this was the principal reason we never got the
jetpacks we were "promised." I mean, there kind of was a promise, right? I grew
up seeing videos of rocketeers flying their jetpacks high above the heads of
amazed crowds, at World's Fairs and Disneyland and big public spectacles. There
was that scene in
Thunderball where James Bond (the canonical Connery Bond,
no less) makes an escape by jetpack. There was even a
Gilligan's Island
episode where the castaways find a jetpack and scheme to fly it all the way
back to Hawai'i:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0588084/
Clearly, jetpacks were possible, but they didn't make any sense, so we decided
not to use them, right?
Well, I was wrong. In a terrific new
99 Percent Invisible episode, Chris
Berube tracks the history of all those jetpacks we saw on TV for decades, and
reveals that they were all the same jetpack, flown by just one guy, who risked
his life every time he went up in it:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/rocket-man/
The jetpack in question – technically a "rocket belt" – was built in the 1960s
by Wendell Moore at the Bell Aircraft Corporation, with funding from the DoD.
The Bell rocket belt used concentrated hydrogen peroxide as fuel, which burned
at temperatures in excess of 1,000°F. The rocket belt had a maximum flight time
of just 21 seconds.'
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
