Slashdot Mirror
How Will We Get Around Near-Future Earth?
Slob Nerd points to this BBC article on future transport possibilities. It begins "The prospect of a revolution in air travel has been raised by Nasa's successful test of a 5,000mph plane. But are we likely to see similar advances in other forms of transport? Dusting off the crystal ball, what changes might come in the way we get around? What big ideas are out there, and do they have any chance of seeing the light of day?"
Can't we just ride bikes and enjoy the scenery rather than fly past it at 5000 Mph?
I have also heard it suggested that doing so would probably create many jobs in the US as the building and operations infrastructure was being put into place, not to mention the increased commerce between disparate parts of the US. I don't know the validity of these claims, but they seem reasonable enough. A good kick in the pants for us USicans economy if true, no? I don't see it being very easy to get widespread support with the current power structure, though.
-1, "1337" speak
How about building cities so you can walk or ride a bike to where you need to go, instead of building strictly for car-sized vehicular traffic?
Have you ever tried to walk to the mall?
The only thing I really see coming to market are more effecient cars. There's already some, but there will start to be more alternative fuel cars at some point. Of course, there's no infrastructure for supplying these alternatives.
All the recent talk of alternative (to automobiles) transportation has been sparked by the high gas prices. It's not because we're short on gas, it's because of the oil cartels. If we switch to an alternative fuel, do you think these people will sit back and just watch their industry crumble? No, they will be the ones controlling the alternative fuel markets too.. So in the end it won't make a damned but of difference as long as they are around.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
"I'd like to see more high speed trains in the US"
But General Motors doesn't want to see that in the U.S...
Speed is sexy, of course, but what about just bringing things closer together? Replacing urban sprawl with accomodating (not communist) apartment complexes would be one step towards making a commute faster. What new technologies would make this more possible?
I think that is holding back most innovation right now, reliance on gasoline and fossil fuels keeps out energy levels low in comparison. We might see a large change in 2014? Whenever the fusion reactor is created and successfully tested. Of course, hopefully they learned from such nuclear accidents as Cherynobl and Three Mile Island, I suspect a fusion related accident would be much worse.
Some sort of AI based network of vehicles that are available on demand (the nearest parked car will come to you -- or to the nearest "junction"). No one needs to "own" a vehicle. They will all be safe too.
Oh, that, and cities rising vertically instead of horizontally via suburban sprawl, leading to afforable housing for all.
S
The number one reason why we don't have flying cars: People would have to fly them. Anyone who's ever had to drive more than day in their life knows what im talking about.
Only way to work is to eliminate a computer at the controls. A central traffic grid would be hard to setup but once created could be very efficient at selecting routes to destinations. When you arrive at the address you specify getting in the car then you can point to a more precise location or tell the car to park itself. If you have no specific destination you could tell the car to just cruise.
I, for one, live near the Raleigh/Durham airport. My next trip will be to New Orleans. With standard planes, that's a flight time of maybe 2 hours and a bit. But what about my trip, as it is?
- Driving to the airport: 0:10
- Parking, waiting for shuttle to bring me to the terminal: 0:20
- Checking in, security, waiting, boarding: 1:00
- Flying to Charlotte: 1:00
- Waiting for connecting flight: 1:10
- Flying to New Orleans: 2:10
- Waiting for baggage, shuttle: 0:40
- Drive to French Quarter: 0:30
So, now the grand total is: 7 hours. If I was on a jet that can reach Mach 7, and would be allowed to do so over land, how much time would this really save? In this example, maybe something between 1 and 2 hours. So, I save about 20 percent of my travel time. Big deal. Having a direct flight, as I still had in 2001, would have saved me more.So, fast planes are nice and all, and if your idea of a commute is from LA to Tokyo, this is splendid news for you. For the rest of us, faster planes are a nice solution... just not for our problem.
For what it's worth: this simple math is also the reason why Boeing's planned SonicCruiser didn't get anyone really excited.
Cars are inefficient and dangerous. In any moderately sized city (1 million or more), the infrastructure is enormous and yet is still inadequate -- gridlock occurs everywhere with annoying frequency. Cars are expensive to buy and maintain. They produce more than their share of pollution. Whatever the future of transportation is, I'm quite sure that we will see much less reliance on individual cars, and much more on mass transit.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
It's called supercavitation. Traveling within the vacuum created by the shockwave the nose of your craft creates. Water only touches the nose, the rest of your craft is flying - hence supercavitation typically requires rocket power.
Which is fine for a missile - but a bit impractical if you're a human that wants to get there without being turned into a gooey paste due to extreme forces at launch, maneauvering - and if you hit anything.
In the not too distant future there will be futile attempts to halt our greenhouse gas emissions as the evidence mounts that we're facing a problem. These will possibly involve the most mechanically efficient short-range vehicle (the bicycle) for all those trips under 2 miles (to the video store etc) that we all take in urban centers.
Hell, at least during the Depression the WPA made useful things... things that are still around today. It was really all busy work from an economic point of view, but from a societal view it had some use. Why can't someone propose that for an economic plan? Even if it doesn't boost the economy, at least it does something.
I know it's a joke, but I think that foot travel really has potential for the future. As urban density increases, you'd think that the general short-haul travel requirements of individual citizens would diminish until their usual haunts ( the office, the local supermarket, the pub ) were within striking distance of their feet.
When you're on foot, you don't need to:
- Park
- Buy gas
- Divert around minor obstacles
- Really pay that much attention to your surroundings
You can watch the local eye candy and it improves fitness levels at the same time. I do most of my regular travel on foot, and I don't understand why more people don't get into it.One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
The tremedous advantage in societal cost, safety, improved environment, ease of living, efficiency, and quality of life would make living in such a place, a slice of heaven. Enhanced taxbase, with tremendously reduced cost of living, would allow money to be available for fantastic free schools, enhanced medical care, and a gorgeous, sparkling infrastructure.
Your world would be incredibly expensive to build, and the "enhanced taxbase" is almost certainly a mirage. For society to pay for such huge and expensive infarstructure and expect a "tremendously reduced cost of living" is a non sequitur from the start.
The greatest problem would come from high population density. The cost of sewage, water, power, and so on for such large and dense habitats would be very high. Densely populated areas tend to be high in crime and low on "crime prevention, cleanliness, well lit open airy spaces."
Nevertheless, I wholeheartedly agree with your initial premise:
The question should be how are we going to support a world with 10,000,000,000 people in it, while maintaining some semblance of quality of life. This idea of half a billion people in the U.S. going anywhere they feel like, any time they feel like, each in their own vehicle, which if by current standards continues is 7 feet high, 18 feet long, weighs 12 tons, sleeps 10, and get's 8 MPG, is at best insane. It ignores sanity on so many fundamental levels, I'm not even going to bother listing.
I think for high speed trains to work in the USA, you want trains that have to be really fast.
:-)
The thing about the USA is that because of the sheer physical size of the country, steel-wheel trains are not going to be practical for travel beyond 275-300 miles between your origin and destination points. At speeds over 186 mph (300 km/h), the physical contact of steel wheels with steel rails and the overhead wiring will cause considerable wear on the trainset on large-scale revenue service. I don't expect steel-wheel trains to be travelling much faster than 330 km/h in the long run.
For the type of distances involved in the USA, it's time to finally do a major development program to make maglev trains economically practical. Since maglevs could travel as fast as 310 mph (500 km/h) relatively easily without attendant wear on tracks and/or the trainset (since there is no physical contact), this makes it possible for journeys between even relatively widely-spaced apart cities in well under two hours; imagine going from Chicago to Minneapolis-Saint Paul in just over a hour!
Maglevs may not be necessary in Europe and Japan given the relatively short distances between major population centers, but here in the USA, the extra speed to shorten travel times is a very good idea.
This reminds me of the talk of colonizing Mars. A lot of people say we could colonize Mars after we destroy the Earth. It is and will always be a lot easier to live in the Gobi desert than on Mars, regardless of the amount of pollution!
Anyone who thinks Mach 7 is about travel is a horse's ass.
We need to get our planes fast enough that we don't need Turkey's permission next time we want to drop bombs in the Middle East on 15 minutes notice.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Here's my prediction. In an ideal world we will travel less distance, and more slowly.
Goods and information will be moved to people, and make people virtually present to each other.
Highways will be torn up. Roads will be planted with trees. Travel will become more not less expensive, as it is required to bear the FULL cost of the ecological and habitat destruction that cutting transportation corridors causes...
My utopia is an antitransportation utopia in which people stay in places that are so good that they don't want to go very far, so rich that they don't need to go very far, and so well served materially that and socially that they choose not to travel.
In the ideal world instead of subsidizing the environmental destruction of highways, airports and transportation technologies of every kind, we will make them pay their true cost, and work on creating PLACES.
Transportation is fundamentally about destroying PLACE....
Transportation is the enemy of PLACE.
Movement is a seductive fantasy... it seems to present so many opportunities to the individual, and yet it makes every place the same, and destroys the habitats and environments that lie between places....
Movement is what we all want, but that doesn't mean that we or our planet is better when we have more of it, or faster versions of it....
Just the opposite. Transportation is a seductive illusion... it gets you from here to there, but only at the cost of destroying the difference between here and there and everywhere in between.
A central traffic grid would be hard to setup but once created could be very efficient at selecting routes to destinations
I don't know about you, but I know that I don't want my primary means of transport centralized. Just too much opportunity for badness there.
How about we just work on cars that can drive themselves independently in the midst of humans driving their cars? That's the only way we can gradually transition to a computerized system, anyway. Once a sufficient majority of drivers have self-driving cars, we can start declaring lanes "computerized cars only", and then gradually phase out un-automated cars.
Once we have decent self-driving cars, a whole new way of life emerges- how about ordering stuff off the internet and having it delivered automatically? No more need for stores, really, at that point... Little motorcycle-sized auto-delivery bots cruising all around?
I could go downtown and have my car drop me off somewhere and park itself, or maybe I'll just have a taxi service that I can summon near-instantaneously with my phone/PDA, and then it can go serve someone else when it drops me off. I would imagine it would alter the shape of suburbia drastically, as well. I could live in the middle of nowhere and get around just as efficiently as if I lived in the heart of the city...
For further info google "peak oil hubbert"
Or you can read my post. :)
Hubbert, in the 50s (I think it was 1954) forecast that American oil production would peak within 30 years. And it did. Nobody believed him, everybody laughed at him, and in the 70s american oil production peaked.
You might think "peak is good" right? Well, peak is not good when you're talking about oil reserves. Peak is the magical point where after you have peaked, there will be no further production growth, only shrinkage. Peak refers to an oil field reaching approximately half-depletion, but not necessarily. So when oil production worldwide has peaked, after that there will be no production growth. To counter this, all we need (heh, really!) is some new technology that creates a shrinkage in demand, hopefully a shrinkage that is equal to the shrinkage in production.
After oil production peaks, expect the drop-off to be sharp, painful, and to create an economic catastrophe like nothing you'd ever imagine.
Some geologists are predicting peak within a decade. Bush's own energy advisor says we're peaking *now*. He also says there isn't any way to know with current technology when we've peaked until after it happens, and that we have no plan B in place for when it does happen. So that means two things. First, it means we can't predict when oil production will start shrinking. Second, it means that when it does, we're immediately fucked.
The Hubbert reference is important because it's historical precedence for the fact that oil production in a field will peak, and it doesn't take much brainpower to determine that oil production world-wide will also peak. Oil is a finite resource, and without proof of life on other planets we can't even expect space exploration to solve this problem.
Fortunately, this is an area where every single one of us can help, and it doesn't require zealotry to do so. ALl you have to do is realize that oil production will peak, understand that it may be peaking right now (but we have no way of knowing), that oil is a finite resource, and then take action on it. The only action you need to take is with your spending decisions. Spend your money to promote non-fossil power sources of any kind, any time you need to make a power decision. Support companies that promote weaning ourselves off oil, and don't support companies that promote further dependence on oil (yes, that means propane is not a viable alternative, since it's made from byproducts of the oil refinery process). If you're going to buy a new car and there's a hybrid option, take it. And so on and so forth. It doesn't require passion or any of that crap, just pragmatic acceptance that we don't have a plan B for when it happens, and that it will happen no matter what, eventually. Even if it's 100 years from now. (I'm inclined to believe Bush's advisor who says it's happening now) Preparing for the future isn't that hard, if we just spend a minute thinking about it. ;)
Like what I said? You might like my music
I agree that there is no benefit in paying people to do nonproductive things (like digging and refilling holes in the ground). I also agree that the Broken Windows Fallacy is legitimate.
But building commuter rail is not a special case of the broken windows fallacy. The broken windows fallacy states that it is not productive to allocate resources to areas where there is no economic gain. The construction of a high-speed rail system has such a gain in that before the project there was no high-speed rail and after the project there is. This is not the same as breaking a window in order to employ people to fix it where the total gain is nil.
Additionally you are assuming that the country's resources are being efficiently allocated - this is not the case. Since there is already colossal waste within the system on other, less worthy projects it might be a good idea to fund a high-speed rail project (even if the project was not providing a net economic gain).
Anyone who thinks that a scramjet that travels at Mach 7 is going to form the basis of a future commercial airline travel is seriously deluded! Face up to the reality there are only 2 uses that this thing is realistically going to be used for and that is for Weapons/Military and maybe as a space propulsion mechanism.
How many years was concorde in service ? Came into service during the sixties (i think) and no-one but either the very lucky or the very rich ever got to enjoy the privelege of travelling over the speed of sound.
Its just going to be too damn expensive to run this thing as commercial / enterprise. Concorde has recently gone out of service , only a few were ever made and never succeeded. Commercial airline travel has taken a backwards step with the demise of concorde. So I wouldnt get too excited about this causing a revoltion in global travel for a very very long time.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp