Have you ever thought about everything? When I say everything, I mean all of it-dirt, trees, animals, people, planets, stars, galaxies-the entire thing all at once. I try sometimes, until I blow a cerebral gasket or fall asleep. I'm not sure why I do this. Maybe I'm trying to see what I've been missing all these years of not using drugs. It's a sort of meditation for me.
I start with tiny objects, grains of sand on the beach or something similar. I think about the billions of those that make up one beach. Then I go to everything on the beach, then everything surrounding the beach and keep expanding from there. Thinking about the universe's incredible vastness is a sort of zen state with a sci-fi-geek spin.
Expansive thought also happens to be a great way of looking at things from the bottom up. Seeing things from the simple to the complex, or the infinitesimally small to the humungously large. Too often we look at a problem from too great a view and see something so complex that it looks impossible to resolve.
I was definitely of the opinion that we were years off from cars that drive themselves. I was looking at it from the big picture of requiring incredibly accurate GPS computers and huge networks of data being collected, organized and shared among cars. I was under the impression that a huge amount of computing power would be needed to control all the cars as one big system and every car would need to be controlled individually.
Some cars I've driven recently made me see the sand on the beach, so to speak. Intelligent cruise control systems use radar signals to ping the car's bumper in front and monitor that distance constantly. The driver can adjust the following distance and maximum speed, and the car will accelerate and decelerate as needed. One BMW had a lane departure warning system that uses a forward-looking camera to alert drivers if they are swerving into another lane. By combining this with some of the active steering systems available, the car could essentially drive itself on the highway-in one lane, at least.
That one lane may be all we need for a good start, however. The whole system could be phased in on long stretches of road with a designated auto-drive lane. The trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas could be turned into 250-mile ride similar to a drive-through car wash, just without the colorful, spinning foam octopi. Obviously, emergency stop procedures would have to be put in place, but they could be handled by satellite, cell phone or even radio.
I always thought we had to have this massively complex traffic system to control everything when, in reality, we just need something to replace us. As drivers, we take in information around us and make decisions largely upon what we see happening. We have to guess what other drivers will do and, for the most part, we can never see much more than a mile up the road. We aren't operating on a macroscopic level when driving, it's more a microscopic level of what is happening in our visual world.
A much larger traffic control system would be nice. Something that could re-route cars to avoid traffic jams, divert accidents, even get us door to door and not just take the reins on the highway. That system may be further off, but having done the LA-to-Vegas drive more times than I can count and struggled to stay awake on everything from the New Jersey Turnpike to the Austrian autobahn, I wouldn't mind a more micro system. Let's deal with new sand before we try reinventing the whole beach.