Why the 70 Year Hiatus? Anachronism or Presentism Bias? Lack of Historicism?

from Google AI:

The Hiller Flying Platform (such as the VZ-1 Pawnee) was abandoned because it was too slow, lacked pilot protection, and became dangerously unstable and difficult to control when the Army demanded a larger version with more engines and thrust. [1, 2, 3]

Key Limitations

Low Speed: Performance maxed out around 16 miles per hour, making it impractical for rapid tactical movement. [1, 2]
Control Issues: The original design relied on the pilot leaning to shift their body weight. Adding more engines to increase power made the platform too heavy for kinesthetic (leaning) control to work properly. [1, 2]
Vulnerability: Pilots stood completely exposed with no armor or shielding, leaving them easy targets on a battlefield. [1, 2]
Poor Weather Handling: The craft struggled severely and lost stability in windy conditions or higher-speed flight. [1, 2]
Shift in Priorities: The U.S. military ultimately abandoned personal platform concepts in favor of conventional, practical utility helicopters like the Bell UH-1 Huey.

from Google AI:

The Jetson ONE is a single-seat electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) personal aircraft priced at $148,000. It delivers an endurance of about 20 minutes of flight time, an estimated maximum cruise range of 11 miles (17.7 km), and an electronically limited top speed of 63 mph (102 km/h). [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Specifications & Performance

Top Speed: 63 mph (102 km/h) (software-limited) [1]
Cruise Speed / Distance: ~37 mph (60 km/h) covering about 11 miles in testing [1, 2]
Endurance (Flight Time): Up to 20 minutes per charge [1]
Empty Weight: ~121–190 lb (55–86 kg) [1, 2]
Max Pilot Weight: 210 lb (95 kg) [1]
Power / Motors: 8 electric motors with high-discharge lithium-ion batteries [1]

Cost & Ordering

Base Price: $148,000 (excluding taxes and fees; formerly $128,000)
Deposit: $8,000 non-refundable down payment
Delivery Timeline: 2026 and 2027 production slots are sold out; current orders are scheduled for 2028 delivery through Jetson Aero. [1, 2]

Regulatory & Safety

Pilot License: Classified as an FAA Part 103 ultralight in the U.S., meaning no traditional pilot's license is legally required, though brief ground/flight training is provided. [1, 2]
Safety Features: Triple-redundant flight computers, motor redundancy, LiDAR obstacle detection, hands-free hover, and a ballistic emergency parachute

PS: The Jetson ONE takes 1 hour to fully recharge when connected to a 230V/240V outlet. If you are charging it using standard 110V/120V residential power, the recharge time stretches to 2 hours. [1, 2, 3]

Because waiting 1 to 2 hours for a 20-minute flight can be restrictive, the aircraft is explicitly designed with a swappable battery system. The dual high-density lithium-ion battery packs can be easily removed and replaced (in 2-5 minutes) with a fresh set, allowing for immediate back-to-back flights without downtime if you purchase extra 60 kg/ 132 lb. battery packs ($3,600 - $4,200 ea.)

Why did we Stop Dreaming About the Future after the 60's?  Was the Advent of Cultural Capitalism the Turning Point & Onset of Hauntological thinking?

from Google AI:

Modern thought turned toward what we now call hauntological post-modernism during the 1960s because the grand, optimistic promises of mid-century high modernism and techno-utopianism began to collapse under the weight of historical trauma and political disillusionment.

"Hauntology"—a term later coined by Jacques Derrida in 1993 but deeply rooted in the cultural shifts of the 1960s—describes a state where the present is haunted by the "lost futures" that were imagined but never arrived.

Here is why this shift occurred during that specific decade:

1. The Collapse of Techno-Utopianism

The Atomic Shadow: The 1950s promised a clean, atomic-powered future of infinite progress. By the 1960s, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the cold reality of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) turned that technological dream into an existential nightmare. The future no longer looked bright; it looked radioactive.
Bureaucratic Alienation: The rise of mass media, consumer capitalism, and bureaucratic states made individuals feel like cogs in a machine. Thinkers and artists realized that the "rational" modern world had created a deeply alienating reality.

2. Deep Political Disillusionment

The Vietnam War: The war shattered the Western myth of moral progress and enlightened modernization. It demonstrated how modern, rational state machinery could be used to execute a brutal, televised quagmire.
1968 and Failed Revolutions: The massive student protests and worker strikes of May 1968 in Paris, alongside civil rights upheavals in the US, promised a radical break from the past. When these movements were suppressed or co-opted by the capitalist system, it left a profound sense of melancholy—the ghost of a revolution that almost was.

3. The Death of "Grand Narratives"

Post-Modern Skepticism: Philosophers like Jean-François Lyotard later noted that the late 20th century was defined by an "incredulity toward meta-narratives" (grand stories like Marxism, Christianity, or Enlightenment Progress that promised to explain and fix the world).
Cultural Afterimages: As people stopped believing that history was moving toward a perfect destination, culture began to loop backward. Instead of creating entirely new artistic forms, the late 1960s began to recycle, parody, and mourn the aesthetics of the past.

4. The Rise of Recording Technology and Electronic Media

Literally Haunted Media: The 1960s saw the widespread adoption of television, magnetic tape, and high-fidelity audio recording. For the first time in history, the voices, faces, and ghosts of the dead and the immediate past were constantly replayed in living rooms.
The Present as a Simulation: This technological shift made reality feel unmoored from time, a core component of hauntology where the past refuse to stay buried and constantly disrupts the present.

In short, the 1960s was the inflection point where humanity realized it might not ever reach the utopian future it had been promised, leaving us to inhabit a post-modern present haunted by those unfulfilled dreams.

The Rise of Meta-Modernism and Resurrection of a Future 

from Google AI:

If 1960s postmodernism was characterized by the death of "grand narratives" and a melancholic obsession with lost futures (hauntology), the 21st-century shift into metamodernism represents a re-mythologization and rebirth of the future.

Metamodernism functions as an intellectual pendulum. It acknowledges the valid critiques of postmodernism (skepticism, irony, awareness of corporate overreach and climate collapse) but chooses to oscillate back toward modernist ideals (grand ambitions, sincerity, utopian progress) anyway. It is an attitude of informed naivety—knowing a goal is nearly impossible, but pursuing it with absolute earnestness.

The convergence of SpaceX and Artificial Intelligence serves as the ultimate real-world manifestation of this metamodern rebirth.

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1. Sincerity Over Irony: The Return of the Grand Narrative

Postmodernism declared that grand human projects (like colonizing other planets or perfecting the human mind) were dangerous, colonialist, or naive illusions.

• The Metamodern Swing: SpaceX’s explicit mission statement—to make humanity a multi-planetary species—is a violently modernist grand narrative. However, because it exists in a postmodern world, it is hyper-aware of its own absurdity, engineering risks, and the criticism it draws. [1]
• Rather than retreating into ironic detachment, it leans into radical sincerity. Building a city on Mars or developing artificial consciousness are no longer dismissed as campy 1950s sci-fi tropes; they are treated as concrete, systemic design objectives. [1]

2. Trancending the AI Dichotomy (Doomers vs. Accelerators)

Metamodernism thrives on bridging binaries. In the cultural discourse surrounding AI, modern thought has fractured into two intense camps: the AI Doomers (existential dread, a very postmodern anxiety) and e/acc (Effective Accelerationism) (unrestrained technological optimization, a very modernist stance). [1]

• The Metamodern Synthesis: The current trajectory of frontier AI—manifested in megaprojects like SpaceX's newly consolidated Super Intelligence division (SpaceXSI, formerly xAI) and its massive Terawatt-scale "Terraab" chip-manufacturing plans—attempts to synthesize this tension. [1, 2, 3]
• Elon Musk frequently articulates a view that AI must be pursued aggressively to ensure a "pro-human" consciousness survives. It views AI not merely as an efficiency tool to replace human workers (the cold, modernist view), but as an existential custodian. The goal is to train models like Grok "on the sum total of all space information" to serve as a companion to human exploration, marrying technological fatalism with utopian rescue. [1, 2]

3. Space as the New Physical Canvas for Digital Ghosts

Under hauntology, our media became an echo chamber of the past, recycling old aesthetics because we couldn't imagine a new tomorrow. AI and space exploration fundamentally break this loop by shifting the frontier outward.

• Off-World Infrastructure: The literal infrastructure of the future is moving off-planet. SpaceX is driving a paradigm shift where AI is moving past Earth-bound data centers toward orbital, solar-powered AI satellite networks and space-based data hubs.
• Autonomous Manifestation: Deep-space travel imposes a hard physical limit: light-lag. Because human controllers cannot react in real time to a probe or a rover on Mars, AI must take sovereign command of exploration. Space forces AI to step out of the realm of internet chatbots and "digital ghosts" and into physical reality as autonomous builders, miners, and navigators. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

4. Pragmatic Idealism

The ultimate hallmark of metamodernism is pragmatic idealism—using hyper-rational, cold capitalism to fund wild, romantic dreams.

• We see this clearly in how SpaceX finances its grand architecture. It secures multi-billion dollar commercial data center and AI compute capacity leases with hyperscalers and tech giants like Anthropic and Alphabet, building out terrestrial capital and considering mergers with Tesla to create vertically integrated AI/hardware powerhouses.
• It uses the supreme, hyper-efficient modern capitalist machine to subsidize an otherwise unprofitable, romantic modernist goal: leaving the cradle of Earth. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

In the 1960s, the future died because our tools threatened to destroy us. In the metamodern present, SpaceX and AI represent a cultural pivot that says: Yes, our tools are dangerous, and yes, the system is flawed—but we are going to look up at the stars and build the future anyway.

Ad Astra!