Good news! The future is here! Those awesome ideas we grew up hearing about from the realms of science fiction have been realized and, believe it or not, you can actually own some of the stuff you’ve always wanted. But like most things in this world, there’s a catch: You can only have this stuff if you are freakin’ loaded. Here is some of the awesome, cutting edge tech that proves that you can live in a modern day, sci-fi fantasy land… if you’re rich.
1.
They Can Own Flying Cars!
For decades now people have been doing their best to get a good working model of one of science fiction’s earliest staples, the flying car, and in the last three years, there have been massive leaps in the technology. In July of 2007, the first ever flying car hit the market, the Moller M200G Volantor, which can best be worded as a saucer car, since it looks like it was modeled after every single UFO drawing ever. The M200G Volantor could drive to speeds of 50 miles per an hour and fly 10 feet off of the ground for about 90 minutes, which might not seem like much, but you know what? It’s a start, and shit, it still flies.
It still looks like a couple of pie plates though
Now, if you want your flying car to not look like it is owned by George Jetson, then there is good news: Someone made a newer flying car that beats the shit out of this one, and it is called The Terrafugia, or as we like to call it, the best damn looking flying car ever.
Now that’s more like it!
Not only does the Terrafugia look totally fucking sweet, it’s also completely viable to drive on the road with the retractable wings and it can actually fly in the air at a top speed of 130 mph with a flight range of 500 miles. After successful air and road tests, the Terrafugia is on pace to be in consumers hands in five years time. If you dig the Alien spaceship vibe, it’s $90,000 for the M200G Volantor, but if the Terrafugia is more of your thing, it will be $148,000 when it hits the market.
2.
They Can Clone Their Pets!
If you’re anything like us, when your child’s pet dies, you try to replace it with an ASCII picture and hope your child doesn’t notice.
Lucky for you, as long as your pants are falling down from the weight of all that cash you’re carrying, you can now make backups of your animals through the power of cloning. As this report mentions, after storing her cat’s DNA, a woman was able to get the cat cloned following its death. The price? $50,000.
Well, it does purr.
According to the link, the woman claims the cat’s personality has remained the same. Before you chime in with “Dead?,” we’ll clarify by pointing out that the cat returned as a kitten. Of course, some of you might shrug and claim the cat wasn’t cloned; it just got reduced to eight lives. Well, we have news for you: for $155,000, Edgar and Nina Otto received a cloned copy of their dog, Lancelot, after he died of cancer.
Impressively, the new owners report that apart from looking just like the original, the new Lancelot, despite being only a 10-week-old puppy, took just a few hours to substitute the old Lancelot’s position as pack leader to the other nine dogs the couple own. To be fair, if one of our bosses died, only to return younger than before, we too would prefer washing the mess in our pants over asking for higher wages.
3.
They Can Have Electric Cars Too!
You can learn a lot about a man from the luxuries he buys. If Alfred B. Billionaire spends a few million dollars digging a giant pit and filling it with every carnivorous animal known to Man, doesn’t install handrails, and then invites people to stand right on the rim to check out a “cool thing,” and that’s the last anyone ever hears from them, you know it’s not a good idea to steal his sack lunch from the break room.
It’s not fair. Rich people have the best tuna salad.
Martin Tuchman is a New Jersey based entrepreneur who made his millions as a CEO of something called Interpool Inc, purported to be one of the top three international leasing companies, whatever that means.
We choose to believe it involves slaying leprechauns.
These days, he spends a lot of time as chairman of The Tuchman Foundation and The Parkinson Alliance, which assists scientists in getting grants from the National Institute of Health. So we know he’s got a bit of a charitable streak; if he’s going to splurge, it will probably be on something he justifies as helping the world. Maybe a nice electric smart car?
But when you’ve got money, why help the world at 40mph in a rinky-dink smart car when you can do it at 125mph with the Tesla Roadster?
Yes, it’s that Tesla, the brand name is referring to. Don’t worry though, General Public; this isn’t a death ray in disguise. Although with an acceleration of 0-60mph in 3.9 seconds, your balls will be melting into the seat anyway. The Tesla sports a completely electric, 288 horsepower engine that gets roughly 200 miles on a full charge. Though it won’t plug into any old wall outlet, you can hook it up to your home electrical grid with nothing more complicated than what you use to connect a washer/dryer.
Thanks to his purchase, Martin Tuchman is living in a wonderful future free from the tyranny of Foreign Oil! He could, theoretically, drive right up to Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, kick them in the nuts, and drive off into the sunset without any consequences.
The starting cost for a Tesla Roadster is $109,000. Of course if you don’t want to come off looking like a cheap hobo, you’ll have cough up an additional $17,000 for the full package of features. Perhaps recognizing the fact that the market for expensive gimmick cars isn’t very large in the middle of Worldwide Economic Turmoil, the company offers a range of leasing options. If you’re an American customer, you can even take advantage of an $8000 tax credit.
4.
One of Them Has A Supersonic Jetpack!
Since the dawn of time, man has yearned to do two things: fly and be a little more like Boba Fett. In 2004, Yves Rossy did both.
Why yes, we are saying the dawn of time was the year 1980.
Rossy spent his early years as a pilot for the Swiss Air Force, which seems like the best job ever: all the awesome high-tech planes you could want, with no possibility of ever having to go to war with them. He then started piloting commercial airliners, but apparently that wasn’t enough excitement for the Swiss man. So he got somewhere between a quarter and a half million dollars in investment money, and set out to build his very own personal jetpack.
Three years later, he finally had a working model; problem was, it would only work at very high altitudes. Instead of doing what a normal person would have done (give up and call it a day), Yves instead decided to jump out a plane 4000 feet above ground with the jetpack on his back, trusting that his invention would work properly. Just to add another layer of ballsiness to this, the actual “jet” part of his jetpack was nothing more than modified model aeroplane engines.
Not pictured: a believable way to keep a human aloft
While you would be justified in thinking that this adventurer ended up as a small dark squishy patch somewhere on the Alps, the jetpack in fact worked perfectly and he flew for more than four minutes before touching down. Since that flight, he has done more than 30 others without any issues, getting up to speeds of 186 miles per hour.
Thanks to his success, Rossy has started to refer to himself by superhero names like “Fusionman” and “Jetman”, which we have to admit, is exactly what we would do if we had a jetpack. Oh, and by the way, he’s over 50 years old. That’s right, at the age when most people are thinking about Social Security and 401(k)s, Rossy built and became the goddamn rocketeer.
Just goes to show that any dream can come true, no matter how far-fetched, as long as you have a half-million dollars to burn.
Written by Ross Doherty – Copyrighted © www.weirdworm.net
Image Sources
Image sources:
- – They Can Own Flying Cars!: http://jalopnik.com/assets/resources/2007/07/rear_view.jpg http://www.gizmag.com/pictures/gallery/5910_260706101245.jpg
- – They Can Clone Their Pets!: http://i902.photobucket.com/albums/ac221/dustbin123/cat.jpg http://i902.photobucket.com/albums/ac221/dustbin123/2010_Lotus_Exige.jpg http://i902.photobucket.com/albums/ac221/dustbin123/lock.jpg
- – They Can Have Electric Cars Too!: http://i792.photobucket.com/albums/yy202/nuclear_siafu/CrackPics/4129883062_4de5a35f70.jpg http://i792.photobucket.com/albums/yy202/nuclear_siafu/CrackPics/scary_leprechaun-13321.jpg http://i792.photobucket.com/albums/yy202/nuclear_siafu/CrackPics/3290397774_ab23093660.JPG http://i792.photobucket.com/albums/yy202/nuclear_siafu/CrackPics/teslaRoadster.jpg
- – One of Them Has A Supersonic Jetpack!: http://ablogtoread.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/starwars-boba-fett.jpg http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/42412000/jpg/_42412488_plane416.jpg
