Amazon has recently announced that it will be releasing “drones” to carry packages to customers in as little as five years time. In a test run seen below, Amazon suggests that they will be able to deliver packages to people within thirty minutes of ordering. The drones, which reportedly will cost less than a smartphone, are small, basic and loosely resemble a miniature helicopter. They will fly to your front doorstep dropping the package off neatly before returning to undertake another mission.

This all sounds extremely futuristic and despite the video showing a successful trial run of a drone, the idea of thousands of drones zipping through the air at any one point in time makes for an almost comical picture. How good will they be at avoiding trees or each other mid flight? How high will they fly? High enough to endanger actual aircraft such as helicopters or low enough to be caught on electricity wires or chimney pots? Will each drone be manually operated by a person or will they have some sort of tracking device with an immediate area sensor built in to their system? If the former, at least there will be plenty of jobs created!

It is hard to imagine the authorities across Europe allowing their airspace to be overrun by tiny drones when Europe itself doesn’t even share a singular airspace. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see this happen. It would be an incredible feat for mankind and perhaps the first step towards flying cars and transport in the future seen in such films as Fifth Element. In five years, however? Perhaps a little ambitious.

Ambition and practicality aside, you have to admire Amazon for its innovation and will to improve the technology with which it operates. Imagine receiving more or less anything you needed within half an hour of ordering it? The problems of forgetting someone’s birthday until the day itself would be a thing of the past. Not to mention the thrill we would all get from seeing what resembles a small alien space shuttle land on our front door step. Perhaps a new children’s game “Catch the Drone” would be invented, it might be quite useful to catch and operate your own personal drone…

Whether or not this happens in five years, we can be sure that something similar will come about sooner or later, now that the technology exists. I, for one, am excited to watch it all unfold.