Planes, pains and self-driving automobiles

Future telling or fairy tales?

We want to believe in a cool, shiny future London. Honest we do.

Hell, we’d even take a gritty, Bladerunner-esque future London if it came to that. But, right now the future London that’s being sold to us is less ‘science fiction’ and more ‘complete fiction’.

Example number one: A couple of weeks ago, some research was published in the monthly journal Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance that summarised work done by the Civil Aviation Authority, the RAF and King’s College London into the physiological effects of “hypersonic passenger travel”.

To put it simply, they were looking into the question of whether us non-astronaut types could survive the kinds of G-forces you’d experience if you took a quick suborbital space flight (that is, going up 50 or 60 miles above the Earth).

Just why they were looking into this became very apparent once you read the ensuing headlines. ‘Yes, Really – Two-Hour, Bum-Clenching Flights To Sydney Are Coming’ squawked the increasingly unhinged HuffPost (righ…