Slashdot Mirror
The Future of Flight
Roland Piquepaille writes "With "High Times," the Economist delivers a very long and extremely well-documented article about the future of aviation during the next fifty years. It tells us about pilotless planes, with 32 countries currently developing more than 250 models of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), primarily for combat purposes. The article also looks at future civilian pilotless planes and at the future of personal aviation. But what captivated my attention in this article was the last part about future commercial supersonic and hypersonic (at least five times the speed of sound) planes. In particular, the Economist describes the HyperSoar. "The HyperSoar is a concept for a craft flying at ten times the speed of sound and able to reach any point on the globe within two hours." This overview contains more details and references about the HyperSoar which would fly from Los Angeles to New York in 35 minutes."
This is the kind of thing that gets me. Not that I don't believe it or anything, it just strikes me as one of the reasons we have growing unemployment. People's jobs are being replaced by technology, the human element is being removed.
A friend of mine worked in a local tv station, and she lost her job, and was replaced by a machine. Robotics and automated systems are a curse for the working man (or woman.)
That and foreign nations, and George Bush, but I digress.
I can hardly contain my excrement...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
As a military aircraft, a HyperSoar bomber the size of an F-22 could take off from the U.S. and deliver its payload from an altitude and at a speed that would defy all current defensive measures.
Can somebody explain why the US always has to drop all the bombs. Just to make the world a safer place, the plane should be available to all countries.