An AI-fuelled future has broadened the horizons of personal and public transport in every sphere: land, sea, air and space. Day trips to space, airborne commutes, supersonic subterranean travel and the promise of self-sustaining energy sources help serve up the future by putting fantasy, fiction and reality in a blender.
Land Terra Incognita
Self-healing Cars
Imagine the car as a complex, vascular organism and you’re closer to realising the future of personal mobility which makes the pursuit of horsepower and mileage seem so last century. Self-healing technology can not only enable the car to escape mild fender benders with limited to no consequence, it can also self-diagnose core electronic and mechanical issues using AI-powered tools to prevent future damage. At a surface level, the tech can integrate advanced polymers and micro-capsules that can release a healing agent to pave over cracks or use smart polymers that potentially reverse chemical bonds to repair the material completely. It’s not just limited to automotive materials.
When applied to concrete, it can also theoretically allow damaged roads to repair themselves—a tantalising prospect for India. While science is still nipping at the heels of fiction in this instance, cars like the MIT-built Lamborghini Terzo Millennio help paint an optimistic picture of the future. Scientists are working on self-healing tech that would allow a car to analyse data from sensors negating not only the need for the odd, overpriced paint but also lessening the tedium of annual maintenance. More crucially, the use of self-healing polymeric coatings can prolong the lifespan of a car and enhance safety by using routine, over-the-air software updates.
Conductive Road Charging
Think arcade racer-style tracks with neon patches that boost speed. Except instead of a patch, it’s the entire road and instead of boosting speed, it’s charging your EV in real-time as you trundle along. Electrified roads are possibly the single most effective antidote to range anxiety—the most prevalent bugbear of EV users. While widespread electric roadways are being experimented with in countries like Sweden, Denmark and Germany, we’re still years away from it getting real. An electric road system or ERS, in theory, would use wire loops embedded in roads, or suspended above them to charge EVs, enabling car makers to put smaller batteries, making EVs cheaper and lighter.
While e-highways can vastly improve rural and urban connectivity and reduce dependence on vast highway charging networks, kinetic roads can solve the problem of urban mobility. Using piezoelectric crystals which activate on the application of pressure, these tiles can transfer electric charge via a car’s tyres, enabling charging on the move. Unlike electric road systems, kinetic roads are more energy-efficient and less dependent on renewable energy sources. Between the two technologies, we could collectively reduce the over-mining of essential battery components and minerals, saving millions of gallons of precious water, and literally paving the road to a greener future.
Augmented Reality
Virtual tour guides, 3D pathways and pop-up menus that allow you to not only navigate the world in your immediate driving environment but also interact with it—augmented reality can dramatically alter the way we drive. From browsing through playlists, and seeing crucial alerts to receiving points for adhering to traffic rules, live 3D information projected onto the windscreen or fed through AR glasses can simplify everyday driving and make the most remote locations accessible.
By choosing the data that is displayed in front of you, the driver can use 3D markers to find the perfect exit through a crowded or poorly lit street and, on weekends, the fastest line on a racetrack. Augmented reality will also allow drivers to get real-time data about important historical landmarks, public amenities, health monitoring updates and more, should they choose to. It can also help you troubleshoot any mechanical or electronic issue. While it might seem overwhelming at first, AR can help you in a new city, avoid topographical hazards and reach your destination safely.
Hyperloop
Supersonic travel by land might seem like a pipedream for now, but the developments in Elon Musk’s revolutionary public transport system are rapidly gaining ground. Other than surpassing the speed of conventional maglev trains, a fully functional high-speed transportation system, or hyperloop, would use a significantly lower drag coefficient and regenerative braking to be more energy-efficient than any public transport system in existence. And it’s not just limited to subterranean transport; above-ground hyperloop networks can use solar panels to generate a surplus of energy. With multiple companies working on the technology, this is a slice of the future that will turn into reality sooner than later.
AIR Starry Ascent
Nuclear Rockets
The line for people intending travel into inner space is getting longer, but when it comes to interplanetary space travel, nuclear-powered rockets are our best bet. Using nuclear thermal propulsion—an energy source currently being studied by NASA and a few private aeronautical firms—nuclear rockets allow for more effective propulsion, using a nuclear reactor to generate thrust instead of any chemical form of combustion.
The resulting speeds would allow the rocket to travel at speeds up to 2,00,000 kph (as opposed to a conventional rocket’s top speed of roughly 16,000 kph) enabling deep-space travel and exploring frontiers to Mars and beyond. In theory, it’s as simple as using a liquid propellant like hydrogen through a reactor core, a system that is, according to engineers, twice as efficient as chemical rockets. Fission-powered propulsion would not only cut down on travel time, it would limit the flight crew’s exposure to radiation, providing more time to collect essential data needed for conquering the final frontier and colonising the stars.
Superconducting Jets
Sustaining air travel through aviation fuel is unsustainable. However, advancements in aviation technology now point to a possible solution: superconductivity. Superconductivity essentially involves super-cooled magnetic fields to conduct electricity in real-time, resulting in powerful, lightweight and more energy-efficient propulsion.
Using superconductivity, airliners can forego conventional battery-sourced electric power, saving a considerable amount of weight. And given that the process of generating electricity is friction-free, the electric motors used for propulsion would be more durable and safe. Throw ultra ultra-lightweight fibre-resin compounds and structural lattice material pioneered by Boeing, and we could be looking at a safe, though far from silent, return to supersonic air travel.
Space Elevators
For those hankering for a killer view, space elevators could help you get to the inner confines of space using a tether made of lightweight, but resilient carbon nanotubes linked to the Earth’s surface and held in place outside its atmosphere, by a counterweight. According to the MIT Technology Review, space elevators would allow us to circumvent the exorbitant costs involved in leaving Earth’s atmosphere, by using solar energy to escape Earth’s gravitational pull. While no existing material shows enough promise or tensile strength to support such a structure, a strong carbon-based polymer could, in theory, take us thousands of kilometres above the Earth’s surface. There’s just no guarantee if any cocktails will be served once you reach there. Going up?
Personalised Drones
The vision of flying cars zipping past metropolitan skylines has existed for nearly as long as the modern airliner. But personalised drones present a more elegant and safe solution when compared to the idea of winged vehicles whizzing past each other hundreds of metres above ground. With autonomous drones customised for personal travel, all you have to do is enter the coordinates and let its advanced navigation enable door-to-door travel, even if the distance spans several city blocks.
You don’t even have to keep one in the garage. With fixed aerial pathways, a personalised drone can be summoned, effectively making it a sky taxi. With companies like EHang, Volocopter and Joby Aviation working on functional prototypes, your very own drone could arrive on a rooftop or a garden near you sooner than you think. The ultimate evolutionary end-point of urban mobility, drones will ensure that your milk-and-eggs run will never be the same.
Hoverbikes
Largely included in the arsenal of dystopian police states, hoverbikes can be excellent recreational vehicles, marrying the friction-free movement of drones and the g-force tackling thrills of a motorcycle. Given that they operate a few feet above ground, hoverbikes are comparatively safer to vertigo-inducing drones and would require fewer regulatory approvals. Electrically powered hoverbike prototypes use multiple fans to generate lift—a hazard in urban confines—but with the right use of winged aerodynamics, smaller, covered rotors and hydrogen-powered fuel cells.
Travelling at Lightspeed
According to a NASA paper titled Helical Engine—A New Concept in Propulsion, published by aerospace engineer David Burns, Star Trek-style warp-speed travel is theoretically possible. According to Burns, a helical engine would allow a spacecraft to move through a curved pathway in space while revolving on a central axis. Using advanced, and largely incomprehensible theoretical physics, Burns claims that his helical engine concept can be used to achieve light speed by using a particle accelerator to create a spiralling magnetic field through rotating ions. Though considered to be largely speculative and purely theoretical, a helical engine is the only existing concept that can get us to cross the light-speed barrier, deemed impossible by modern-day physics.
WATER All Aboard
Supercavitating Submarines
Gathering momentum underwater has proven to be one of the hardest engineering challenges. To put things in perspective, the fastest aeroplane in the world, the SR-71 was capable of speeds up to 3,200 kph, while the fastest submarine ever built, the Soviet K-222, could only muster a meagre 81 kph. This is because water creates far more resistance than air. The drag and friction created by water has kept underwater vessel speeds frozen for the last century, but supercavitation submarines could change all of that. With propulsion provided by rocket engines, a supercavitation submarine creates a bubble of gaseous air surrounding the vessel, so the vessel itself is never in direct contact with water.
No direct contact with water enables the submarine to move much faster, reaching speeds up to 200 kph. Supercavitation experiments thus far have been impeded by the fact that the air bubble can contract unexpectedly, but recent scientific research, conducted by the Harbin Institute of Technology theorises a way that could keep the bubble stable. If the air bubble could have an underarmour of a thick liquid membrane, it would remain consistent in size. Not only would this drastically alter the shipping industry, supercavitation has the potential to let passengers cross continents in a few hours, sans disruptive sonic booms in the sky.
3D-printed Superyachts
We may not be close to having Avengers-style invisible helicarriers, but as far as water-based yachts are concerned, the future looks promising. A concept unveiled by designer Joseph Forakis points at what could be the world’s first guilt-free luxury yacht which claims to be invisible in design and environmental impact. This robotically 3D-printed yacht dubbed the Pegasus would be, in theory, powered by solar panels sending energy to electrolyzers which in turn would use electrical energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
The technology differs from standard hydrogen fuel cells as they require onboard hydrogen. Except in the case of the Pegasus, it utilises a steady supply of water to create electricity in real-time. 3D printing would allow such a yacht to be built in far less time than conventional construction techniques, complete with an onboard pool, helipad and wings with mirrored glass, so it blends in with the ocean. Throw in some oversized rotors to generate lift, and you have yourself an airborne carrier of one percenter or military aircraft, should the need arise.
Floating Cities
Floating cities don’t get around too much, but they provide an elegant solution to the problem of ever-shrinking inhabitable land masses. Given that the human population by 2050 could reach 10 billion, floating cities seem like the most promising way forward. A concept, imagined by Italian firm Luca Curci Architects, envisions an island city that would harness the energy of the sun, wind and water turbines to be a self-sustaining haven for residents. And being self-sufficient doesn’t mean floating cities can’t be self-indulgent. Vertical gardens, football stadiums, conventional halls: with self-sustaining power sources, these islands can accommodate any structure, even setting sail for the horizon in a gigantic, turtle-shaped cruise ship. Forget the Metaverse, the next real estate boom will take place on water.