Category Archives: Transhuman News

The Great Depression hit the United States in 1929. By 1933, one in four Americans was unemployed and former millionaires were counting pennies. With no government-sponsored work relief available, it was all doom and gloom. And the automakers weren't doing any better either.

Production had dropped rather dramatically in just a few years. In 1929, Americans had bought more than four million cars. In 1932, this figure had dropped to only a million. While Ford had to slash yearly production from more than 1.5 million to only 300,000, premium carmakers like Peerless and Marmon disappeared altogether. And many more companies declared bankruptcy by the end of the 1930s.

Pierce-Arrow was one of the luxury firms that refused to give up. Established in 1901, the Buffalo-based company had become a status symbol in just a couple of decades. Favored by Hollywood stars and tycoons, Pierce-Arrow automobiles were also popular among royal families the world over. But things started to go south in the late 1920s.

Acquired by Studebaker in 1928, Pierce-Arrow started to leak money as the Great Depression hit. But unlike most of its rivals, it refused to develop and offer a lower-priced car. The Buffalo-based firm went in a completely different direction and opted to build its most opulent vehicle yet, the Silver Arrow.

Conceived at a time when Piece-Arrow was losing millions, the Silver Arrow was penned by Phil Wright, who was still in his 20s, and immediately approved by Harley Earl. With fully integrated fenders and headlamps mounted high with the line flowing up and back past the doors, the Silver Arrow resembled no other car from the company. And no other car available at the time, for that matter.

The car also featured a few groundbreaking aero features, such as flush-fitting rear fender skirts, recessed door handles (common on modern cars), and a sharp sloping rear section. The cabin was flanked by a V-shaped windscreen in the front and a slit-like window in the rear. The latter was pretty useless in terms of visibility, but it added to the car's futuristic, Batmobile-like styling.

Pierce-Arrow's out-of-the-box thinking continued with the placement of the spare wheels. Most cars of the era had spares mounted on the rear (attached to the trunk box) or placed on the front fenders, which were individual units, separated from the body. The Silver Arrow had them hidden in lockers in the impressively long front fenders. These could be opened by remote controls in the dash.

Speaking of which, thanks to a 462-cubic-inch (7.6-liter) V12 engine rated at 175 horsepower, the Silver Arrow was fast enough to turn that speedo to 115 mph (185 kph). Despite a curb weight of 5,700 pounds (2,585 kg)!

Pierce-Arrow rushed to have five examples of the Silver Arrow ready for the 1933 New York Auto Show. But with a price tag of $10,000, about 25% more than the most expensive Cadillac of the era (the equivalent of more than $200,000 in 2021), it essentially remained a show car.

It could very well be America's first-ever concept vehicle, a feat usually assigned to the Buick Y-Job design study of 1938.

Three of the five original Silver Arrow cars have soldiered on to this day and they're among the most expensive American classics. They don't come up at auction often, but when they do, they change hands for more than $2 million. It's not only the most sensational car designed in the early 1930s, it's also America's first futuristic concept vehicle.

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The Story of the Pierce-Arrow Silver Arrow, America's First Futuristic Concept Car - autoevolution

A futuristic city in Saudi Arabias Tabuk Province is a promising destination for sustainability, and technology. Called NEOM, meaning new future, it is a forward-thinking city that is supposedly nothing like the world has ever seen before. It is being called a revolution in urban living, with an immense potential for tourism. The city is going to be completely powered by renewable energy sources.

The city is a promising step towards the future of our world. It promises to leave behind all the trepidations of urban living we currently face. So yes, a city that is planned, without traffic, waste, or pollution. NEOM further promises a place that is going to allow easy access to essential resources and amenities to its residents. It is being reported that the city is going to be in the shape of a long thin line, and it will be a space for both human and nature to co-exist. It will do-away with the idea of suburban cities we have today, which encroaches into the natural world.

A smart city by all means, NEOM is going to take the term even more seriously than any other city has done previously. It is going to be technologically driven, which means that everything from traffic to live data for hazardous situations will be monitored. So, with the power of technology, a road accident could be avoided.

With efficiency as the key motivator, the city is going to redefine what it means to be living in an urban space.

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NEOM - a futuristic city that promises surreal is coming up in Saudi - Happytrips

On first click, Omnipedia feels like the shadow-sister of Wikipedia: empty white space with the occasional image, marked up by slim black text and iconic blue hyperlinks. But we are on a different internet now. This fictional encyclopedia is essentially the narrator of Neurocracy, which is part game, part murder-mystery novella and part postmodern exploration of how we take in stories and information. It is a labyrinth of text the reader, or player, navigates a 2049 version of our world by clicking hyperlinks. Having done some exploring, I believe its best to go in totally blind, though I will say that the central mystery concerns the death of the man who launched Omnipedia in the wake of Wikipedia, a character named Xu Shaoyong.

We click through from one fictional entry to the next, learning gradually that this future world is full of threats, from the presence of a civilisation-upending disease to binaural implants that track and enhance our experiences online, all the way down to dating shows that end in shocking loss of life. It feels unnervingly close to the internet as we know it, but with subtle differences that amount to clever environmental storytelling. For example, the GDPR cookie-tracking pop-up thats now the doorman at the gate of every website includes both familiar text about data and consent, and a note about our montages being tracked our emotional state, as tracked by an algorithm.

The storytelling style is rather like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, but it rejects linearity in favour of allowing the reader-player to intuit themselves through the web of information. The online rabbit-hole becomes a literary device. Theres even an option, as there is on Wikipedia, to start on a random page. This is ambitious and confident writing there is a sureness here that the machine of this mystery works so well that you can walk into the maze from any angle, and still find what you are looking for.

Omnipedia is an unreliable narrator we are encouraged to look at the edit logs of each wiki page, to see what information is new and what has been deleted. This feature of Wikipedia, programmed into the encyclopedia for transparency, is used here as a postmodern storytelling tool, and it provides a strange kind of tension. Revealing what is new information and old information on the search for the truth behind Shaoyongs death injects drama into the static, familiar space of a website.

New material has been added to Neurocracy every week, and its storytelling method is compelling. For me, the best way to engage is with a notebook, marking down my findings but there is a thriving Discord community sleuthing away too. What is more powerful than the murder mystery, however, is the depiction of a world that feels uncannily close to our reality. There is a sense in each entry that what we see there could be just around the corner. This is what excellent science fiction does: it holds up a mirror to culture as it is, and shows us what is just creeping up behind us.

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Neurocracy: futuristic murder-mystery fiction as told through Wikipedia - The Guardian

We officially found the toilet with the best view.Number One Throne

SpaceXs historic Inspiration4 mission launched like clockwork last night, kicking off the first-ever all-tourist spaceflight.

And, as promised, the views out of the massive cupola,which is a huge glass dome replacing the Crew Dragon spacecrafts port normally used to dock to the International Space Station, are breathtaking.

A video uploaded by SpaceX to Twitter shows the Earth slowly rotating hundreds of miles below an incredible sight, especially considering the dome is right abovethe small spacecrafts only toilet.

Its literally a hundred-million dollar view. In other words, the view while the crew is doing number two is truly number one.

SpaceX was able to remove the protective cover around the dome roughly twenty minutes into the flight, around the time Crew Dragon was gaining altitude to insert itself into a stable orbit.

While the crew will makes a doo with an incredible view, they will fortunately have a curtain shielding them from their compatriots.

Its not a ton of privacy, billionaire funder and mission commander Jared Isaacman told Insider in July. But you do have this kind of privacy curtain that cuts across the top of the spacecraft, so you can kind of separate yourself from everyone else.

And that also happens to be where the glass cupola is, he added. So, you know, when people do inevitably have to use the bathroom, theyre going to have one hell of a view.

READ MORE: SpaceX Crew Dragon cupola provides awe-inspiring view of the Earth from space [CNET]

More on the launch: SpaceXs Inspiration4 Already Blasted Past Jeff Bezos Highest Point

Futurism Readers: Find out how much you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

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The View From Inspiration4's Toilet Is Absolutely Incredible - Futurism

Scientists were puzzled by a bizarre case stdy: a 33-year-old male with a history of illicit drug use whod been experiencing a substantial amount of sperm passage from his rectum with ejaculation for the past two years, according to study titled A Curious Case of Rectal Ejaculation,published last month in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science.

In crude terms, the unfortunate patient was jizzing out of his butt.

The man had experienced five days of testicular pain, doctors said, noting a substantial amount of urine and sperm coming from his rectum.

A CT scan of the mans pelvis later revealed he was experiencing a chronic case of rectourethral fistula, an extremely rare condition in which theres a new anatomical connection between the urethra and rectum.

These cases are usually caused by other conditions such as prostate cancer, rectal cancer, surgery, or severe trauma. The researchers note that a large number of cases have occurred during times of war.

In this case, the unusual passage caused sperm to make its way out of the rectum rather than its usual exit, the urethra.

The cause wasnt immediately clear. The man denied having undergone abdominal surgeries, rectal manipulation and penetration, or rectal trauma, according to the study.

But, as it later turned out, the patient did spend three weeks in a comatose state thanks to a combination of cocaine and phencyclidine (better known as PCP, or angel dust) use two years before becoming symptomatic. The Foley catheter, a flexible tube used to drain urine in hospitalized patients, may have caused significant trauma at the time, the researchers suggest.

The team was fortunately able to seal the hole. They also used a catheter inserted above the pubic region to temporarily allow the man to relieve himself.

In the end, the patient made an almost perfect recovery.

So whats the takeaway? For one thing, stay away from illicit drugs so you dont end up in a comatose state.

And for health care practitioners, the case also highlights the importance of provider mindfulness when utilizing seemingly benign therapies such as Foley catheters, according to the researchers.

Futurism Readers: Find out how much you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

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Doctors Intrigued by Man Who Jizzed Out of Butthole - Futurism

Did you know The Future may be only a few short years away? Did you know that you might soon see actual flying cars in the skies over Los Angeles? And that the city has a goal to have tens of thousands of them zipping around?

In December, Mayor Eric Garcettis office announced the creation of an Urban Air Mobility Partnership, a new public-private merger with Hyundai to get low-noise, electric aircraft flying in our local airspace by 2023. The partnership says it will be working through safety and infrastructure issues, including figuring out the logistics for a vertiport where these things can take off and land.

A dreamy Hyundai promo features near-future travel in LA and San Francisco, with special attention to how bad car traffic is and how you can rise above it. Video byCES 2020 Hyundai/YouTube.

Garcetti is very bullish on flying cars, though its not clear whether the citys dedication to urban air mobility (UAM) will change when and if he decamps to India.

In late April, Garcetti spoke at a House Subcommittee hearing on aerospace innovation, where he made the sales pitch for LA as a leader in advanced aerial mobility (AAM). Its been a hub for the aerospace industry for more than half a century, so flying cars extend that destiny.

For this technology, the sky is literally the limit. And it has the potential to reduce emissions, to connect communities, and to grow our economies, he said. We need to make sure that AAM doesnt create flyover highways accessible only to those with the economic means without creating more sprawl. We know that well in Los Angeles, where traffic is among the worst in our country, and our air quality has been too, even though weve made huge strides.

This futurist optimism is not held by everyone.

We have this technical term in transportation that I'm going to use. So if you need a definition, just let me know it: This sounds to me like bullshit.

Thats UCLA urban planning professor Michael Manville gently pointing out that the transportation industry is full of promises and timelines self- driving cars, electric vehicles, high-speed rail.

It's just the beauty of technology that doesn't exist yet. You can say anything about it, right? It's, Oh, yeah, it's gonna be affordable, and we're gonna have this many vehicles in seven years, he said. Give me a break. It just doesn't work that way.

Will flying cars arrive on time? Will they deliver the clean, equitable future weve been promised by sci-fi? Or is it all just the 20th century transportation mistakes all over again, but just a little higher up?

Busy skies ahead

You might be surprised to know just how big this industry is.

There are dozens of companies around the world trying to break into this space with their own version of the flying car. Some look like big quadcopter drones, some look like Cessnas with a bunch of extra propellers. There are electric take-off-and-landing (e-VTOL) vehicles. Some are designed to be piloted, some autonomous.

There are big companies like Airbus and Boeing, and little companies youve never heard of with names like Joby and Wisk and Lilium. Los Angeles is partnering with both Hyundai and a startup named Archer.

The industry sees this ramping up over a decade or more, even if the mayors office touts flyers by 2023. In the early years, itll be expensive to fly, but the goal is to bring the price-per-ride down so that people fly regularly as a rideshare. The idea of people owning their own flying car is not a significant part of the business model. Within the city, its like Lyft. But some startups are also looking to serve as regional connectors, flying from Silverlake to Palm Springs, for example.

The citys UAM blueprint is based on a report called the Principles of the Urban Sky, which LA put together with the World Economic Forum. It estimates, among other things, that well have 23,000 vehicles in the air by the year 2030, and that a ride will be about $30 a pop.

Billions and billions of dollars are flowing into this industry, from hedge funds and people like Google founder Larry Page. So, there are a lot of people who really want to see flying cars in our near future. And not just air taxis. There are all kinds of other proposed applications for these things: regional or rural flights, transporting cargo, hovering ambulances or troop carriers. Even racing.

This is an industry estimated to be worth $1.5 to $3 trillion by 2040.

UAM companies and boosters say flying cars can reduce traffic, provide affordable mobility for everybody, and create a less polluted environment.

The UAM industry also says the vehicles will be much quieter than helicopters, but potential noise complaints are just one of the hurdles theyre dealing with. Theres also safety related to a bunch of aircraft flying over dense urban areas. Airspace belongs to the FAA, so there are struggles, or more charitably, intense conversations, over whether the city, the state, or Washington will decide how these things will use the skies.

Will they solve traffic?

While the technocrats envision a total redesign of city infrastructure, airspace, and transportation to make way for UAM, for the LA driver, it all boils down to one question: Will flying cars actually make traffic go away?

Susan Shaheen is a mobility expert at Berkeley whos studied autonomous vehicles, carsharing, and the environment. She and many others think that highways in the sky will behave like highways on the ground: The notion that if you create more capacity, it'll just fill up, and we've seen that with highway building.

Its induced demand in the skies: If everyones flying around and the highways open up a little, people will just move back to cars because theyre cheaper and now theres not traffic slowdowns, which then creates congestion.

Hyundais Pam Cohn says we shouldnt think of flying cars solving the problems of traffic alone.

UAM has been called the ultimate congestion buster, as have autonomous ground vehicles, as have micro-mobility, she says. And from our perspective, the answer is actually that all of them need to come together in order to beat congestion.

This makes sense, but its also breakfast-cereal logic. You know how commercials for Lucky Charms say part of a balanced breakfast? Meaning its healthy if you also eat a grapefruit? Thats what the UAM industry is saying: Flying cars are part of a balanced transportation breakfast, along with public transit and bikes and regular cars. But whether the flying car is good or bad for transportation whether its a grapefruit or a bowl of brightly colored sugary crap that remains to be seen.

Hyundais vision of multimodal transportation includes flying cars, self-driving living rooms, and a vertiport where youll have a selection of transportation options and, probably, an overpriced latte. Credit: CES 2020 Hyundai/YouTube.

I think in the future, there's an opportunity for us to really rethink how we shape cities and how we develop cities. And I think that that might be where you get to the congestion reduction, says Dan Dalton, vice president of Global Partnerships at a Bay Area UAM startup called Wisk.

But in the near term, I think it's more about how do we impact individuals individually, versus trying to restructure entire traffic flows?

In other words, urban air mobility is good if you need to get across town quickly, or if you want to avoid rush-hour, or if youve got to get to the bar for happy hour.

There is so much money invested in a flying car future that its hard to imagine it not coming to pass in some way. Not even here and already too big to fail. If creating highways in the skies is the goal, whats actually good for us earth-dwellers may take a back seat.

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Flying cars are coming to LA. But will they solve traffic? | Greater LA - KCRW