Tesla's SpaceX-Powered Roadster: Flying Cars, Play, and the Future of Innovation
When Tesla's redesigned Roadster crawled up an inverted ramp, clung there upside down, and then flipped itself back onto its wheels on bursts of compressed air, it invited two very different reactions: awe at the engineering, and an eye-roll at the spectacle. In this episode of Modem Futura, Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard try to hold both at once. They unpack what was actually shown at the October reveal (cold-gas thrusters developed with SpaceX, an underbody fan system that lets the car quite literally suck itself to a surface, and a claimed 0.81-second sprint to 60 mph) and why so much of it reads less like a product than the most lavishly funded science fair project imaginable. From there, the conversation turns to something bigger than cars: what happens to imagination when we only allow it inside the lines? Sean shares the story of a high school mousetrap car that became a model-rocket-powered missile, and earned a D for its trouble. The hosts explore the difference between a playpen and a playground, why "serious play" may be a contradiction in terms, and how the language of innovation so often asks for the outputs of play without permitting the process. They also wrestle with a harder question: how do you celebrate genuinely playful engineering when it is fronted by someone with outsized wealth and influence? Along the way: futurist Jim Dator's reminder that any useful idea about the future should appear ridiculous, the flying car as one of our most persistent borrowed futures, fan-car physics, the spinoff argument for wild experiments. A conversation about spectacle, speed, and the permission to be ridiculous, and who gets to have it.
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Modem Futura is a production of the Future of Being Human initiative at Arizona State University. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. To learn more about the Future of Being Human initiative and all of our other projects visit - https://futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu
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Host Bios:
Sean M. Leahy, PhD - ASU Bio
Sean is an internationally recognized technologist, futurist, and educator innovating humanistic approaches to emerging technology through a Futures Studies approach. He is the Executive Director for the Future of Being Human Initiative and Research Scientist for the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and Senior Global Futures Scholar with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University.
Andrew Maynard, PhD - ASU Bio
Andrew is a scientist, author, thought leader, and Professor of Advanced Technology Transitions in the ASU School for the Future of Innovation in Society. He is the founder of the ASU Future of Being Human initiative, Director of the ASU Risk Innovation Nexus, and was previously Associate Dean in the ASU College of Global Futures.
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