Don’t know if you’re aware but George Jetson was born this year. Yep. Debuted on the idiot-box in 1962 as a 40-year-old living in 2062. July 31 was the day, we’re told. Cynical fact-checker Snopes agrees on the year, if not the day.
I raise this because last week I heard about an airborne jet-ski – a big multi-prop drone – a Japanese mob is selling, with the US to follow suit next year. They’re calling it a bike but it’s an airborne jet-ski if I’ve ever seen one and it’s very Jetsonesque.
At $777,000, it’s presently in Lamborghini territory, and eminently marketable as a rich-kid super-toy but it could be as low as $50K as soon as 2025. At that rate it might just become the new Volkswagen, the 21st century people’s car.
Not sure what happens if you bingle the things. Become 21st century cactus pretty quick I’d imagine. TAC might have something to say about that. But given the way e-scooters are going, it’ll probably take more than a few fines to stop their popularity.
Pretty remarkable how swiftly airborne tech is developing. Elon Musk is looking to send 100 SpaceX missions skywards next year. That’s after launching a massive 5000-tonne Starship rocket next month. Little George Jetson go-karts are small potatoes by comparison. He wants to ferry cargo and people to the Moon and Mars and elsewhere around the galaxy. Cosmic Uber Eats can’t be far behind.
NASA’s a bit slower getting its rockets up right now. It’s been battling to get its Artemis 1 rocket off the launchpad. But it’s ambitious, too, with its Moon to Mars program reviving the Cold War space race of the 1960s. Maybe this time it’ll be with a little more international collaboration.
Which would be nice given some of the ominous things headed our way. Can’t say I’m wild about star-date Friday 13 April 2029 when the meteorite Apophis – named for a snake-like Egyptian god of darkness and chaos – is scheduled to come dangerously close to Earth.
We’re talking a 200 billion tonne ball of iron and iridium crashing into the Atlantic. Giant tsunamis, clouds of dust forever, dinosaur extinction stuff. No more George Jetskis. And you’re worried about climate change? Pffftt.
Of course, it might not happen either. NASA’s been scrapping with some German wunderkind who recalculated the meteorite’s one-in-10,000 chance of us being blown to smithereens back to one in 450. The jury’s still out.
Latest news, in true Armageddon movie fashion, is that NASA’s been working up what it calls a Double Asteroid Redirection Test. That’s DART to you and the idea is send up a rocket and slam it into any dodgy-looking asteroid making eyes at an earthly landfall.
“It’s a very simple idea,” mission lead Dr Andy Rivkin told BBC News. “You ram the spacecraft into the object you’re worried about, and you use the mass and the speed of your spacecraft to slightly change the orbit of that object enough so that it would miss the Earth instead of hitting the Earth.”
And NASA’s managed to do just that. Pretty much straight out of the Bruce Willis US hero textbook, but without Bruce. Apparently we should sleep a little better for its efforts.
Just one thing. Getting the asteroid to turn right instead of left still might not be as easy as it sounds. Wouldn’t blasting it to smithereens be better? Not that I want to be, as Spike Milligan once complained, hit by a smithereen.
I’m hoping Musk has his Moon-shots shipshape by 2029 if that Egyptian snake’s still targetting us. But then again, with all its craters already I don’t know if the Moon’s the best place to try escaping to. Looks like a meteorite magnet.
Then again, the way Putin’s acting up, I mightn’t have to worry at all. Nothing much else to say for it all, really, Oh, except maybe: Happy birthday, George.
This story appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 18 October 2022
