The biggest complaint we’ve got about life in the 21st century, aka: “The Future,” is the near-total lack of the really cool inventions Pop Culture has been promising us for the last 50 years. Yeah iPhones are kinda cool, but you still can’t do a video or hologram chat on one (WTF Steve Jobs?!?), laptop computers have just created a race of modern information slaves, and anyone found traveling by Segway is pretty much guaranteed (or at the very least, deserves) a severe beat down (especially the fat lazy cops who ride em). We want our flying cars, time machines, and jet packs now! And while you can pretty much file the flying car and time machine ideas in the “never” category, this week inventor GLENN MARTIN unveiled the first fully functional consumer-grade jet pack in the futuristic town of Oshkosh, Wisconsin proving that some semblance of a Jetson-ian future might not be too far off. Demonstrating the pack in the video here was the inventor’s 16-year-old son (after all, you can always make more kids, right?) who was prevented by spotters from taking to full flight in public until more test flights have been completed. Designed to fly an average-sized pilot 30 miles in 30 minutes on a 5-gallon tank of gas, the MARTIN JET PACK can be had for a measly $100,000 Earth dollars, and since it is designed to conform to the FAA’s definition of an ultralight vehicle—which weighs less than 254 pounds and carries only one passenger—a pilot’s license won’t be required for users. No word yet on when the death machine will go on sale but we’ve got a short list of “friends” we’d love to gift them to…

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 11:04 pm and is filed under Cool Shit, Death Trip, News, Video, WTF???. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.