It’s straight out of 1950s science fiction: an entire country connected by food-transporting pipelines, sending baked beans and smoked kippers sailing between London and Liverpool at 60 miles per hour. And it’s arguably more sensible than what we’re already doing.

In the United Kingdom, 8 percent of all carbon dioxide mixed into the atmosphere comes from the diesel gas used to move around food trucks. That’s a ton of unnecessary pollution, particularly when you consider one estimate suggests only a small percentage of that gas is actually needed to move the food if things were run efficiently. That’s where Foodtubes enters the picture.

The brainchild of a British team of academics, engineers, and project planners, Foodtubes calls for the creation of high-speed food pipelines throughout the UK. Each major city and center food production would be linked with a pipeline, and the cities would also have their own internal pipelines to get the food to various different neighborhoods.

The food would sail along in small capsules at upwards of 60 miles per hour. As many as 900,000 capsules could be in circulation in the nearly 2,000 miles of pressurized pipe, all of which would be controlled by smart grids that would keep food from crashing into each other. To give some semblance of order, the capsules would generally be organized into little trains of about 300 linked capsules, each spaced about a meter apart.

Now, this idea might seem a little nutty—I’ll admit it seems rather fanciful. But the people behind Foodtubes point out the UK transports 180 times more water than food everyday, and all of that is done using pipelines with minimal pollution and no traffic jams.

Up to 200,000 food-carrying trucks could be taken off British roads, which would save 40 million tons of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere. Not bad for twenty tons worth of pipes and capsules. If the entire world adopted the Foodtubes approach, they estimate a massive four billion tons worth of yearly carbon dioxide emissions would be stopped. The world currently emits about 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually, so that’s a pretty significant savings.

The Foodtubes people admit their ideas will face opposition from supporters of the current system, but they’re confident that the savings will be too good for people to ignore:

“The freight industry is deeply entrenched at every level of government and commerce. They claim rights to profit from dominating our roads, shaking our buildings and polluting our air. Many traditional politicians and food bosses are oil-junkies, dedicated to keeping things as they are—whatever the social costs. [However] the business operation is likely to be highly profitable and the transport savings to supermarkets and others will be immediate and significant.”

One thing I’m not sure they’ve considered is what to do with all those suddenly unemployed truck drivers—I’m guessing there aren’t 200,000 available jobs for pipeline technicians—but that seems more like a detail to figure out than something that invalidates the whole idea. For more, check out their two-minute slide show:

This post originally appeared on io9.

Here in the present, we don’t seem to be making much headway in really crazy transportation breakthroughs — not much sign of beaming or stargates — but some scientists are considering some novel ways to improve air travel by copying our friends the birds.

OK, maybe “friends” is a little strong for describing our relationship to the last living dinosaurs, but nonetheless, with the ability to hover, stop on a dime, and fly with impressive energy efficiency, birds offer researchers a great deal of inspiration for improving aircraft.

At the 63rd Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics in Long Beach, Calif. Last weekend, Geoffrey Spedding of the University of Southern California and Joachim Huyssen of Northwestern University in South Africa presented research offering a more birdlike wing and tail design that could reduce drag and therefore improve efficiency.

In an effort to strip down flight to its essentials, the pair tested flight models using just a wing, a tailless tube-and-wing structure, and a tube-and-wing structure with a modified tail. They found that by minimizing the tail to reduce turbulence from the wings, they reduced drag greater than current designs.

Back in June, a team from MIT lead by Russ Tedrake considered ways to create aircraft that could land on a perch, as birds do on a wire. The scientists envisioned the landing technique for unmanned drones, and not manned aircraft (no amount of putting a sat in an upright position could prepare passengers for coming to a sudden stop with the cabin pointed upward at a steep angle). Using a ground-based computer and cameras mounted on nearby walls, the team coerced a foam model to land on its tail.

So that’s nice and everything, but I feel like we’re getting on toward time for our next major transportation revolution. We’ve had cars and planes for a century now. When’s the next big thing coming?

Here’s the scoop on DARPA’s flying car from CMU:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a 17-month, $988,000 contract to Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute to develop an autonomous flight system for the Transformer (TX) Program, which is exploring the feasibility of a military ground vehicle that could transform into a vertical-take-off-and-landing (VTOL) air vehicle.

The TX vehicle envisioned by DARPA would be capable of transporting four people and 1,000 pounds of payload up to 250 nautical miles, either by land or by air. Its enhanced mobility would increase survivability by making movements less predictable and would make the vehicle suitable for a wide variety of missions, such as scouting, resupply and medical evacuation.

“The TX is all about flexibility of movement and key to that concept is the idea that the vehicle could be operated by a soldier without pilot training,” said Sanjiv Singh, CMU research professor of robotics. “In practical terms, that means the vehicle will need to be able to fly itself, or to fly with only minimal input from the operator. And this means that the vehicle has to be continuously aware of its environment and be able to automatically react in response to what it perceives.”

It’s official, folks. Between all the secret wars and reptilian invaders, we are now living in a Nick Fury comic. The flying robot car is just the nail in the coffin.

This post originally appeared on io9.

io9. Escape to the world of tomorrow.

So what happened? Computers are faster, cars are safer–but we’re not seeing any self-driving cars, as envisioned in sci-fi from Knight Rider to Minority Report. “It was too expensive,” said Mohan Trivedi, a University of California-San Diego professor who specializes in intelligent cars. The cars required highway lined with sensors and magnets to guide the cars, massively increasing the cost of building roads. So the project died.

But not the dream of better cars. Trivedi chaired the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium last month, and he said science realized that maybe we don’t want to cede control of our cars. “We have a connection with our vehicles we don’t want to give up,” he said.

Instead, smart car research is focused on how cars can better assist their human drivers. There were some pretty cool concepts on display at the conference:

* Directional sound. One UCSD team of grad students was playing with ways they could modulate the amplitude and frequency of sound from a set of high-end speakers to create a sense of where a sound is coming from. Cameras outside the car can detect objects on the road (like a car in the blind spot), and project sound at the driver so it sounds like it’s coming from where the object is.

I got to try it out. Using just a speaker in front of me (no surround sound!) they could simulate a haircut.  I could hear the scissors move around my head.

Other members of that same team were using the directional sound to project conversations between the front and back seats, and to make it so that different people in the car could listen to different entertainment without interference.

* Autodimming windshield. A pair of high school students came up with this one. They found a material that increased its opacity when an electric charge ran through it. Using a camera to sense the location and brightness of the sun, they think they can devise a windshield that automatically dims when necessary.

* Lane-changing assistance. Another team has devised a way for the car to recognize the lane on the highway and determine whether the driver intends to change lanes, or is just drifting. If the former, the system will assist with the lane change; if the latter, it will alert the driver to straighten out.

OK, there was some advance in self-driving technology on display. Behold, from the minds at Stanford University’s Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory,  a car that can store a map of  a parking garage and be sent off to park itself. It can be summoned back with just a cell phone call. Maybe KITT won’t be deferred for too much longer.

Or, start of story.

Rick Cavallaro and John Borton have built a cart that moves 2.86 times the speed of the wind, moving straight downwind. That may seem impossible, but after a year of tinkering and some financial assistance from Google and Joby Energy,  they did it. Don’t believe me? Check out the video. Keep a weather eye out for the green flag at 0:35. Notice how it’s blowing the exact opposite direction of the orange wind socks on the cart? That’s because the cart is going faster than the wind.

How is it possible?

That’s the mind bending part, and even Borton and Cavallaro admit that it’s kind of a brain twister to grasp the physics involved. But after a half hour on the phone, they managed to teach me the rudiments of what’s going on.

The key to it all is the difference between relative air speed and actual ground speed. Let’s go back to the balloon. The balloon propelled by the 10 kph wind is moving at 10 kph along the ground, but it’s relative air speed is 0 kph. It’s moving the same speed as the wind.

Ok, now bring the cart back.

The Blackbird, lined up at
New Jerusalem runway in Tracy, Calif.

The cart is quite aerodynamic, so it makes a crappy sail, but it’s still a sail. The wind gives it a push, and the car starts to roll, however slowly. As it moves along the ground, the wheels turn. At 0 kph the cart has an air speed (relative to the 10 kph wind) of -10 kph. As it gets rolling, it will catch up to the wind in velocity: at 5 kph ground speed, it has a -5 kph relative air speed, and at 10 kph ground speed, it has a relative air speed of 0 kph. At 10 kph ground speed, the cart is just like the balloon, and would not beat the balloon in a race.

But unlike the balloon, the cart has a 17-foot propeller linked by a complicated drive train to the wheels. And it’s the wheels that provide the work to turn the propeller. Remember that: The wheels turn the prop. Not the wind. Not magic pixie dust. The wheels turn the propeller. That’s important.

At 0 kph air speed, the propeller, sections of which have already been pulling on the car, really begins to bite on the air. It pulls the car forward exactly as a propeller pulls an airplane forward. The ground speed of the car increases, turning the wheels faster, which turn the propeller even faster, adding yet more acceleration. And now the whole project seems ridiculous,because everyone knows a perpetual motion machine is impossible.

But the wind never stops adding power to the system. Come back to the difference between the relative air speed and the ground speed. In the example, the cart reaches a ground speed of 10 kph, and relative air speed of 0 kph. The propeller kicks in and the cart accelerates: Ground speed rises to 20 kph, with relative air speed of 10 kph; then 30 kph ground speed with relative air speed of 20 kph, then it finally reaches a top speed of 28.6 kph, with a relative air speed of 18.6 kph (meaning, going 18.6 kph faster than the wind). There’s some loss to friction and to the drive train, but generally the wheels are always doing 10 kph-worth more work then the propeller, because the propeller is pulling through  air that’s already moving of its own accord (Cavallaro and Borton like to compare this to how a boat driving  down river moves faster than a boat in still water). That difference in work is where the extra energy enters the system, allowing the cart to move faster than the wind directly before the wind.

If that was totally baffling, don’t worry, you’re in good company. Cavallaro and Borton have worked with some of the finest minds in aerodynamics to develop the cart, and they’ve been put down as morons by other, equally fine minds. But the cart works.

The two men got into the project as an academic exercise, a kind of proof of concept with no real application. But they’ve since realized they designed and built a  device that extracts an extraordinary amount of energy from the wind, indeed, far more than any stationary wind turbine currently dotting Texas or the seas north of Germany. Borton said their cart derives 23 horsepower at top speed, roughly four times the theoretical maximum and seven times the amount of work a traditional wind turbine gets. They’ve formed a company, called Thin Air Designs, to try and tap the commercial potential of their cart.

Tapping that power will be a trick–the cart has to move, after all, and as cool as the visual would be of carts zipping along the salt flats to power Las Vegas, the high voltage power lines they’d need to transmit the power into the grid would be no joke. But it’s a fascinating application from something everyone said should be impossible.

Image and video courtesy of Thin Air Designs.

If a nanoparticle field emission thruster (the aforementioned NanoFET) has been a subject of investigation for University of Michigan electrical engineer Brian Gilchrist for several years now. Gilchrist, joined by a team of scientists, has published and presented papers (pdf) at conferences (pdf) around the country, trying to show the theory of how electronically charged nanotubes could enable a spaceship to achieve astonishing speeds.

As Gilchrist envisions it, a nanoFET engine would be installed as a series of flat plates around our spaceship—let’s say the Millennium Falcon. So instead of the white glare of rockets pointed off the back of the Falcon as it flees TIE fighters, there would be a series of flat panels that resemble the silicon wafers that go into microchips (the MEMS production process would be very similar). Each panel would be covered in round discs, each 10 centimeters in diameter, which in turn would be comprised of thousands of emitters, each roughly 100 micrometers in diameter.

Each emitter works a bit like an tiny particle accelerator: The anode of the emitter charges the nanoparticles, which are then accelerated and then shot out a tube by a strong magnetic field generated by a stack of microchip-like components. “In that a particle accelerator uses an electrical field to propel charged particles to high speeds — that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Gilchrist told MSNBC. Thanks to Newton’s third law, as the ship ejects particles in one direction, the ship moves in the opposite direction. Eject long, thin nanotubes for high-efficiency, slow acceleration; use short, thick nanotubes for better acceleration at greater cost of energy. The NanoFet could potentially eject nearly any type of nanoparticle that would take a charge.

The nanoFET is also remarkable flexible and scalable. A plate of nearly any size could be placed more or less anywhere on the object to be propelled, and each plate could be nearly any size. So instead of the Millennium Falcon merely being the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy, it could also be astonishingly maneuverable, with smaller plates on different parts of the hull to establish tight turns and sudden changes in direction.

The only real downside is that nanoFETs are not imagined to provide the kind of high acceleration needed to break Earth’s gravity and escape orbit. But once in space, a ship equipped with nanoFET would have an extremely thin and lightweight engine with a commensurately compact fuel source. The nanoFET would be able achieve nearly constant acceleration. Do that for long enough, and speeds of 90 percent of light speed might become possible. Just think, if the Americans in Armageddon had a nanoFET powered space ship available to get out and intercept that asteroid, that whole Affleck-Armageddon fiasco could have been avoided. And wouldn’t we all want that?

DISCOVER: What kind of realistic technology could we use to get to nearby stars? Which stars would be feasibly reachable by such technologies?

Kevin Grazier: It’s a saying plastered on T-shirts and bumper stickers—the kind sold at both science-fiction conventions and physics departments nationwide:

186,000 miles per second:
It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.

The speed of light, of all electromagnetic energy, in a vacuum is the ultimate speed limit in the universe. Nothing that has mass or carries information can travel faster.

This universal speed limit is a direct fallout from Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Special relativity implies that the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant, but values that we tend to think of as constant in our daily experience—mass, length, and the rate of the passage of time—are not. Depending upon the relative velocity of two observers, these values will “adjust” so that both observers see the speed of light as a constant. Two observers travelling at high speeds relative to each other will find themselves in strong disagreement about measurements like the length of each other’s spacecraft and the rate of the passage of time.

Another consequence of special relativity is that, as an object travels increasingly faster, it behaves as if it has increasingly more mass. Therefore the amount of thrust it takes for an incremental change in velocity (known in the space program as a delta-V) is vastly greater at high speeds than at low. This effect is also highly nonlinear: It takes almost an order of magnitude more thrust to accelerate from .9c (nine-tenths of the speed of light) to .99c than it does to accelerate from .5c to .7c. An object travelling at the speed of light would act as if it had an infinite amount of mass and it would, therefore, require an infinite amount of energy (read: an infinite amount of thrust/fuel) to attain it.

This is, of course, a shame for civilizations (like ours) who want to explore planetary systems around other stars first hand. The distances involved are, well, astronomical. Just within the Solar System, it typically takes NASA probes 6 months to a year to reach Mars; it took Cassini 6 years, 9 months to reach Saturn. The (currently) fastest object created by humankind, the Voyager 1 spacecraft, will take 40,000 years, give or take a few thousand years, before it makes its closest encounter with its first star: AC+79 3888—currently located in the constellation Ursa Minor. At that speed few Time Lords, and even fewer humans, would survive the journey to even “nearby” star systems.

Current chemical rockets, and even the more efficient ion drives, cannot propel humanity to the stars at a reasonable speed, but there are concepts for interstellar spacecraft drives that are promising, that could be constructed in a practical sense, and you may be surprised how long the designs have been around. Stanisław Ulam, a Polish mathematician who participated in the Manhattan Project, proposed nuclear pulse propulsion back in 1947.

The idea is simple: explode a series of nuclear bombs behind a spacecraft. The explosions are directed against a thick steel “pusher plate”. The pusher plate is, in turn, connected to the spacecraft by a huge shock absorber to lessen the high G forces from the impulsive accelerations. In the straightforward terminology of Jimmy Johnson, the engineer on the Phaeton:

Basically, we gonna blow us up a bunch of big ass bombs off the ass-end of this here ship. Big ass bombs gonna vaporize some big ass alloy plates, and the translation of all that big ass energy’ll make us go real fast. Real fast. Yippe kai-ay, m…

The practical attempt to design and develop nuclear-pulse propulsion was performed by General Atomics in San Diego in the 1950s and 1960s. Ultimately the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty between the Unites States and Soviet Union made the testing for such a drive illegal, nevertheless over 50 years ago the design seemed practical and could be implemented within the bounds of existing technology. For more information, NASA and Star Trek designer Mike Okuda provided still more details on Project Orion, the U.S. government’s investigation into a nuclear-pulse spacecraft.

An Orion-style drive powered by thermonuclear explosions could theoretically reach speeds of .08c to .10c. That could get a spacecraft to the nearest stars within a human lifetime, but not within Phaeton’s 10-year mission. Virtuality is set in the mid-21st century, and it’s reasonable to assume some technological advances in the intervening time. Phaeton does not use thermonuclear explosions for propulsion, the charges dropped out the back are matter/antimatter charges (yes the thrust for Phaeton is, in essence, provided by photon torpedoes). The obvious assumption is that by the mid-21st Century, science has solved problems regarding the generation and containment of antimatter. One estimate has shown that Orion-style drive propelled by matter/antimatter explosions could attain speeds of .5c to .8c.

If Phaeton’s Orion Drive (named after the real-life nuclear concept) could propel it to 80 percent the speed of light, it could get to Sol’s nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri (4.4 light-years away) in just 5 years, 6 months. That’s certainly a vast improvement, and shortens the round-trip mission time to several nearby stars to less than a human lifetime.

Only, it gets better.

Special relativity, which bit us in the asteroid when it comes to top-end velocity, does our crew a favor as our spacecraft attains speeds that are a high fraction of the speed of light. Recall that for objects travelling at relativistic speeds, values like mass, time, and length appear to “adjust” to keep the speed of light a constant. At high speeds, distances that we measure at “rest”, or at low speeds compared to c, appear to be shortened. This effect is called Lorentz contraction or Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction.

Moving at a snappy .5c, the distance to Alpha Centauri is only 3.8 light-years (down from 4.4), and the apparent travel time is a bit over 7 years, 6 months. At 80 percent light speed, the distance is 2.6 light-years, and the travel time is 3 years, 3 months—less elapsed time for the crew than it would take for light to make the same journey.

Travelling at a speed of 0.7c is the “break even” point, where the combination of spacecraft velocity and Lorentz Contraction means you are travelling at “functional light speed” (the distance to Alpha Centauri in that frame would be 3.1 light-years and the travel time 4 years, 5 months). Of course time passes at different rates based upon their relative speeds as well, a phenomena called relativistic time dilation, so if Phaeton were travelling at a speed of .7c, for every year that passes for the crew, a year and five months would pass for The Edge of Never viewers back on Earth. Billie Kashmiri alludes to this in her confessional near the end.

With the phenomena of Lorentz Contraction as an aid, many more star systems become potential targets of a 10-year mission. There are sound scientific arguments why astronomers believe that any star that could potentially have a planet with life, in particular intelligent life, must be similar to our Sol: from mid-F range on the Herzsprung-Russell Diagram to mid-K. There are several stars in that size/temperature range in Sol’s neighborhood. Below is a screen capture of a spreadsheet that the producers of Virtuality used to select the target star for Phaeton’s mission (text color corresponds to the star’s color):

On the spreadsheet are the stars’ distances at rest, and at various fractions of light speed—with the corresponding travel time.

Click image to embiggen.

Epsilon Eridani, the nearby star that the Phaeton is sent to explore, has one, perhaps two planets orbiting it, as well as at least three asteroid/planetesimal belts. If we assume that Phaeton’s Orion Drive can get her up to .8c, or 80 percent the speed of light, then because of Lorentz contraction the journey (normally 10.5 light-years) is only 6.3 light-years, and it takes just under 7 years, 11 months. So if the Orion Drive can reasonably get a spacecraft up to .8c, then Phaeton’s mission is actually closer to 16 years. If, however, the Orion Drive was capable of propelling Phaeton to .9c, or 90 percent the speed of light, then the distance to Epsilon Eridani is only 4.6 light-years, and the one-way flight time is 5.1 years.

So in order for Phaeton to get to Epsilon Eridani and back within the stated 10-year mission duration, we clearly see that the ship’s Orion Drive would have to propel her to over 90 percent the speed of light (.9c). For all the elements of Phaeton’s mission that might be practically attainable by the mid-21st Century, this is where a little science fiction enters the picture.

Thank you to Steve Cooperman, Doug Creel, and John Weiss for their helpful input and comments.

I want to have a teleporter in my story. How would one work?

The good news is that a working teleportation device already exists. The bad news is that it won’t work for you if you happen to be bigger than a rubidium atom—but scientists are toiling away to fix that. As physicist Michio Kaku noted last year in DISCOVER, we could be teleporting things as big as a virus within a few decades, which means we would be ready teleport a person around the 23rd century, just in time for the predicted construction date of Captain Kirk’s Enterprise.

The key to teleportation is to realize that we don’t want to use it as some kind of “matter transporter.” The kind of everyday matter that makes up you, me, and the planet, is made up of protons, neutrons and electrons. Quantum physics tells us that every proton is identical to every other proton, every neutron is identical to every other neutron, and the same holds for electrons too. What’s important are not the particular particles that make up our bodies, but the way those particles are arranged into atoms, molecules, and cells. Duplicate the arrangement, and you duplicate the person.

The situation is analogous to what happens when a scene is captured by a TV camera and transmitted to a screen somewhere else. We’re not interested in somehow transporting the actual photons that entered the camera’s lens to the eyes of the viewer. Instead, the camera records the pattern the incoming light makes. Information that describes this pattern is transmitted to viewer’s screen, where a brand new set of photons are produced with the desired color and intensity. These convey the image of the scene to the eye. What’s important is preserving and transmitting the pattern of information, not the original photons.

The key to transmitting the information pattern of solid matter, as opposed to an two-dimensional image made of photons, is a spooky phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. It turns out that particles can be in a number of different states, and big part of the weirdness of quantum mechanics is that these states are undefined until they are somehow measured. Imagine tossing a coin and catching it. In the quantum world, not until you peek at the coin does it decide to be heads up or tails up! Entanglement means taking two particles and treating them together in such a way that their states become mingled. The states of the particles are still undefined until measured, but now making a measurement of one particle’s state will instantly determine the state of both particles, not just one. This holds true, even if you took one of the entangled particles and moved it to the other side of the solar system before performing the measurement.

Incidentally, Einstein loathed this idea, and it was one of the things that turned him away from quantum mechanics and towards a more-or-less dead end approach to physics in his later years. But thanks to a piece of quantum theory known as “Bell’s inequalities” along with entanglement experiments conducted in Paris in the 1980’s, Einstein was proved to be wrong.

Entanglement makes teleportation possible like this: first create an entangled pair of particles, say two atoms. We’ll call one atom “the pitcher,” and the other “the catcher” (This is not standard physics terminology). Now move the catcher to wherever you want to teleport to. This must be done very carefully to avoid destroying the entanglement. Now let’s take an atom that we want to teleport. This atom has a particular internal arrangement of electrons, neutron and protons that somehow makes it special to us—we’ll call it the Scotty atom. We put the Scotty atom into a chamber containing the pitcher atom. The states of the Scotty and pitcher atoms are combined and then measured. This combination process scrambles the state of the Scotty and pitcher atoms, putting them into random states.

So far, it looks like all you’ve done is put a perfectly good Scotty particle into a quantum shredder—the arrangement that made it special has been destroyed. But now you take the measurements of those scrambled random states and transmit them (in theory this could be done by radio, or any other method you can think of) to wherever the catcher atom is located. A regular, run-of-the-mill, atom is pushed into a chamber with the catcher atom. We’ll call this new, boring, atom the Tabula Rasa atom. The information about the random states that we measured after the Scotty and pitcher atoms were combined is also fed into the chamber. Presto—the Tabula Rasa atom takes on all the attributes of the Scotty atom. To all intents and purposes it is the Scotty atom.

Scientists are working on scaling up the process so that it works on larger and larger scales, hoping to move up from atoms to molecules, molecules to cells, and maybe one day, entire people. But the basic process is the same as for a single atom.

Note that in some ways the process is similar to what happens on Star Trek—teleporting someone requires disintegrating their body. There’s no way to teleport someone and leave their original body intact—the person can’t exist at the pitcher and catcher ends at the same time. Teleportation cannot be used to make copies of a person. In quantum mechanics this restriction is known as the “no cloning theorem.” In some ways however, teleportation is quite different to Star Trek—it requires quite a bit of preparation and equipment at both ends of the process—you can’t just appear on the surface of a planet you’ve never visited before.

But you could imagine this being used as a way to travel to distant solar systems—a robot probe with a supply of entangled particles could be sent out on the decades, or centuries long, journey required to travel between stars. Once it arrived at it destination, explorers would step into a teleportation chamber on Earth containing the entangled pairs of the particles sent with the probe. Their bodies would be destroyed, but information about them would be transmitted by radio at the speed of light to the probe. The probe would receive the information, and reconstitute the explorers. Of course, if anything happened to break the chain of transmission, or to disturb the entangled particles before the right time, the explorers would be killed. But if everything worked, to them it would feel like going from Earth to an alien world in the blink of an eye.

Naturally, these systems don’t really work like this. The system installed with OnStar, the real world version of “RoamStar”, can unlock a vehicle remotely, provide route information, and alert an operator in the event of a crash, but they can’t drive the car for you. Not to say such a thing is impossible. In 2007 the BBC show Top Gear fitted out not one but three full-sized sedans with remote controls for what has to be the most bizarre auto races ever driven, right down to the “Swinging Ball of Death”. In March of last year, James Brighton from Cranfield University in the UK rigged a Hummer H3 to run via remote as well, and of course, Mythbusters hack together remote controlled cars for their experiments every other week.

While the level of sophistication for all of these engineers varies,the principle is still the same. The remote only has to replace the driver’s physical manipulation of the car, which is to say, the steering wheel, brakes, and gas pedal. In this 2003 video, a group of guys with apparently too much time on their hands show how they install the mechanism for managing the gas intake from the engine, bypassing the pedals entirely. The Top Gear episode seemed to require a lot of electronics and controllers that took up most of the front seat, forcing the hosts of the show to sit in the rear. The Hummer, easily the most sophisticated of all of them, concealed all of the controlling mechanisms, providing the most KITT-like look, where a driver could sit in the front seat of the car and actually appear to be driving, or sleeping, or anything else, while the remote controller stands atop a high cliff and enjoys what has to be one of the most entertaining toys ever.

It took science another 15 years after those episodes aired, but in 2001 a company called Line-X made the bullet-proof coating very nearly a reality. Paxcon, a heavy duty spray on plastic coating, makes walls extremely blast and bullet resistant (major shout out to Knight Rider Online for the tip).  The U.S. Air Force tested it (PDF) on their typical portable quicky-build military construction and found that it resisted explosions amazingly well. They needed 1,000 pounds of TNT to even damage the coating, and the wall still held.   For a dramatic visual demonstration, check out this Fox news video, which demonstrates the coating against explosions, but then also shows it effectively protecting a cinder block dropped from 52 feet up. Even at that height, the block bounced when it hit the ground.

The coating is extremely elastic, allowing it to stretch and deflect the energy of a bullet or a blast. But why this particular plastic is so effective, no one’s really sure. Even the military had to commission a panel to try and figure it out (I called Line-X, but had to leave a message).

But let’s talk about cars. Plaxcon already sees civilian use as a coating that protects pick-up truck beds. Recently Smash Lab, a Discovery Channel show,  actually tested it with two trucks, one with the coating and another without. Their test truck used a competitor to Plaxcon called Rhino Liner, but it’s more or less the same thing. Then they set off five pounds of “industrial explosives” placed underneath the rear axle of the truck.   The truck-bed without the coating was turned into tiny bits scattered all over the desert test site. The one with the liner deflected the force of the explosion to the front of the truck, destroying the cab, but leaving only a dent on the bed itself.

So it makes some sense that one could coat KITT’s body with the stuff and get a pretty good bullet proof car. Paint over it and it might even possible to generate KITT’s sleek, shiny look. Windows are a problem, though. Line-X is opaque, so probably traditional bullet proof windows are needed.  And then there’s the problem of the underbody. Cars are traditionally fairly open along the bottom, making them easier to repair. But coating every part visible along the bottom of the car would mean cutting through it every time a part had to be checked or fixed. More likely I imagine KITT having a big metal shield along the underbody of the car, which Sarah Graiman or Bonnie would have to remove make a repair. I like to imagine that somewhere off camera,  during fix-it scenes,  a long, KITT shaped piece of shielding leans against the wall. And that sometimes Billy knocks it over.

Show News: There’s been a lot of tidbits about the future of Knight Rider lately. First the show was picked up for a full season. Then the full season was shortened by four episodes. Along the way, NBC decided to drop three characters, eliminating the characters of Alex Torres, Carrie Rivai, and Charles Graiman. Also, future episodes will have a closer resemblance to the original show, in which KITT helps find criminals rather than terrorists. It’s not clear if the show is in danger of cancellation, but signs are not good.

So, does anyone else remember back in 2005, when GM announced that they’d have a self-driving car by 2008? The story was everywhere. It was supposed be a modified Opel  Vectra that would attain speeds of 60 mph and navigate dense traffic. Well, here we are, 2008, no intelligent Vectra in sight. Where’s our self-driving car, GM? Huh?

Not coming any time soon, I suspect. Tim Lee at Ars Technica has a pretty good overview of all there is to know in self-driving cars, but if you want the condensed version, start with the the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge. DARPA, the advanced research arm of the Department of Defense, asked AI developers to build a car that could travel 131 miles through the dessert with no human input. That first year, no car made it more than eight miles. But in 2005, five cars survived the trek, including the winner out of Standford Unvesity, a modified Volkswagon Touareg named Stanley. In 2007, DARPA issued a new challenge, to navigate city streets, and six cars succeeded in the task.

The winner, a modified Chevy built by engineers from Carnegie Mellon, used cameras, lasers, and radar to build a virtual map of the terrain on the fly. Meanwhile, top level decision making algorithms were deciding strategy, like “stop at the intersection” and “Flip off the cop” while another set of software managed the steering wheel and pedals to actually accomplish those goals in light of the terrain map and other traffic obstacles

But there’s still so much the cars can’t do: identify stop signs, pedestrians, or cone zones, just to name a few, and then there’s the problem of managing multiple obstacles at once. That’s why the guys who are expert in these cars say  we’re probably a couple of decades away from telling KITT to go park himself.

Not to worry, there are a couple of neat things that have become automated in recent years. Remember those Lexus commercials with the car that parks itself? Those were for real. The driver stll has to manage the breaks and gas, but after lingin up the car for the spot, the car takes over the steering wheel and executes the kind of perfect parrallel park most of us couldn’t manage on our driver’s tests. And then there’s adaptive cruise control that detects when the car is approaching an obstacle and slows down. These are baby steps, to be sure, but as the saying goes, you have to walk before you can get the self-driving car to go pick up the pizza.

Ah, the beach episode, a classic of the 1980s crime fighter genre, brought to vivid life in last night’s episode of Knight Rider, when Mike Traceur must infiltrate a band of (what else?) surfing mercenaries to locate a missing secret agent. Fortunately, an episode on the beach creates a perfect opportunity to bust out what has to be one of the coolest, if not always the most useful, things a super car can do, which is go into submarine mode. In last night’s episode a rocket actually blasted KITT off a cliff and into the water. Kitt’s shielding protected Traceur and this week’s sidekick, Zoe Chae, and he made a mid-air transformation to Aqua-KITT. Safe below the waves, Traceur and Chae pondered their next course of action.The episode got me wondering: Could we actually build a submarine car? As you can see from the video clip (skip ahead to 2:35 in the video): yes.

The sQuba, by Swiss auto maker Rinspeed, debuted at the Geneva Motor Show last March. It has a road speed of 75 mph, boat speed of 4 mph, and underwater speed of 2 mph. The car is naturally buoyant, so driving it into the water turns it into a boat with no transformation required. To dive, passengers simply open the door and let the water run in, though they would be wise to don the integrated SCUBA masks and mouthpieces first. Rinspeed’s website said that to keep the car light enough to float, they had to make the water jets out of the current ultimate in futuristic materials, carbon nanotubes. To top it off, the sQuba uses an electric motor, so it’s a zero emissions vehicle. In case you’re wondering, designer Frank Rinderknecht did create it specifically because he loved James Bond’s Lotus Esprit, from The Spy who Loved Me.

On the website, Rinderknecht said he designed an open vehicle so he wouldn’t have to deal with the problem of trapped air. He said the added buoyancy would require an extra two tons of weight to sink the car, which would destroy the land-based performance.

But somehow, an open-topped dive doesn’t satisfy me. I’d need to wear a drysuit to keep my tuxedo safe when I arrived at the formal ball, you know? Maybe my best bet would be the personal submarine from U-Boat Worx, a Dutch company. It has no land-based function at all, but for $570,000, I can buy a personal submersible, motor down to 100 meters below the surface, hang out for six hours watching the fishies, and be home in time for dinner.

ETA: Corrections to pricing and locations of U-Boat Worx

Living on Martian time [Futurismic]

Singing Mad Scientist Alert: Dr. Horrible comes online today and its pretty frakkin’ good. If only Whedon had the foresight to cast NPH in the Buffy musical.

Revenge of the moped: The future of transport is not the hovercraft, but the electric bicycle. [Next Big Future]

Ahead of our ComicCon panel next week on good science in good science fiction, some musings on the opposite phenomenon: when science fiction hurts good science. [io9, Science Fiction in Biology and Mike Brotherton via SF Signal]

UPDATE: I totally missed the main point of this last story, which was that Buzz Aldrin was the guy who said that popular scifi was hindering science.  Active discussion on the topic going on now at Bad Astronomy.