The "Back to the Future" of Tesla’s new car

For those who were children after 1985, Robert Zemeckis’s "Back to the Future" trilogy was, often, more than just three films. It was a suggestion: the future will be spectacular. Yet the future depicted in the second film of the series was anything but spectacular. It was bleak, problematic and just as uncertain as the present. Yet with humankind occupying the skies above cities and the countryside—because, as has always been the case, if there is one thing humankind seeks to conquer, it is the sky—gravity has always forced us to keep our feet on the ground.

Without this ambition, there would have been no Icarus, no Montgolfier brothers, no Ferdinand von Zeppelin, no Wright brothers, no NASA engineers, and no Neil Armstrong. Nor would there have been, at least in part, the curiosity that led Leonardo da Vinci to become the man of genius that he was, and Galileo Galilei to become the man of science that he was.

The sky – the conquest of the sky and then of space – has been one of the driving forces behind our curiosity and quest for progress. The ‘Back to the Future’ trilogy was a cinematic summary – perhaps a little too Hollywood-esque, perhaps a bit slapdash – of all this. Yet it was decidedly effective, given that a scientist such as Kip Thorne, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics ‘for the detection of gravitational waves’, has repeatedly admitted that the trilogy served as an inspiration for him to continue his research. He is not alone. Time and again, Christopher Lloyd, the actor who played Emmett L. ‘Doc’ Brown, has stated that for over forty years, hundreds of doctors, researchers in pharmacology and medicine, physicists, aerospace engineers and materials engineers have stopped him to confess that it was his character who sparked their passion for science.

Watching the launch presentation of Tesla’s new car, the Roadster, the future depicted in "Back to the Future" seemed a little closer. This is because the Roadster, thanks to cold-gas micro-rockets developed with SpaceX, is capable of flying.

It is true that Elon Musk has been saying since 2017 that we will soon have flying cars. And the Tesla Roadster is not a flying car, but a car that can, in certain cases, under specific conditions and for short periods of time, lift off the ground and ‘fly’ over obstacles.

One question remains, however. And it is by no means a minor one. Did we really need this? Cars have already taken over the streets, occupying much of the social space that women and men, girls and boys, could have used; will the same thing happen in our skies?

A question that requires a caveat: what if this were to happen and the streets were once again a place for women and men rather than for tin boxes – what would happen if cars were to rain down from the sky like large hailstones?

It is probably a distant future, and one we may never see. That is why it would be useful to start thinking about this issue now.