Light Start – Supersonic jets, Tesla X, Futurama, weed-bot, and Google Star Trek
Brett Venter
What you really need is to get to your destination by private supersonic jet – like this one
You’ve heard of conspicuous consumption, right? If you’re keen on being a part of that then you’re going to want to charter an Aerion AS2 supersonic private jet – once they become available in 2023, that is. The Aerion AS2, the dominion of a company called Flexjet, is being developed in conjunction with Airbus and uses Supersonic Natural Flow, a tech that originated with DARPA and NASA. 20 of the supersonic jets will be going online in 2023, assuming there are no breaks in the development process. As for the conspicuous consumption part? What else would you call an eight-passenger, high-speed, inter-continental aircraft? Besides a space shuttle, we mean?
Tesla’s Model X SUV has been priced and the cost is… mighty
We know that it’s going to be impossible to get our hands on a Tesla, Model X or otherwise, for a while yet. We don’t have the infrastructure at the moment but we can dream, right? And right now we’re dreaming about a bank account large enough to afford just the base model of the Tesla Model X, which was recently revealed. Without tax incentives or any extras buyers can expect to shell out $80,000 (R1.12 million) for a 70D Model X. You can scale up the options available to include more seats but that’ll also scale the price up. Right, back to dreaming about owning one.
Futurama is Back, Baby! As a mobile game called Game of Drones
It’s not perfect but it’s what we have at this point. Cult animated science fiction series Futurama has been cancelled, resurrected as a series of feature films, actually resurrected again only to be cancelled. And now it’s undead, we guess, about to resume existence as a mobile game from developer Wooga. The game will be called Futurama: Game of Drones and will follow “…the Planet Express crew as they fight a desperately imbalanced trade war against longtime shipping rival MomCo.” Sounds like it’s a perfect fit for the series. And since they’ve got some series writers in on the act, the humour should be just as… er… humorous.
Bonirob is a robot designed to help farmers remove weeds without pesticides
Ah, we’re on to you. You thought that this was going to be a different kind of weed robot, didn’t you? While we don’t doubt that those actually exist, probably in some sort of hydroponic care capacity, Bonirob here is something else. A company called Deepfield Robotics got together with Bosch to build Bonirob and his purpose is to trundle around fields and remove weeds – by smashing them. Awesome. That’s not all he does, of course. Bonirob also automates fertilising and monitors crops without having to send off soil samples for testing. Don’t expect it in the fields for a while though, Bonirob’s still in testing and will only see widespread use in a couple of decades or so.
Google made a Star Trek communicator for voice search (and then cancelled it)
Star Trek fans are going to be bummed about this one. Google went to the trouble of building a device based on the iconic communicator from the sci-fi series. The point was to use it for voice search. Nothing else, they were just interested to see how else they could interact with voice searches. As a result the prototype (pictured above, unless you’re looking at the newsletter) has remained in the prototype stage and isn’t likely to leave. Soon, at any rate. But the Star Trek communicator? Oh yes, that’s very possible now. We just need someone to build it. A production model, anyway. Based off one of those new cellular smartwatches, perhaps?
