.... you get promoted to a new position before you are actually fully qualified for that position.

In my experience, companies don't promote people to having additional responsibilities before that worker has already proven that they are capable of handling those responsibilities, perhaps through a management training program. Such a promotion must actively be sought out by the employee.

The only other "promotions" that I know of are something like annual cost-of-living salary increases that the most respectable companies may offer to their employees, or else performance-based raises, which are not promotions either, being where one's duties and responsibilities remain essentially unaltered, but one has shown that they are providing a sufficient utility for the company to justify paying them more... generally because after factoring in training costs, the company feels they may have to pay more just to replace them and still get the same amount of utility.

They use the word hologram to describe this because that's the word that pop culture identifies with... even though it is wrong.

You are right, however... this no more makes holograms than a View-Master toy invented in the 60's... it just has a lot more tech behind it.

Small prop driven aircraft, ALREADY.

The market was almost nonexistent about five years ago but it's growing quite fast. Don't underestimate what the major and ongoing advances in motors, controllers, and batteries will bring in the future. There's many radically new technologies in the works to partially or completely electrify aircraft transportation, far beyond just electrically driven propellers.

I'd have trouble being whisked around town dangling from a drone under my command without also being in a superhero costume.

Seriously, in our modern age, how else would a superhero get around? A fast car? Pish.

The system is actually not that big. The batteries are small because, despite the weight of the plane, the distances traveled are very short; and electric motors pack a lot of power into a small package. Having it all built into the plane reduces ground delays, ground staff, and additional ground hardware. It's a "pushback and go" system, the pilot can move the instant he gets clearance to, he doesn't have to wait for anyone else. It's estimated to save about 2 minutes over using tugs, which may not sound like a much, but each flight at the gate represents about $100k worth of revenue, so squeezing an extra flight in every couple days is a lot of money.

Ultimately they want to turn it into a fully automated airport traffic flow, where each plane moves from the runway to the gate and vice versa in a fully automated, optimized manner.

"Fast" is not an issue. Electric motors have a much better power to weight ratio than combustion motors, and li-ion batteries have no trouble feeding it. The reason things like solar impulse fly slowly is to reduce air resistance and thus minimize their power consumption needs.

Batteries have advanced tremendously in the past several decades and show no signs of slowing down. The transition of air travel will be more difficult and longer in the making than that of ground travel, mind you.

Before ICBMs became a reality, nuclear-powered planes were significantly researched. Probably the craziest was Project Pluto, whose concept was to have an open to the air nuclear core inside a ramjet housing, acting as the heat source instead of combusting fuel. The unmanned craft was designed to be able to fly around for months at a time holding numerous atomic bombs. When given orders to attack it would have bombed Soviet cities... then with its cargo spent, continued the rest of its lifespan flying low over Soviet territory damaging everything its path with sonic booms and the radioactive plume spewing out the back. Then when finally shot down or out of power, it'd crash as a dirty bomb in Soviet territory.

The engine was actually tested on a railcar, but there were way too many concerns about the craft, and the advancement of ICBMs just seemed a better route. Among the many concerns was that the US didn't want the Soviets to feel that they had to develop a similar such craft as a countermeasure.

There's also some interesting side possibilities of airplane electrification being looked at. I read a research paper at one point which focused on the fact that electric propulsion scales down far better than other forms of aircraft propulsion; they investigated the possibility of having a number of micropropellers along the wing which are run at full power during takeoff and landing but not during level flight. The concept was that though they're not as efficient as the main propeller, they dramatically increase the lift and reduce the stall speed, so you can have aircraft lift off on very short runways or fly at very slow speeds without having to resort to normal VTOL techniques.

Of course, the size of the batteries needed will preclude carrying any passengers or cargo.

There are already electric small airplanes that take a couple people.

Airplanes are obviously the highest-hanging fruit for switching over to electric drive, but they're not impossible. On the pure electric front you're first going to see the current growth trend in small personal electric airplanes continuing and short-range business uses like crop dusting and the like grow. From there you'll move to the little short hop passenger flights between small regional airports, and then increasingly longer ranges and sizes.

There's also hybrid jet technologies being researched, wherein you greatly simplify your jet engines by removing the turbine, and instead drive the compressor with electric power; the casing becomes the stator and the compressor the rotor of an electric motor. The moving part count is greatly reduced and there's far less resistance to the exhaust gases leaving the engine, meaning more power and better fuel efficiency.

But actually, before all that, there's one electrification system that's just now hitting the market, but it's not where most people might think: the wheels. Jet engines are horribly efficient in running at low powers such as taxiing, and planes burn a lot of fuel just moving about and waiting to take off or heading to the gate - on a short flight a plane may burn 5-10% of its fuel just sitting on the ground. There are now small scale pilot projects out there that have battery-driven electric motors in the landing gear so that one doesn't have to waste all this fuel.

It has been well known for quite some time now that single-sex crews are a very bad idea for long voyages.

Like 98% of military crews throughout modern human history?

Believe it or not, humans can and do live in isolation in single family units all over the world. It's not exactly a good environment to grow up in, but it doesn't turn someone into a murderous beast or whatnot. Do also realize the alternative. Every person you add - and their corresponding mass overhead - dramatically slows down your spacecraft or dramatically scales up the size of its launch stack. There are huge costs; launching only the absolute bare minimum is critical. The slower you go, the more consumables you need, which increases its mass on its own (see the aforementioned problem), and the greater the likelihood of catastropic collapse).

No, a semi-working society ready to hit the ground is most definitely not a requirement, you don't want a "society" until you have a base set up that can sustain them, and automatic robotic labor, not human power, is far more efficient (both in mass and energy terms). But even if such a ready society was a requirement, that'd only be a task for the last generation or two, not every generation in transit. Again, minimizing mass (and thus in-transit consumables) is critical.

The biggest challenge of the whole thing is the massive difficulty of setting up a truly independent colony with as little hardware as possible. Modern technology is based on ridiculously long resource and production chains, with each part produced requiring consumables from numerous other different production chains; a single random piece of modern technology may ultimately have required some tiny degree of the usage of tens to hundreds of thousands or more chemicals or parts that will eventually wear out, in thousands of systems scattered all across the world. Every bolt on every mining truck, every hydraulic fluid in every piston, every seal, every fluxing agent, every tire tread, every hammer-mill hammer, they all need to able to be produced at a faster rate than they are consumed. One obviously gravitates toward "generalized"production processes like 3d printing for part manufacture and plasma centrifuging for refining; however, low volume / high consumable production techs such as these may be fine for low volume consumables but become a consumes-more-than-it-yields dead-end when it comes to making high volume consumables. And you can't just send an emergency resupply boat to a different starsystem. It's fundamentally critical that technology chains be condensed to their absolute simplest cores. Nor are all of your raw mineral inputs going to be found in the same location, which means a cross-planetary shipping system is needed. All of this sort of stuff is the real challenge.

Mass.