I think the Segway is Ginger. Yeah, it was hyped up, but Dean Kamen himself said that there was too much hype about the thing. And if there are inconsistencies between the writings of a journalist and the actual thing, is that more likely to be the fault of the journalist or the fact? As for the rest, I'll wait to hear more details.
In any case, even if IT turns out to be a hovercraft, that's hardly going to be more important than the internet. The most that can happen is we start flying to work like in The Fifth Element or that city in Star Wars (which would mean we'd have more accidents due to people not being able to think in three dimensions and that those accidents are more likely to be fatal since a broken vehicle would fall from high up. But never mind that). So we get where we want to go faster. We've been doing that for centuries now.
By the way, Timeline was a good read, but I don't consider it to be fine writing. Crichton has a tendency to inject murder and deceit where it isn't needed, and that was true of Timeline as much as any other book. But he does do his homework, and he's very good at mixing real science with a little fiction to produce a theory that sounds plausible to the average reader. His quantum mechanics don't quite work out in the book, but it was a game try nonetheless.
And if you want to know why his theory doesn't work, consider the fact that the time travellers are essentially going to another dimension in order to travel through time. That is, they are going to a dimension where it happens that the world developed a 100 years later than it did in our dimension and thus it is the year 1902 there instead of 2002. All well and good, but how would someone from that dimension be able to affect our present? If he leaves a pair of glasses and a note in the past, it will reach the present in that other dimension, not ours. We'd never know about it. But in Timeline, there are several instances of the time travellers affecting our present through their actions.
|