Beam Me Up, Hilton

If you listened to Pam's "Gigi in the 561" podcast today (and I hope you do), she talks about the "Sky Hotel," a concept envisioned to forever circle our skies and never have to land, or at least, rarely touch down.

It gave me immediate flashbacks to my growing up years when I devoured science fiction  writers like Isaac Asimov, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Heinlein, to name a few, as well as movies like "This Island Earth" and "Forbidden Plant." Most painted a futuristic earth where cities of glass and steel floated in the clouds, and people moved about in flying cars. The idea of a flying hotel would fit right in.

Powered by nuclear energy, the Sky Hotel would circle the earth continuously, giving vacationers spectacular views of the planet and phenomena like the Northern Lights. Guests would be ferried to and from by jet planes and transported via elevators to the hotel.

The dream of a hotel in the sky has been around a long time. It played a pivotal role in the late, great Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, "2001: A Space Odyssey." Since the dawn of the Space Age, and particularly since the privatization of space travel, many of us expect a Hyatt or Hilton to be orbiting the earth any time now.

While many things science fiction have become science fact, it's still much easier to create concepts than take those dreams from the drawing board to reality. And just imagine how much a stay in the Sky Hotel would cost, and that's before you add in the "resort fee" -- not to mention what the valet charge would be to park a private plane or jet.

Isn't it sad how reality crushes our childhood dreams of one day living like "The Jetsons"? Chances are, we'll have to settle for the virtual reality version of hotels that fly or cities that float in the clouds. I'll ask my AI app to get busy on that.