Tomorrowland (12 page)

Our boat weaves through head-high saw grass tangles. It’s a tough old plant, evolved to withstand a tough environment. The tops of the shafts form spears, and tiny, sharp teeth run up both sides of the blade. Unsuspecting tourists have been known to gash their palms while copping a feel. The early explorers told tales of men lost for months in this maze.

Motoring on, we start to see the tree islands, places where, over hundreds of years, the sediment level has risen and seeds have blown in and taken hold. The islands are teardrop-shaped, symmetrically aligned so that the fat end faces north and the taper faces south, pointing out the water’s otherwise imperceptible flow.

At one point, we spy a marsh rabbit swimming from tree island to tree island. A few days later, when I’m back at Water Management headquarters, I mention the rabbit to one of the top scientists working the project. He looks at me like I’m crazy.

“An aquatic rabbit?”

“Yeah.”

“Aquatic?”

“It looked like it was doing the breaststroke.”

“No shit,” he says. “I had no idea there was such a thing. We really don’t know much about the Everglades — that’s the real challenge.”

6.

Few people understand the challenge better than Jerry Lorenz, a marine ecologist with the National Audubon Society who studies spoonbills in the Florida Keys. “In the sixties,” he says, “when the system started to break down, we had no idea what was going wrong, let alone how to fix it.”

But over the past thirty years, ecology has morphed from a fuzzy, soft art into a rigorous statistical science. What started out as fragmented crisis management — an endangered species here, an oil spill there — has become a unified systems-based theory. But it’s a very new theory.

“Realistically,” continues Lorenz, “ecosystem ecology itself is quite young. What we have in South Florida right now is a bunch of separate ecosystems. If you want to save the whole thing by piecing them back together — what’s called landscape ecology — then you’re dealing with an entirely new field. Ten years ago, the whole philosophical underpinning that’s driving this restoration project didn’t even exist.”

I am riding next to Lorenz as he pilots a small boat across the Florida Bay. He wears jungle fatigues, a bandanna to cover his head, and has a long ponytail trickling out the back. We slide inland, up a feeder river, one of the many that connect freshwater to saltwater. In seconds, dense canopy blots out the daylight. Lorenz hardly notices: He’s too busy shouting about spoonbills over the engine.

“You know, people say that this project is about restoring the hydrology of the Everglades. Yet, down here, at the end of the pipe, you can get the hydrology perfect for 360 days a year, but if you fuck it up for five days, then Florida Bay takes it on the chin. If you get a surprise storm and the farmers start bitching about excess water in their fields and that water gets dumped at the wrong time, say during breeding season, then the spoonbills are screwed. All the modelers and engineers deal in averages. They’ll
tell you five days is a blip on the radar, that it’s inconsequential. Well, it’s not inconsequential if you’re a spoonbill in heat.”

Thus, much in the same way that Brandt and Mazzoti are collecting alligator data, Lorenz is collecting spoonbill data. The results of all this research is sent to the computer modeling department at the Water District offices, where scientists are doing their best to fight against that five-day blip, among other catastrophes.

It’s another massive undertaking. The database being built doesn’t just contain facts about the Everglades present, it’s a treasure trove of the entire natural history of the area. There are botanical tidbits gleaned from eighteenth-century survey records, expedition accounts and agricultural deeds, interwoven with thirty years of hydrological data, including information about evaporation, canal flow, levee seepage, and water quality. There are disaster patterns from fires and tropical storms, topographic facts, population numbers, and all levels of biotic minutia: everything from the mating habits of aquatic insects to statistics on the Florida panther.

The model tells the engineers in the field what to do — which dam to blow up, how much water to store — but the model’s predictions could be wrong. Thus, the only way to change the Everglades is to change it slowly, carefully, monitoring each step and being prepared to unstep at any moment. In other words, just as ecology gave way to engineering in an attempt to dismantle the past, ecology must once again become engineering to reassemble the future.

But even that past is a mystery. No one really knows what the Everglades used to be — sure, there’s the random fact scooped out of the muck of soil deposits, yet there’s no groundwater table for the Mesozoic era, no aerial photographs from the Dark Ages. This is the largest eco-engineering project ever undertaken, our greatest effort to undo the damage we have done. Yet the scientists and engineers are hydroforming blind, as their actual goal exists only in imagination.

Lorenz and I are punching out into the Florida Bay, with nothing but empty ocean stretching out to a far horizon. I spin around and look back toward the land, but we’ve moved too far away to gain any perspective. I see neither mangroves nor saw grass prairies nor behemoth lakes nor meandering rivers. There’s only the thin edge of the continent: a green line over the shimmer of water.

“It’s just seems too damn big to fix,” I say.

“Yeah,” says Lorenz, “yet the plan is tiny compared to what it represents. The Everglades aren’t the planet’s only endangered ecosystem. The whole world is watching — if we fail here, then people aren’t even going to want to try elsewhere.”

Buckaroo Banzai

THE ARRIVAL OF FLYING CARS

It was 2004. Hollywood, California. I was sitting in my apartment in the late afternoon, writing the initial pages of what would eventually become my second book, when the doorbell rang. It was Dezso Molnar, the aerospace engineer we met in the Preface (when he worked with Craig Breedlove in the attempt to drive a car through the sound barrier). In the years since, Dezso and I had become friends, but — back then — we hadn’t seen each other in a little while.

He walked into my apartment with an armful of schematics and a smile on his face. “I solved it,” was the first thing he said.

“Solved what?”

“The flying car.”

Then he unrolled the schematics.

Now, sure, this was not the first time in history someone told their buddy that they’d figured out how to build a flying car. After all, when it comes to our science fiction dreams, what’s dreamier than a flying car? But here’s the thing: Dezso’s flying car — which, albeit, is actually a flying motorcycle — really flies.

At a personal level, nothing is more emblematic of the radical change being described in this book than that conversation. It was my “Welcome to Tomorrowland” moment — not just a paradigm shift, but a paradigm shift in my freaking living room.

1.

The Calfee Design Factory is 10,000 square feet, a few stories high, and perched on the edge of a lonely bluff in La Selva Beach, California. Below the bluff, the Pacific rumbles and moans. Above it, in the factory, on most days, they build bicycles — technically some of the very best in the world. Today is not most days.

Today is October 20, 2005. An afternoon of dark skies and light rain. A man named Dezso (pronounced
Dezh-ur
) Molnar is braving the elements, pushing a strange, three-wheeled contraption out of the warehouse and onto a 2,000-foot runway. A few years back, when Molnar started hunting for a place to build this contraption, he had three key needs. The first was isolation. What he wanted to build in his skunk works was the kind of project that attracted all sorts of unwanted attention. Calfee’s warehouse fit the bill. It sits on 379 acres of private land and sees few visitors. His second need was expertise. Molnar’s contraption had to be light — very light. Calfee’s bicycles are made from carbon fiber. They weigh about 12 lbs. The engineers who work here understand light. Molnar’s last requirement was a straight stretch of pavement. It didn’t have to be a runway, but — considering the true nature of Molnar’s invention — it was a fitting touch.

The true nature of Molnar’s invention is hard to discern at a glance. The machine looks like some Mad Max version of a recumbent bicycle, only with training wheels, a giant steel roll cage, and a 68-inch, three-bladed propeller strapped to the back end. Today is the very first day Molnar is going to fire up that propeller and see if it can push his machine down the road. He’s hoping for speeds about fifty mph — because, at least according to Molnar’s
calculations, that’s about what it should take to get his flying motorcycle off the ground.

2.

The flying car, the flying motorcycle, the stuff of dreams — of very old dreams. Aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss invented the first flying car back in 1917: a forty-foot-long tri-winged beast made from aluminum. The beast never did fly, but it did manage to hop. That hop was enough, inspiring almost a century of innovation. Next came Waldo Waterman’s 1937 winged Studebaker — dead because of lack of funding. A bad crash destroyed the 1947 ConvAirCar. The Aerocar, perhaps the most famous of all roadable aircraft, went through six iterations before the oil crisis of the 1970s killed off production plans. Since then, there have been dozens of other attempts; a few have flown, most have not. Today, the two most widely known versions are Paul Moller’s M400 Skycar and the Terrafugia Transition. Both of these vehicles are currently for sale; neither of them have actually been delivered to a customer. And that’s really the issue. Out of the 104 roadable aircraft (80 of which have patents on file), none have seen mass production.

There are, of course, good reasons for this. While the upside of a flying car is easy to imagine — no traffic jams, shorter commutes, another excuse to quote
Blade Runner
— the downsides are considerable. Cost and noise, for starters (at $196,000, the Terrafugia has already been branded a rich man’s toy, to say nothing of Moller’s $3.5 million reserve price).

Safety and ease-of-use are bigger stumbling blocks. As with anything that flies, the consequences of pilot error can be severe. Add in the possibility of bad weather and it’s no surprise that the safest pilots are the ones with the most practice and the best knowledge of their airplane, twin requirements that further put the flying car out of reach of the average citizen. Moreover, right
now, most small planes require constant (and expensive) upkeep. They also tend to be gas-guzzlers. Flying cars, especially if they become everyman tools, can be neither. And this list doesn’t include the bevy of concerns that arrive when one wants to create a street-legal aircraft.

Until about eight years ago, Molnar never intended to get into the street-legal aircraft business, but, considering the nature of his pedigree, perhaps it was inevitable. Molnar flew hot-air balloons as a teenager, then paid his way through college by flying planes in the Air Force and moonlighting at Truax Engineering, where Robert Truax had a Navy contract for building a replacement vehicle for the space shuttle (this was right after the
Challenger
crash). They built a workable rocket, but funding issues shut down the effort. Afterwards, Molnar spent a few years playing music in bands, building robots with the performance art outfit Survival Research Labs, and designing DIY vehicles like his buzz-bomb jet-powered go-cart. He next signed on as a crew chief for Craig Breedlove’s attempt to drive a jet car through the sound barrier. When that project ran its course, Molnar jumped back into music, and that’s where he might have stayed had it not been for London’s 2004 heatwave.

“In 2004, I was in the UK shooting a music video. It was hot and fun until I got back to Los Angeles, where it was foggy and dew was dripping from the walls in my house. I called a friend and suggested we drive out to Palm Springs, just to warm up. But it was the middle of the day and my friend worked downtown, and the traffic there was bumper-to-bumper. We were trapped. We couldn’t leave.”

But that’s when Molnar got curious about the kind of vehicle that could leave. A vehicle unencumbered by traffic on the ground because, well, his vehicle wasn’t going to travel on the ground. More important, Molnar wasn’t interested in fairy tales — he was interested in practicality. A flying car capable of vertical takeoff was the most obvious solution, but the only thing that could take off vertically was a helicopter, and those were both expensive and
difficult to pilot. But what if he threw that requirement out the window. There are 14,000 airports in America — 30 in the LA area alone. What if you could depart from those airports — which typically sit in less congested areas so getting there isn’t as much of an issue — and land in a congested area? There are dozens of parking garages in downtown LA. What if you could land atop one of those?

Then Molnar remembered an advertisement from his childhood for a gyrocopter, a type of “rotorcraft” invented in 1923 by Spanish engineer Juan de la Cierva. Gyrocopters use an unpowered rotor for lift (like a helicopter) and an engine-powered propeller for thrust (like a small plane) and have the distinct advantage of being able to land at very slow speeds (to maximize pilot safety), and in extremely small spaces (like the roof of a parking garage). Even better, gyroplanes are cheap — kits start at a thousand bucks — and easy to fly. A sport pilot’s license is required: roughly twenty hours of practice time. There was one small issue, however: Gyroplanes had a bad habit of crashing.

“The problem,” says Molnar, “is that the most popular gyroplane on the market was designed without a horizontal stabilizer, which is what keeps a plane’s nose from pitching up or down. People kept getting killed because of it, and too often it was considered pilot error. The gyroplane was originally designed to create a safe wing that would not stall, but the perceived option of removing the horizontal stabilizer was a design error. If you put the stabilizer back on, the result is potentially one of the world’s safest aircraft — and one that can land in less than twenty feet.”