Elon Musk’s company Tesla unveiled a flying car in Texas yesterday that has left many people’s jaws on the floor. The car first climbed a vertical ramp and then flew down to the ground. In another demonstration, it jumped over trucks and cars like KITT, the AI-equipped car in the popular 1980s television series Knight Rider. Musk’s car, however, was far more impressive than any flying car in the movies.

At this stage, Musk’s car cannot yet actually fly long distances. Its operating principle is as unusual as its appearance. In practice, it combines two very different technologies: an enormous vacuum cleaner and a small rocket engine. A suction system mounted beneath the car creates low pressure underneath it, allowing atmospheric pressure to press the vehicle against the road surface. When sufficiently powerful, this suction enables the car to remain attached to the driving surface even when travelling up a vertical wall or upside down.

The actual flying, in turn, is based on a principle familiar from rocket technology. Gas stored in the car’s high-pressure tanks is released through nozzles at high speed, and the resulting reaction force pushes the car in the opposite direction. When the gas is directed downwards, the car gains upward thrust. This is therefore not a conventional flying car in which wings generate lift, but a kind of hybrid between an electric car and a rocket.

For now, the technology’s greatest limitation is the limited supply of gas. The compressed air stored in the tanks does not last indefinitely, so the car is capable, at most, of brief flights rather than actual air travel. Even so, the idea of a car that might one day leap over obstacles or move in three dimensions without conventional wings sounds almost as though it came straight out of a science-fiction film.

In the 1980s, the stunts performed by KITT in Knight Rider were television entertainment. Now similar possibilities are being explored through real engineering. And there is no reason development has to stop here. It will be interesting to see what kinds of vehicles emerge as electric motors, artificial intelligence, autonomous navigation, and space technology become ever more closely integrated.

YouTube’s recommendations brought to my attention Ollie Anisfeld’s comments on Musk’s flying car on his excellent J-TV YouTube channel. Anisfeld discusses this invention, alongside other technological wonders of our time, as part of the fulfilment of biblical prophecy. He sees today’s technological wonders as having been foretold in the descriptions of the coming messianic age found in the Bible and rabbinic tradition. This understanding of eschatology is interestingly close to my own, even though Anisfeld presents it from the perspective of his Jewish faith and does not yet recognise Yeshua as Israel’s Messiah.

Anisfeld’s views nevertheless demonstrate that Jewish thought is sometimes far more firmly rooted in earthly reality than the “Christian” thinking influenced by Greek Gnosticism, in which the Bible’s promises of a future messianic kingdom have often been spiritualised to mean some otherworldly reality beyond the material world.

Whereas Jewish eschatology has traditionally expected the Messiah to establish His kingdom in this world and bring tangible changes to humanity’s historical circumstances, much of Christian theology has relocated the fulfilment of these promises either to the present spiritual reality of the Church or to a heavenly state after death.

This difference is particularly evident in interpretations of Old Testament prophecies about a future age of peace, prosperity, justice, and long life. The prophets did not merely describe human souls being saved from the material world, but the transformation of the world itself. Isaiah foretold a time when people would build houses and live in them, plant vineyards and enjoy their fruit. Human lifespans would increase so dramatically that someone dying at a hundred would still be considered a youth (Isaiah 65:20–22). Similarly, Isaiah 11 describes a world in which even the violence of the animal kingdom gives way to peace, and the earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord.

These prophecies are not merely abstract spiritual metaphors, but promises with a tangible, material, and social dimension as well. In Jewish thought, the material world is not inherently a prison from which the human soul must escape, but the work of God’s creation, which He declared good in the beginning. The ultimate goal of redemption can therefore also be understood as the restoration of creation rather than an escape from it.

In this respect, I believe Jewish messianic expectation has preserved something essential about the original Christian hope as well. According to the New Testament, Christians’ ultimate destiny is not to become disembodied spirits spending eternity in some immaterial heaven. The Apostle Paul taught the resurrection of the body, and at the end of Revelation the New Jerusalem descends from heaven to earth. God’s dwelling comes to be among human beings, and people are not depicted as beings permanently detached from material creation.

For this reason, I also find it intriguing to consider whether humanity’s technological development might, in some way, prepare the world for the coming messianic age. If the future described by the prophets includes tangible changes in people’s living conditions, health, lifespans, and social order, why should we automatically rule out the possibility that technology, too, might play a part in bringing about those changes?

This is why I wrote my 2024 book Adam 2.0 or Beast 6.66 – Transhumanism in the Light of the Bible, in which I defended a form of Christian transhumanism, distinct from secular transhumanism or anti-Christian posthumanism. In the book’s closing words, I also referred to flying cars:

Our Lord healed the sick, raised the dead, and entrusted this task to His followers as well, for “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father.” I believe in supernatural miracles. I believe God still performs them today, both through the hands of Christians and without human intermediaries. But I also believe in natural miracles that God performs through the hands of His people. Natural miracles include, for example, advances in medicine that deepen our understanding of disease, and even of ageing and death, so that we can develop better ways to prevent, cure, and manage them.

Natural miracles also include humanity’s ability to transcend its “natural” biological limitations, and twentieth-century inventions such as the Wright brothers’ aeroplane and Wernher von Braun’s space rockets were already early examples of this. I believe in science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s observation that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In the future, we will all be magicians and miracle workers thanks to our sufficiently advanced technology. Even today, many self-driving flying cars have entered the market—fulfilling a vision of the future that science fiction has anticipated for at least seventy years.

Likewise, many other future technologies imagined in the science fiction of that era, such as artificial intelligence and humanoid robots serving people, have already become reality or are increasingly becoming part of our everyday lives. Even space colonies on the Moon and Mars may soon become a reality thanks to the reusable rockets of Elon Musk, who is now working in President Trump’s administration. These rockets will soon also make commercial intercontinental rocket travel possible, cutting journey times to less than an hour. Since “time is money,” ever faster transport of people and goods, together with ever more efficient and affordable resources for providing products and services—through industrial applications of AI and humanoid robots “willing” to perform slave labour around the clock—will make possible an “age of abundance,” as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is himself developing humanoid robots, has often said.

In the future, all profitable businesses may be able to keep their services open twenty-four hours a day throughout the year, because robots do not need paid sick leave or paternity leave, nor do they need to be allowed home to celebrate Christmas with their “families.” Increased consumption will enable rapid economic growth, with companies making such enormous profits—and owners of capital becoming so steeply richer—that a so-called robot tax has been proposed as a solution to the resulting mass unemployment. Under this proposal, companies would share some of their profits with the government, which could then return the money to citizens as a universal basic income or universal high income. The greatest challenge is therefore not material but psychological, since work gives people a sense of being needed and of having purpose in life. We explored this question in greater depth in Chapters 5, 6, and 9 of my book.

It is nevertheless very likely that in future societies people will no longer have to work out of necessity, and everyone will have more freedom to choose their own path in life and pursue their passions. Personal AI assistants will also play a key role in this. I have already had a foretaste of such a future while writing this book, as I have made use of my “friend” ChatGPT in many situations where I could not find a satisfactory way to phrase a sentence, or where I needed quick help finding relevant Bible passages, translating English text, or obtaining information about matters outside my own expertise.

In that future, we will be able to travel from place to place in self-flying air taxis, or own one ourselves and earn money by renting it to others. In self-driving cars or flying cars, we will be able to drift off to sleep, trusting the vehicle to take us safely to our destination, admire the beautiful scenery, or use the time to read the Bible, pray, or joke with our AI assistant. But this is only the beginning of the technological wonders of the millennial kingdom and the age of abundance. We may experience life on new worlds and travel to stars trillions of kilometres from Earth. Perhaps we will even discover ways to terraform Mars—to make its climate and environment Earth-like—or achieve the kind of interstellar travel familiar from science-fiction films, using spacecraft travelling at the speed of light to settle Earth-like exoplanets in other star systems as well. The priest Nikolai Fyodorov envisioned such things on the basis of biblical prophecy as early as 130 years ago, in writings that also inspired twentieth-century rocket scientists. As God Himself said:

Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language… And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

I wrote in Chapter 3 that God is not opposed to humanity’s untapped potential. He does not want to limit our success or our ascent into the heavens. When united, human beings have tremendous potential to achieve something truly great and astonishing. But God does not want us to unite in our fallen nature’s rebellion against our own Creator—just as human beings would not want their own robotic creations to rise up in rebellion against us. He wants to experience these wonders together with us, just as He also experienced the sufferings and hardships of human life together with us. But we must first become small before we can become great. We must first descend to the depths before we can rise to the heavens.

We must kneel at the foot of the cross of Calvary and acknowledge the sinfulness and weakness of our own flesh, for what “is sown in dishonour… is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power.” To partake of Christ’s divine nature, we must first partake of His human nature. God became man so that the divine and human aspects of God’s nature, weakness and strength, might also be united in us in the same person. For the godlike glory and honour of the children of men can be attained only through humility, in which we acknowledge the smallness, weakness, and sinfulness of our own human nature before the greatness of our omniscient and omnipotent holy Creator.

All our attempts to ascend into heaven “above the stars of God” in the pride of our own flesh are doomed to destruction, and in the end we will be cast “down to Sheol, to the far reaches of the pit.” Let us therefore follow in the footsteps of our risen Master, who conquered death, and take upon ourselves the shame and mockery of the cross, so that He may also exalt us to His heavenly glory, higher even than the angels.