Daniel Simon is an automotive futurist. He's interned with Lamborghini and worked on concept cars for VW. But the auto industry -- indeed, the galaxy -- could not contain his imagination.

In a time of all talk and no action by car companies promising us the car of the future, Simon's new book Cosmic Motors: Spaceships, Cars and Pilots of Another Galaxy satisfies our future-lust with hyper-real fetish vehicles.

Most artist renderings of futuristic vehicles are so outlandish they verge on cartoonish. Simon avoids that trap by incorporating automotive and industrial touchstones -- steering wheels, rivets, turbines -- everyone can recognize. It feels like you could reach out and touch them.

Click through the gallery to check out these amazing vehicles and the stories behind them.

Left: Simon hasn't just created cool vehicles, he's created an elaborate back story for them. Most are built by Cosmic Motors, which could be called the General Motors of Nembi, a planet in the distant galaxy Galaxion.

The Camarudo is CoMo's first vehicle, built from parts salvaged from wrecked cargo ships. Its small size and nimble handling made it the perfect vehicle for hunting, and CoMo adapted them to racing. Many famous pilots started their careers flying them on Oosfera.

"A 'real' futuristic ship does not need anything but a seat and a plug," says Simon, who worked in the auto industry before launching Daniel Simon Studios two years ago. "The pilot steers via mind and feels the input via brain injections. Design-wise, that's dead boring. Without all these real-world details, my fantasy vehicles would be less desirable because they're less recognizable."

Left: Here's a different Camarudo, shot from above. The first Camarudos were assembled by farmers, a heritage reflected in its simple design. A turbine provides thrust, and forward visibility is by means of a virtual 3-D display, rendering a windscreen unnecessary. Despite its humble beginnings, Camarudos often are customized to reflect the personalities of its pilots.

Simon, now 33 and living in Germany, is a lifelong gearhead who's been drawing since he was 4. He got serious about it when he was 17 and earned a degree in transportation design from the University of Applied Science in Pforzheim. He kicked around the auto industry for six years before launching his own design studio because, "I have to experience much more than car design." Working in the auto industry "is a boy's dream come true," he says, "but there is much other cool stuff, like jets, rockets, boats or movies." He's done some consulting and design work and he's currently in Los Angeles working on an undisclosed movie.

Left: The Detonator was a styling exercise never meant for production, but it proved so popular at CoMo's annual party that the brass approved a limited run of 10. Each has a 6-liter V8 engine good for 155 mph. Most are owned by collectors who display them on the show-car circuit, but the fate of No. 5 remains a mystery after it vanished without a trace.

The 700-foot-long Incisalis is the centerpiece of the Djado fleet that carries the princess of Pangha-Ipoh, a desert planet of simple technology. The Incisalis travels with an identical decoy ship and is always accompanied by a fleet of smaller, lighter-than-air ships and ground caravans that carry servants, cooks, mechanics and others in service of the princess.

This drop-dead gorgeous coupe is the Galaxion 5000, the most technologically advanced vehicle in the CoMo lineup. A xenoramium fusion reactor provides blinding acceleration to 330 mph. Available only in translucent white, unauthorized "Black Edition" models with mile-deep black paint and extensive weaponry have surfaced in the underworld of Tarra 1.

The Gravion was built to dominate the Gravion Cup races of Glancory. The asymmetrical design accommodates the massive engine used in the Sexy Magrela aerial racers, creating a vehicle capable of 1,300 mph. Taking turns at that speed generates huge G-forces, so the off-center cockpit rotates to keep the driver from snapping his neck. Heated coils in the rear tires keep the rubber hot for optimal adhesion.

Patrolling the trade routes of the ice planet Nala is nasty work best done in an Ice Train Series 3. The huge vehicles -- the entry door is 24 feet above the ground -- feature giant heated wheels that cut through the ice and snow to solid ground. Much of the space inside the vehicle is reserved for the massive turbine engines, leaving just enough room for the captain, the navigator and a crew of 12 dwarfs.

The ultra-luxurious Nembiquarer started out as a military vehicle developed by CoMo's main competitor, Astrocon, but the project was abandoned when peace came to Tarra III. CoMo bought the blueprints and created a go-anywhere, do-anything vehicle favored by the obscenely wealthy. Two versions of the 45-foot-long truck compete in the Trans Terra Rally.

The Sexy Magarella is an aerial racer based on Astrocon's Railton Bomber military ship. The powerful bombers are popular among racers who strip them down and trick them out for the daring -- and dangerous -- Railton Cup races on Oosfera. This particular model is flown by Roketa Fleetza and Lagata Donner, the daughters of CoMo founder Osni Redooa and two of the cup's most-successful pilots.

Of all the planets of Galaxion, only Mujofa remains wracked by war. Taooa are powerful laser gunships that feature two 505-mm light rays capable of destroying anything that might give it trouble. The warships often sport nosecone art similar to those that graced warplanes on a distant planet called Earth.

What are the social consequences when science allows us to see things that had previously been invisible?

Scientists have revealed microscopic life, nanoscale molecules and galaxies billions of light-years away. These images have revolutionized the disciplines in which they were made, but they also transformed the public's imagination, giving common people new things to think and dream about.

The intertwined social, scientific and artistic impacts of 19th century photography is the subject of a new exhibit, Brought to Light Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900, at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art.

This gallery looks at some of the more astounding images and stories from the exhibit.

Left:
Hermann Schnauss, Electrograph of a brass wire gauge, 1900 As the men of industry attempted to harness electricity for profit, the public — which knew electricity primarily as lightning — had to be persuaded that this powerful, invisible force was something to invite into their homes. Electrographs like this one, produced by exposing a photographic negative with electricity, helped the public visualize and understand the mysterious electromagnetic waves that scientists were discovered populating the air.

"This is a moment where [scientists] are trying to harness electricity for practical purposes, but the general public was kind of skeptical," said Corey Keller, curator of the Brought to Light exhibit. "Their experiences with electricity were generally through lighting, which they knew could burn things down and kill you, if you weren't careful. So a great deal of time and money was spent trying to make electricity understandable and approachable."

In the early history of photography, capturing motion was out of the question. The photographic negatives of the time were not sensitive enough to light to be exposed over the short time periods required to capture fast action.

"If you look at 19th century cityscapes, you would think that Armageddon had taken place. You don't see any people," Keller said. "It's not that they aren't there, it's just that they don't show up because they walked through too quickly."

But by the end of the 1870s, more sensitive negatives brought motion within reach. Edward Muybridge was one of the first photographers to take advantage of the new abilities.

In this photo, we see one of Muybridge's motion studies: two men boxing in jock straps. Historians note that despite the scientific trappings, Muybridge's work was just art; it did not produce good scientific evidence about bodies' movements.

The ability to capture motion in photography opened up a previously invisible source of scientific data. Etienne-Jules Marey was a scientist trying to understand biomechanics, or the motion of the body, and he used photography to acquire information he couldn't get any other way, as in this photograph of a man on a stationary bicycle.

"What happens in this picture is that each split second exposure is layered on top of each other, so you get the sense of the full arc of the motion," Keller said. "And he's put a piece of tape down the arm and torso and the leg where the joints articulated, so as the leg went around and around the whole pedal stroke is outlined."

This wasn't just to create beautiful pictures; Marey was on a committee in France to improve the ergonomics of the newly popular bicycle.

"So by studying the motion of the leg, he would have been able to improve the engineering of the bicycle," Keller concluded.

While forward-looking scientists like Marey were using photography to understand, for example, how animals moved, as in this photo, others were less enthused about this new technology.

In particular, photographers' ability to capture images beyond what the human eye could perceive called into question an important tenet of 19th century science.

"What's amazing is that this is a moment where empirical observation in science is the most important thing, that idea of objective observation. And this kind of photography proved how completely useless a human observer was," said Keller. "So you end up with this photographic data that cant' be corroborated in any other way. It exists independently of any kind of perceptual experience."

Technology's ability to capture detail and motion more accurately than our eyes has only accelerated, of course, as anyone who has seen incredible ultra-slow-motion YouTube videos can attest.

When William Roentgen announced his discovery of X-rays, a photo of his wife's hand accompanied his paper as it made its way into the scientific community.

Over the next few years, images like this one of a skeletal hand with the ring came to symbolize X-rays. Practically, the hand is relatively flat and therefore easy to X-ray, but it was the aesthetics and grim-reaper symbolism that Keller said hit a nerve with the upper classes.

"It became fashionable to have an X-ray portrait taken of your hand," she said, calling attention to x-ray hand portraits of the last tsar of Russia and his wife.

The discovery of X-rays also touched off a lower-brow commercial craze. Within three months, DIY X-ray kits were available on the market. Photographers, who had access to most of the tools needed to make the images, began to train this new form of light on just about anything that might be beautiful.

"They were X-raying everything just to see what it looked like," Keller said.

One stunning example is this X-ray of a foot in a shoe from 1897. In fact, the connection between X-rays and extremities has remained strong. Even into the 1960s, shoe stores kept X-ray machines in their lobbies, both as marketing tools and to help their salesmen fit their patrons' feet correctly.

Throughout the second-half of the 19th century, photographers strived to unite the camera with the telescope. The moon, in particular, held a lasting fascination for astronomers and artists alike.

Imaging the moon, after all, was an immensely difficult task. The Earth rotates and the moon is actually a relatively faint object. It wasn't until John Adams Whipple and George Phillips Bond figured out how to rotate their camera ever so slightly to cancel out Earth's movement that simple images of our only satellite became possible.

What's interesting is that despite the fascination with creating pictures of the moon, like this striking image created in Spain, the images didn't add much for science beyond what detailed drawings could already do.

If you wanted close-up photos of the moon any time before the Apollo missions, you were pretty much out of luck. Unless, of course, you built incredibly detailed plaster models of lunar craters and then snapped carefully lit pictures of them. And that's exactly what an engineer and astronomer did in 1874 to tremendous acclaim.

James Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam hammer, and James Carpenter, then at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, released a hugely successful book, The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, illustrated by their incredible moon mock-ups. The august journal Nature gave the book a rapturous review.

"No more truthful or striking representations of natural objects than those here presented have ever been laid before his readers by any student of Science," the reviewer wrote.

But what's really appealing about the images isn't their "truthfulness" but their "truthiness."

"Astronomers were perfectly aware of what they were looking at," Keller said. "But they felt that because they were photographed, it added a layer of authenticity to the undertaking that simple drawings didn't have."

At the other end of the scale of size from the moon, other photographers were pushing their discipline into the microscopic realm. They had to devise new emulsion chemistries and types of equipment to capture clear images of tiny things.

Leading the charge was Auguste-Adolphe Bertsch, who worked to overcome any challenge that scientists threw at him. Unfortunately, he died during social unrest in France in 1871, and his images lay in a photographic archive until Keller brought them to the US for the exhibition.

Even as they solved technical challenges, the photomicrographers faced social resistance. The idea of representing a specific living thing instead of a generalized abstraction of an organism forced scientists to let go of long-held notions about their discipline.

"Prior to the 19th century, the scientific illustrations tend to represent a type, an ideal. So if you were going to do a picture of a flower, for example, the illustrator would look at 20 flowers and then take the common features and make an ideal flower," said Keller. "So, if that particular one happens to have a defective petal or something peculiar to it, you never really know: Does that photograph substitute then for that type of flower in general, or does it only represent that one specimen?"

While it may have posed a challenge for scientists of the 19th century, it's the unique nature of each photograph taken during this early period that wows us, even now.