Paper published on producing arbitrarily long nanotubes.

For your reference, records indicate that
Fred J. McCall wrote:

Same as the case for GA aircraft. You need a car at both ends of the
flight.

Really? If that’s the *only* advantage you can think of, you’re
really supporting my point. Cars are easy to rent, or skip all that
these days and just use an app to get a ride. You’re going to need
to make a *much* better case for it to make sense to put an
expensive flying vehicle in the middle of dangerous road traffic.

So why not a single device?

Because the gulf between that idea and the reality is too great.
Different duties have different engineering requirements. Same
reason a vehicle meant to travel the vacuum of space has different
functional needs from one that is intended to launch from a planet
or one that is intended to re-enter an atmosphere.

You probably resisted the idea
of putting PDA functionality on cell phones, too.

Wrong again. I was in the camp that *knew* putting a computer in
your pocket meant that “phones� would stop being about phone calls.
Just like a “flying car� in any sane universe would quickly make
driving pointless, so it’d really just be about a newer kind of
aircraft.

And that’s why I bring up self-driving cars in the context of
trains. Because if flying cars made sense, they’d *first* make
sense in the context of a plane or a car. Even if you never took
it driving, it seems like there should be an obvious advantage of
having a plane you can park at the airport in a facility no
different from a regular parking spot. Yet somehow nobody can
find a market?

A lot of people own a lot of things that make very little sense. IÂ’m
not asking about that segment of the population. IÂ’m asking about
the people who are more thoughtful about their behaviors. Can you
make the case to *them* that flying cars are actually a good idea?


Why do I need to? Make the case for a car, period, to someone who
lives in the Amazon jungle. The fact that there is no such case
doesn't mean cars are useless.

They *are* uselesss in the middle of the Amazon jungle. But that’s
a straw man; stick to the issue at hand. No, you don’t *have* to
make the case for flying cars, but you *did* decide to chime in to
do that. You haven’t been successful as of yet, so you can try
harder, bail out of the conversation, or just admit that, yeah,
flying cars really are just one of science fiction’s dumber ideas.

--
"Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
River Tam, Trash, Firefly