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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."
We'll ignore for the moment the mass extinction of indigenous species going on as a result of the global transport system for biological materials. You may not like the fact that global transport of humans is imposing a risk on others who are not the prime beneficiaries of these transportation economics, but the fact remains that there is serious risk in a high population world of global pandemics wiping out hundreds of millions of people. Exactly how do you propose those hundreds of millions of people be compensated for the risk to which they are being subjected and how will you handle a world in which those risks have not been handled and hysteria breaks out?
Seastead this.