Scientific Earth, July 9, 3012
Eight centuries after the development of anti-gravity vehicles, we take it for granted that humans have always traveled alone or in small groups. Indeed, we see no reason to build vehicles for more than eight people. And historically, this pattern has been repeated. Early humans travelled on foot, and then on animals such as horses or elephants. With the invention of the wheel, they used small vehicles called chariots or carriages, and later bicycles (the precursor to the velomobiles still used today). During the Fossil Fuel Era, humans travelled alone or in small groups (typically the size of a family) in wheeled vehicles called automobiles.
But archeologists have uncovered evidence of other (larger) vehicles, used for a brief period during the Fossil Fuel Era (roughly a thousand years ago). Some of these could seat up to fifty people (sitting and standing). Inexplicably, even after the development of pneumatic tires and wide hard-surface paths called "roads," humans continued to use vehicles with metal wheels running on metal tracks, severly limiting choices of origins and destinations. These could carry several hundred people at a time.
It isn't clear what purpose this form of transportation served; it is hard to imagine a society in which that many people would share a both a common origin and a common destination for travelling. Anthropologists speculate that these vehicles were used to transport slaves, or to carry prisoners to locations for the performance of forced labor.
