yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Taking a Jet Pack Flight | Explorer


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Can we get out in the field and see it in action? Yep, you bet. Beautiful scene! It's a good day for a flight. Best of luck, buddy!

[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
[Music]

This mag can fly. Seeing a man soar in the air is nothing short of majestic, even more so as it means my jetpack dreams are alive and well. But if the most advanced jetpack in the most technologically advanced age of the world has ever known still only gets us 33 seconds of flight time, well, I guess we're not quite ready to go full Rocketeer just yet.

That turns out, even though Troy and his team have improved upon Bell's model, fuel capacity seems to forever be the jetpack's biggest hang-up. Because a tank can only hold what a pilot can carry. At the present time, nobody has solved their problem. You have to have large canisters of fuel, and that's why rockets are so big. Rockets are so big precisely because you need large amounts of fuel to boost an object into the air for more than a few seconds.

The hope is that one day we'll have a nano battery—a power supply that is at the molecular atomic level—that is small enough to put on your back or in a ray gun or inside the engine of a flying car. That's the problem that we physicists face: miniaturization of energy. So while Troy and his team might have only given us 12 more seconds of a head time in the realms of futuristic dreams, maybe practicality isn't everything.

The fact is this jetpack technology isn't really ready for primetime, but we're working on it. And when you look ahead at what the next great technological breakthroughs will be, maybe as so often, it's science fiction that leads the way. What is the rocket fuel that energizes science? That is curiosity.

I'm a physicist; we never give up on anything. And until we can solve the problem of energy—concentrated energy on a small scale—then it's still just a dream. But I say dream on!

[Music]
Oh!

More Articles

View All
Photographing the Real Life of Bees | National Geographic
These have been having a rough time for the last 10-12 years, and so National Geographic asked me, “Can you do a story about honeybees?” This is one of the most well-studied organisms, well-photographed organisms. Like, how am I supposed to drop in out of…
Strategies for dividing multiples of 10, 100 and 1000
We’re going to do in this video is get some practice doing division with numbers that are multiples of 10, 100, 1000, things like that. So, let’s say we wanted to compute what 2400 divided by 30 is. Pause this video and see if you can calculate it using w…
Top 5 Stocks the Super Investors Keep Buying!
Well, here we are back again. It’s that time of the year! The first NF filings have been released, so in this video we’re going to look at the top 10, top 10, but really the top five stocks the best investors in the world were buying leading into 2023. Th…
Nonrenewable Energy Resources| AP Environmental science| Khan Academy
Today, let’s talk about energy resources. You’ve probably already done something today that used energy resources, even beginning from the moment you woke up. For me, the beginning of my day always starts with making tea. I use energy in every step of thi…
Templating a contract with variables | Intro to CS - Python | Khan Academy
Let’s work together on a program that uses variables and user input. Here’s the problem I’m trying to solve: my friend Deshawn has a catering business, and for each catering job that he takes, he needs to write up a contract between him and the client. Ev…
Strategic | Vocabulary | Khan Academy
I love it when a plan comes together, word Smiths, because the word I’m featuring in this video is strategic. Strategic, it’s an adjective, and it means related to a plan. It’s the adjective form of strategy, which is a way of thinking about making effect…