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Sci-Fi Tech We Could Have Right Now (For a Price)
PlainBlack writes "Possibility isn't limited by technology. And it's certainly not limited by human imagination. What makes something impossible is the lack of cold, hard, cash. Wired blog takes a look at 10 science fiction technologies we could build, if they weren't so expensive. 'New York-L.A. Maglev Express - Cost: $70bn (Based on established construction costs). At $70bn, it's tantalizingly affordable by the standards of this roundup: a train that could beat airliners from one side of the country to the other. Many agree that Maglev has enormous potential. Bite-sized examples are in operation all over the world. Birmingham, England, had the first in the 1980s, though the promise of airliner-like speeds on land is still unrealized. The British system sped along at a pathetic 26MPH and was designed to get air travelers to the planes, not to outrun them.'"
for a sci-fi device which installed in Richard Stallman a sense of shame.
OMG my eyes, teh goggles do NOTHING!!
I'm Canadian... Eh?
With a 9 trillion dollar national debt, anything is possible : - )
73! -KB3MGR
a train that could beat airliners from one side of the country to the other
You'd still have to arrive at the train station three hours early and take your shoes off for the TSA goons.
And the war in Iraq has cost how much so far?
But maybe that'd be a bit too much of a disruptive technology.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Only $1.2 billion for a space hotel? Heck, Microsoft should take that $44.6 billion and invest it into a Death Star! I'm sure Ballmer would like his new Vader costume. :)
Honestly.. why would you want a million distracted soccer moms and stressed out sales reps take to the skies?
We like to imagine the flying car scenario like in the fifth element, but in reality it would look more like a WW2 bombing campaign.
We've spent half a trillion dollars in Iraq for no good reason. How about "if we wanted to spend the money"
I'm totally on board for the mech, it's time to make these military conflicts entertaining enough for pay per view to help off set the costs of war.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
* Flying car
* Cheap Nuclear Power
* Safe, Effective Diet Pill
* Cheap TV Phone (nevermind, I don't look so hot in the morning)
* Space Travel for the Mass
* Cure for Cancer
* Cure for the Common Cold
* Artificial Intelligence approaching at least Dog Level
* Appliances that Accept Voice Commands
* Independence from Oil
* 3D User Interface
* Cybernetic Implants
* Energy-beam Weapons
* Easy-to-Maintain Personal Computers
* Car Key Alternative - I hate looking for lost keys.
* Non-Lethal Weaponry for Cops
* Reliable Tires (or that fail gradually) - Tires are still based on air-filled balloon technology, making them problematic.
* Reliable Car Battery
* Scan & Download Brain to Cheat Death
(Yes, I stole some from a wiki, but then again I added most of them to begin with)
Table-ized A.I.
wrong. They have this kind of wealth. If they build things that few others CAN do and create companies that can do high-speed maglev across the country, it would lower the transportation costs, energy usage, and build monster jobs. In fact, I would rather see a maglev be built from D.C. to NYC to Milwaukee. That would make that a true money maker. It would create a large number of jobs in there. From that point, they can shoot for Seattle and then down to LA, flowing all the way into Mexico. In addition, another branch from seattle up to alaska to the bering strait. This is doable for somebody with the kind of money that only a few have. Oh well.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No mention of Arthur C. Clarke's data cube, as posited in 3001! Imagine the entirety of a person's biological makeup, memories, and experiences over a lifetime, all captured in a portable storage device. If I remember correctly, this was sort of Clarke's concept of potential immortality. But perhaps the technology required is not quite within reach, at any cost.
You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!
seeing it recognized as a "Gundam" just made this nerd's day
I thought of it right away before I clicked the link, and it came true!
All the big engineering projects of the last 20-30 years have been in either Europe or Asia (such as the Chunnel, Millau Viaduct, Kansai International Airport, etc.). All the US gets is the Shuttle and the ISS, which have both become a big turkey. Bugger the cost, I want to see a maglev from NY to LA with stops in Chicago and Denver.
Not a typewriter
Whoever wrote this obviously didn't do too much research for the article. They managed to get through an entire section on the feasibility and cost of a space hotel without stumbling across Bigelow Aerospace, who actually has a test bed in orbit right now.
While the floating city mentioned in the article is nice, it's interesting to contemplate the more general class of which it is an example of: Arcologies. Huge megastructures that are cities unto themselves. Arcologies are a common thing in sci-fi, but how cool of one could we build if we were limited only by technology and engineering, and money was not the limiting factor?
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nicolebrodeur/2004131851_brodeur18m.html/
There is no way in hell any public project could get across a state, let alone the entire country, for 70 billion. Sad hunh?
It's not really that disruptive. Rapid prototype parts take a long time to make and don't have the mechnical properties of parts made by other means. They're almost always made of plastics, and relatively weak ones at that...no fiber glass reinforced nylon or anything cool like that. They're awesome for fit or basic function checking in a hurry and for cheap, but if you want performance or durability, and especially if you want high volume production, you need to look at another avenue.
Also, you need to be able to do CAD, unless making models you find for free online is enough for you.
Anyway, here's one that costs $5000...a little more than a good laser printer.
http://www.desktopfactory.com/our_product/
How about silly things like real working public transportation?
Passenger trains between cities, silly crap like that.
For some reason here in the USA public transportation is considered evil.
Great example? Detroit, why there are no elevated trains for transportation is insane. and Most cities in the USA has far to little public transportation.
Also why a maglev from ny to LA? There are supertrains that haul ass pretty damn good. 24-36 hours from NY to LA is something that people would certianly pay for, and that's only a average of 90mph.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yep. It's a shame that Gates pisses his money away in Africa (not to mention funding the Discovery Institute).
There's a lot he could do for humanity as a whole if he wanted to.
But I wonder what the carbon footprint looks like? A plane at 35000 feet is in much thinner air and would not be able to fly LA to NY at a much lower altitude. The train will have to work in that thick air but will be a lot longer with presumably many more passengers and is not using aerodynamic lift. The propulsion system is also more energy efficient.
So I have no idea which works out better. Anybody have numbers? One can of course argue that the maglev can use renewable energy, but that's a crock unless you have surplusses of renewable energy, which we don't.
Squirrel!
We could have had the Maglev Train (several), National FTTH and poured money into researching real alternative energy policy (including paying for the American automakers to design and deploy all electric and hybrid cars by this year). Just shows how we've wasted our money...
We have four boxes with which to defend our freedom: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.
we can have all of this !
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
The current projected price for an LA to SF conventional high-speed train is on the order of $30billion. That's for 500 miles and only going through the fairly small mountains around San Francisco.
NY-LA is 5x as long, and has the freaking Rocky Mountains in the way. How exactly do they figure the $70bil price, even if it was a conventional high speed and not an exotic maglev?
...a dog reads YOUR list and says, He could have written 'Artificial intelligence approaching at most Dog Level. Hmph!'
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Build a vacuum tube from NY to LA. Then maximum speed is limited by, well... not much, actually. Accelerate to orbital velocity, go weightless for a few minutes while still on the ground, arrive. The technology exists; the cost is even more ludicrous, but while we're dreaming, eh?
In fact, hell, it's a vacuum tube. Damn thing's buoyant. Build it from London to LA.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Article says that 70Bn for maglev is based on construction costs. Surely it excludes the real estate along the way. Actually for 70Bn profitability does not seem out of the question.
The one thing to keep in mind with a cross country maglev is that their's more things to hit. e.g. hailstones.
Weren't we supposed to be able to build giant domes by now, large enough to enclose entire cities?
But wait! you might say. What practical purpose could this possibly serve? Do we have any cities that really need to be protected under huge domes? To which I would reply, yes. Yes, we do.
For example, New Orleans.
You might think I joke here, and maybe it is funny on one level. But think about it for a few moments more. If we make such an investment in the future of New Orleans, we could not build a flimsy dome that only keeps out mild rain showers. We must master the construction technology to withstand the biggest hurricanes the Gulf of Mexico can whip up. Beyond that, we would have to remember New Orleans is gradually sinking. Over the long term, that dome has to survive the pressure of being completely submerged under seawater.
And once we develop that set of technologies, entirely new cities can be built on the ocean floor.
No. In Mexico, Mexicans pay taxes.
GE could basically build a thing like this itself. Run it 4 tracks wide from LA to Denver to Chicago to NYC, have the operating costs basically covered by package and other commercial shipping companies. There are a lot of profitable applications to a system like this I'd imagine. What would stop private industry from doing it?
Sure, BillG and Warren have this kind of money, but how are they going to procure the land to build this train track? The government can come in and take land via eminent domain, but BillG and Warren Buffet cannot. So if I am the property owner of a parcel of land and I know that they need to buy my plot to complete the track, and without my land it will cost $200 million to work around it, then I'm going to make them pay me $199 million for a piece of ground that might otherwise be worth only several thousand dollars per acre.
Now, a maglev train that stretches across the West might be more feasible b/c there are large stretches of land that are still gov't owned that the gov't might sell or lease to such an enterprise.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
That cross-country maglev "cost" doesn't include obtaining the land to run it across - the killer in new rail projects. That's why trains don't go all the way through Boston, for example; it would cost fifty gazillion-billion-fagillion* dollars to get the rights to connect South Station and North Station. *rounded to nearest -illion
For just 14 billion. Seriously, the Big Dig's got problems, but from my perspective as a Bostonian, it's a resounding success. Only one civilian casualty so far!
Think of it in the converse; if someone made a copy of you and the copy died would you be dead? That's easy. You still live. Now if someone made a copy of you and then you died, then the question becomes murky.
Who are you? Are you an immortal spirit enshrouded the flesh by God's will? Are you merely a collection of ever-replaced tissues? Are you a nothing but a collection of memories on a replaceable meat substrate?
If you develop Alzheimer's, are you still you? If you suffer brain damage that makes you mistake your wife for a hat, are you still you? If you take an antipsychotic to fight schizophrenia, are you still you? If you are captured by the military and broken under torture, are you still you? If a hypnotist attempting to bring up suppressed memories instead creates new ones for you, are you still you? If you get amnesia and have to relearn your former life through the testimony of those who knew you and your personal writings, are you still you?
Can anyone else be you? Is a copy you? Are you still you if you're the copy? Are you the person you were copied from? Are you really the same person as the child you were many years ago?
I don't present any answers. These questions are as deep as any religious question ever asked. You may find your answers to them come immediately and without need for consideration. You may find that they trouble you for years to come. You may find that it's a bunch of sophistry and blow it all off without an answer or any desire for one.
But ultimately, people who believe in digital immortality have found their answer. It's probably different from yours and probably different from mine, but it's not really that hard to imagine their answers once you start pondering the essential question of who exactly *you* are.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
If we weren't already subsidizing interstates and cars to the exclusion of other forms of transportation, shallow and wrong-headed articles like this one wouldn't be pontificating about what we can't or won't do. Quoth the wiki:
"China aims to limit the cost of future construction extending the maglev line to approximately 200 million yuan (US$24.6 million) per kilometer.[3] These costs compare competitively with airport construction (e.g., Hong Kong Airport cost US$20 billion to build in 1998) and eight-lane Interstate highway systems that cost around US$50 million per mile (US$31 million per kilometer) in the US."
Translation: maglev can beat the costs of our fuel-guzzling, CO2-belching, traffic-jamming highways by a significant margin, but since GM and friends make so much money convincing Americans that cars and interstates are the way to go, whatever the hidden costs of roads and corporate welfare and military policing of oil-producing states, we won't consider shifting that investment into in anything else even though it's cheaper and better. We'll just keep paying in taxes and blood for the status quo. USA! USA! USA!
How much would it cost to build a death star?
A maglev would be nice, but the kind of big money projects that intrigue me are semi-public works projects to make the country more disaster proof and help it adapt to global warming.
Like:
Water pipelines and catch basins to help the West deal with mountain snowpack that is starting to melt too early. Part of the deal: Subsidize cisterns for new homes.
A survivable, redundant national energy grid.
Equip cities with a hardened emergency energy and communication infrastructure to keep traffic signals, police stations, hospitals, and the like going during a crisis.
I think this is kinda applicable here... and kinda funny:
Have a read of some Peter Hamilton books... they're pretty awesome and occaisionally have some nice glimpses into what some technological advances will mean for us
I find it an interesting read however I think that some techs mentionned arent achieved yet, not because of the cost but mainly because we are far from having the technology. The title of the article is a bit misleading. Interstellar travel, android armies? Being a student in computer engineering I see how hard it is to make simple robots work so I can hardly imagine how overly complex (aka impossible) those currently are.
I think that some technologies mentionned were interesting, like the maglev which did not "take off" as one might have expected, considering how advanced it is. That being said, the cat was cute.
Gee this sounds almost like the KDE/Gnome debate. Remember when the argument was "If KDE/Gnome developers would drop what their doing and work on the other project it would get done faster."? If we drop the war that doesn't mean you automatically have money to blow on your geek orgasm.
"Nahhh, let's just kill people!"
Another joint opinion of Slashdot and Fox. Brought to you by "Let's ignore reality" TV.
Wrong Wrong Wrong.
/km is the cost to build in China. Labor and materials are much much much cheaper there, not to mention overhead costs like safety inspections and engineering are substantially cheaper as well.
$24.6 million
The cost of light rail systems in the US is around $35 million/ mile or $29 million/ km. Mag-lev will be substantially more expensive. You can't take the estimated Chinese cost for a new high tech solution, compare it to the real cost of a low-tech American solution and say that the new high-tech solution would be cheaper.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
$70 billion to let New Yorkers visit Los Angeles in less time than it takes now. Great.
If you start throwing in stops, and the security checks,resulting offloads, onloads, time to speed up and time to slow down. You'd end up with a slightly better Amtrak.
In fact, I would rather see a maglev be built from D.C. to NYC to Milwaukee. That would make that a true money maker.
Milwaukee?
Sure, and, after that, let's build out the tracks to Albuquerque and then mosey on over to Petaluma. There are mountains of money to be made!
So, how much would it cost to make a permanent hotel in space? If we don't allow ourselves the luxury of appending it to the ISS, it's going to cost tens of billions of dollars.
Not sure where they get this figure from... Bigelow Aerospace is spending far less than $1 billion dollars total on his private space station, and it isn't going to be attached to the ISS. For those of you unfamiliar with the company, they already have a couple of prototype habitats up in orbit now (launched in 2006 and 2007) sending back data, and will be launching the modules for their commercial space station in the next few years.
Of course, a "hotel" is only one of the marketed uses for it; the impression I get is that Bigelow is much more interested in renting modules for research purposes to interested nations and companies.
I'm sure China would love to keep the cost of it's maglev down, but they can't. That's why they've already cancelled future extensions in favor of conventional high-speed rail. Apparently they couldn't get the cost below $70m/km. Not only that, but roads allow you to skip that extra step of changing modes of transportatino to get to and from the train station.
The maglev near Shanghai goes from the airport to the outskirts of the city. For a fraction of the cost, both in terms of money and time, you can take a taxi directly from the airport to the city center. And that's with the government heavily subsidizing the train. It's not practical mass transportation - it's a ride. A vanity project.
I agree trains can be more efficient than road traffic in certain situations, but we're not starting with empty land. Building out a high-speed rail system only makes sense if you're looking out generations into the future, because the building costs for the road network are sunk already.
IRAQ HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH 9-11
You can't take the sky from me...
Some of these are bargains, seriously.
- Concorde was profitable right up to the end, even including the massive overhaul costs; in its final year, 7 relatively low-capacity aircraft made £90m, whilst BA as a whole was making a loss.
- The only reason BA stopped flying them was that the French wouldn't let them - the agreement under which they were originally built stated that both countries had to to keep flying their concordes and the French didn't want to keep flying theirs because THEIRS were unprofitable (because they operated them badly)
- Also, the French hold the type certificate on the plane, so BA couldn't go even build new ones.
- The original agreement also stated that BOAC, later BA, had to operate the British concordes; so even if Beardy Branson had purchased them, they'd still have been operated by BA staff, and if BA were going to be operating them, they'd damn well still be doing it with the planes in their own colours. Except they couldn't - see above. It was a publicity stunt and Branson knew it.
So, to conclude, the reason that the only supersonic airliner is sitting rotting on the tarmac is because the French killed it, not BA. Also, the Paris crash was caused by Air France putting too much luggage on board and then overfilling the fuel tanks to give it enough to get across the Atlantic. (The tanks were supposed to be 97% full, the French filled them to 100%.)FGD 135
This is an enlightening article about his donations to the Discovery Institute:
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/08/26/gatesfoundation/
* Flying car - Santa says "NO" you don't have a pilots license
* Cheap Nuclear Power - Santa says "NO" have you seen The Simpsons?
* Safe, Effective Diet Pill - Santa says "OKAY" I've seen Rosie ODonnell
* Cheap TV Phone (nevermind, I don't look so hot in the morning) - Santa agrees with you
* Space Travel for the Mass - Santa says "NO" have you seen Futurama?
* Cure for Cancer - Santa says "YES" because he hates Denis Leary
* Cure for the Common Cold - Santa says "NO" because that's his BioWeapon
* Artificial Intelligence approaching at least Dog Level - Santa says "OKAY" and designs an adroid dog that can hump your leg
* Appliances that Accept Voice Commands - Santa says "DONE" and hands your girl friend a new vibrator
* Independence from Oil - Santa says "FINE" and drops a log down your fireplace instead of taking a pee
* 3D User Interface - Santa says "NO" because you'd just use it for pr0n
* Cybernetic Implants - Santa says "NO" because you have self-esteem issues that won't be solved by such trivial augmentations...and your small wii..besides I just gave your voice activated appliance
* Energy-beam Weapons - Santa says "NO" because you're just angry about the "NO" to cybernetic implants.
* Easy-to-Maintain Personal Computers - Santa says "NO" because you already have a Mac which was designed for idiots.
* Car Key Alternative - I hate looking for lost keys. - Santa says "WTF?" because you don't own a car that has a key fob.
* Non-Lethal Weaponry for Cops - Santa says "HELL NO" because if cops had non-lethal weapons it means more work for santa.
* Reliable Tires (or that fail gradually) - Tires are still based on air-filled balloon technology, making them problematic. - Santa agrees with you but is under contract to Firestone
* Reliable Car Battery - Santa says "WHATEVER" because he uses reindeer.
* Scan & Download Brain to Cheat Death - Santa says "STRAP-IN" and says sit in that chair with the metal skull cap.
If the Federal Government only did what they were supposed to, and "Big" stuff, we'd be a lot better off.
Instead they piss away money on what should be local issues. Pure pork, pure politics.
That is a ridiculously low figure for a transcontinental maglev train. I doubt they'd get as far as New York to Jersey for that amount.
How much did Boston's big dig cost?
* Two chicks at the same time.
Far more money was donated during the 90's because the economy was so good. The difference is that it was SPREAD everywhere. Now, that we have had a so-so economy (and heading downwards), we are going to see far less money for donations. If Gates/Buffet took the same approach as Allen or Musk, they would create a number of new jobs that would then contribute.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
All you need to make an automatic translation machine are four pieces of technology, three of which by and large already exist. Speech recognition, OCR (for signs, etc), image editing (add subtitles on the fly), and machine translation software. Image editing already exists, and it's not even that hard to do to get something that can autogenerate subtitles -- if all else fails, shrink the picture and add subtitles in the now-empty space at the bottom.
OCR exists. It would need its accuracy significantly improved, but then, most things you are going to want to use it on will be in one several commonly-used typefaces, especially if you're using it on computer text. Speech recognition exists, but by and large isn't good enough yet. Eventually it will be to the point where it either won't need training, or it will be feasible to precompute a database of hundreds of voices and brute force it.
That leaves machine translation. Unlike Star Trek (where the 'universal translators' can deal with even unknown languages, except when required by the plot), you are pretty much never going to get machine translation to deal with unknown languages. But that's OK, you don't really NEED that. Being able to build a new translator database for new languages as needed is enough. The way I figure, by the time machine translation is good enough, the other three prongs will have advanced far enough that you should be able to make a magic box that takes an AV feed in, and spits a new one out at 60 FPS. There you go, and beam me up Scotty, because I want one of those now!
It would LEVITATE!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
this incident
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
No sig for you!!
Actually, the maglev could run along either abandoned railroad tracks or even along the highways. But if I were them, I would insist on owning the land. In particular, they will want to install pipelines, waterlines, communications, power, etc.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What lies roughly between NYC and Milwaukee? There is more money, manufactuering, and goods traveled there than between any other 2 cities on this planet. Not even Japan or china has as much goods as travels in that arena. Read in Chicago, Detroit, buffalo, etc. Most lines would take at least 20 years to be profitable. This would be profitable the first 5 year.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I would pay good money for a scifi device that would install a sense of humor in mods...
Doesn't need to go to Milwaukee, unless it's to help Miller ship out beer, so, be realistic and end it in Chicago.
I reckon the 70bn price tag is for building the tracks only. And that is based on current building cost. Since the only place of a commercial build so far is China they probably grossly underestimated labor cost for the NYC-LA stretch to start with. Never mind that the German test system and Shanghai airport service were built on flat land - not through the Sierra Nevada.
Secondly, they would need to spend money on (rights to) land to build it on - especially in cities this will be hugely expensive.
Then a service that can cary as many passengers between LA and NYC as airlines do with a schedule as flexible means lots of trains need to be built and they don't come cheap either.
Lastly, you probably want a couple of stops as well so that means a fair few stations along the way - all in expensive urban areas. These stations could be on spurs so you can still have your airline-beating non-stop service, but without these spurs the system would never become profitable.
The problem with the maglev isn't the up front cost - it's the fact that it's extremely unlikely to pay for itself. Annual maintenance costs alone will be nearly crippling, let alone other operating expenses and repaying the construction loans/bonds.
$70 billion for a coast to coast mag lev? No way. The big dig in Boston, which was basically building a few tunnels cost $14.6b and you're telling me you can get a coast to coast mag lev for only 5 times as much? Keep dreaming.
Gates would never take away from rich ppl like Ellis, McNealy, Jobs, etc. And Buffet would never open a competing business even if it meant loads of jobs, high profits, and saving American and the planet, though he would help try to find a way to cure aids and save 10% of the population.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
And no one's confused (except maybe you). Yes, Saddam ran a secular state that was very low on Islamic based terror. But he hasn't run that state for nearly 5 years now. And sadly, Iraq is now pretty well infested with jihadis. It wasn't then, it is now. Get used to it.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
I notice your thought processes (like many others) can't seem to grasp that the middle of the country is just as important as the rest. How about we start the thing in K.C. and branch out to the coasts? Or is that too demeaning for the sophisticates?
Milwaukee/Chicago have loads of traffic that go between them. I grew up mostly in wonder lake( Northern Ill ) and my father was an American Airlines Pilot. When I was talking to him about maglev, he was the one that suggested this route. Pointed out that in the 90's, that route made up roughly half of AA and UAL's revenue and profit. In fact, he pointed out that only the small domestics do not service this entire route. In light of the shipping on the great lake, the trukcing, the rail, and the planes, I think that NOT doing the route to Milwaukee would be a huge mistake.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
New York - LA is not a good idea. The thing is, a Maglev could support a very large number of passengers per year, but its also very expensive, so it needs those passengers. To get so many passengers, you can't cater primarily to travellers, you need to cater to commuters, who will only start appearing if the travel time is less than one hour or something like that.
But a maglev from Washington to New York via Baltimore and Philadelphia would be just over 200 miles, so a maglev going at 300 mph could easily do that in one hour. This would effectively tie these cities together and going between them could become an every day habit for millions. It would make the region the largest metropolitan area in the world and completely transform it.
Hello? What happened to the sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads? By comparison these would have to be a bargain...
Well, unlike Santa, I'm not under any contract to Firestone; I'm free to mention Michelin is already working on a solution, as another post pointed out. They call it the Tweel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweel
Seems we have a new unit of monetary measurement. =-P
"Someone went ahead and did it: calculate the cost of constructing a military-grade giant robot. The result, when you throw in flexible aluminum alloys, seven engines, thirty helicopter motors and a computer fast-thinking enough to keep it upright, is $750m a piece. That would get you half a dozen Eurofighters, a trio of Raptors, or *****about 125,000,000 copies of Peggle.******"
Well, as a guy who lives in Highlands Ranch CO, I think that I can grasp that. In fact, I am closer to the middle than you are. However, you do not seem to grasp that if you are going to make this expand, then it MUST be profitable from the gitgo. Transportation does not make their money on human travel but on Cargo. So the question is, where in the USA do we have the LARGEST amount of cargo travel? Hummmmm? Lawdy, lawdy, can you believe that it lines up RIGHT WITH THE LINE THAT I WAS SUGGESTING? Imagine that.
Look, the line going from D.C. to Milwaukee is about a 1K miles. From Chicago, they would probably head south and west. I am guessing that they would head south to St. Louis area. Why? Because, it is a lot of traffic with a lot of nothing in between. From St. Louis, they can grab the i-70 corridor to KC, Denver, SLC, etc, or they could go to OK City, following 44 around (via dallas, albaq, pheonix, vegas, LA, SD). But you have to make the company profitable first. And that is NOT la/sd, but NYCMilwaukee.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Every time I read about grand projects like these, I wonder how they come up with these ridiculous numbers for costs. Yeah, so I'm a bit of a socialist, and I don't think large-scale projects that benefit large swaths of the population should come with a price tag. I know we're going to be extinct long before any Star Trek communism ever has a chance, but it's still not a bad thing to shoot for.
Look at it this way: if we had a clear path to cure some horrible disease, be it AIDS, cancer, diabetes... and the only thing standing in our way is a patent-hoarding Megacorp holding the cure hostage for twelve quadrillion dollars... I'd volunteer in a heartbeat to go Robin Hood on those jerks and kill 'em all, to benefit the human race at large.
I personally don't see the great appeal of MagLev trains, but I've only ridden a train twice in my life. There are many "futuristic" things within our reach, held back only by evil, dirty money. Money shouldn't matter after a certain point - money's for little guys like you and me to trade, not to synthetically restrain our evolution.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
But they'd have to buy the land from the railroad companies, or lease it, no? And what about the counties or towns that don't want the maglev running through their land because of noise concerns?
I just think it would be very, very hard, if not impossible, for a non-government agency to procure the continuous stretches of land needed to get this thing built. It's hard enough for a city to build or expand an airport, for example. The city I live in has (San Diego, CA) has been talking about expanding the airport for years, and it keeps coming up every election cycle, but nothing's been done since these discussions started 10+ years ago.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
The MagLev trains should of course run in vacuum tubes. That will make them extremely fast and energy efficient.
A general wrong thinking about maglevs is that it should be built for luxurious transportations for huge prices. That is economical madness. As the track is very expensive, you want to fill to 100% (and then you can charge extra for the peak hours) just like Ryanair and now other companies in different industries do.
Also the concept of "train" is bad. As it's vacuum, there is no reason to send train. You can have one wagon per passenger/group/shipment just like normal cars/trucks. And the "tuberoad" would of course be automatically routed, so when you enter where you're going, the system automatically allocate the way and then sends you off in 100 meter per second in a local transport net, into 1000 meters per second on the intercity tubes and then finally into another local net to your destination.
There should also be a smaller system just like this for packages. That is about a meter in diameter which would make it pretty easy to fill it with cargo. I'm not thinking so much about normal postal shippings, but along the line that these postal system should be competitive with piplines, railroads-transports and even ships for moving huge amounts of cargo very cheaply. One little maglev vacuum tube could transport as much as a couple of highways.
And with cheap transportations comes a huge economical boom.
How about instead of going for maglev gold, we just run rail conveyor belts along the main commuter routes, with flatbed spots and de/accelerator ramps from feeder entrances/exits? Drive on in the suburbs, park, and drive off in a highly predictable 15-20 minutes, into a parking lot building. No congestion or collisions, no gas burned (the central power generation and pollution control is much more efficient, and included in your fare). Fill the rails with cars to use the full capacity of the rails.
If a whole NYC/LA maglev that could accommodate maybe a dozen trains at a time costs only $70B, then a dozen "autoartery" car trains serving NYC or LA should cost at most 10% of that. Hell, Giuliani's lame "Sky Train" that gets a few tourists between JFK airport and Jamaica (filthy and remote) station, instead of just extending existing subways 1/4 mile, cost $8B. If we spent that on these car trains, they'd serve over 1M cars a day, which for $10B would mean $10 round trips would take under 3 years to pay back. $4:gal gas in 20MPG cars in traffic means $10 is about half what most people pay right now, not to mention normal car wear, collisions and just going crazy in traffic.
In the 1920s and 1930s, this kind of car train would have been science fiction. Why don't we catch up with "Golden Age" SF first, and then move on to the SF that came later with what we save?
--
make install -not war
southern cal is a WHOLE different creature than the midwest, east coast. NY would gladly open up towns to get that kind of jobs in to their state. Once you step away from NYC and its suburbs, the area opens WAY up. Not as open as say eastern CA, but up there. It would be easy for the train to avoid small towns if they are unfriendly. The issue will be entry/exits from the cities. If somebody wants to build a high-speed maglev that would make a stop in their area, ALL of these towns will gladly do what it takes.
Now, as to the southern cal, the entire coastline is difficult to move around. I spent some time in SD, La Jolla as a child (during the 60's, 70's, my father would take me on his trips and he had a regularly had a layover in SD for 36 hrs). I was surprised at the change in La Jolla in 1980. I was even more surprised in 1999. I can not imagine what it looks like now. Point is, the density that CA has on the entire coast line will only be found in cities in the midwest, and west of the eastern seaboard.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I grew up in the Midwest, including suburbs and very rural small towns, so I am familiar with the vastness and open spaces there. What would be interesting is whether a city or county that wants the tracks to come through their town could force a private individual to sell their land to another private individual (i.e., the company building the tracks). I believe the Supreme Court gave the thumbs up for this a few years back (it happened in San Diego back in 2002 or 2003 when the city claimed land under eminent domain to build a new stadium downtown for the Padres), but it is becoming an increasingly unpopular move.
A private company lacks the clout that the state of Federal government has. So what's to stop all these small towns from getting all high and mighty? Letting them build through their town, then decide to impose a train tax on every train that passes through, once the track is laid? Or what if you get support from a town, but the citizenry opposes it, so six months later they elect someone else who vows to kick you out? Granted, the majority of towns, cities, counties, and states will likely behave, but do you really want to have to respond to every mayor of a town with 500 people who decides to do something annoying that hampers the progress of construction? And you say towns will like the tracks b/c of jobs. What happens if they hire some townspeople, but they can't cut it, so they fire them, and the town raises a stink?
Another challenge, as you noted, is getting the destinations in the city. I assume the cities own their major transportation hubs (i.e., Union Station). Would they let a private company build tracks in there, or would they balk at the idea, worrying that it would detract from their own business?
I dunno, just thinking aloud here, but it seems like the challenges are too vast for a private individual or company to surmount.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Consider, we could have built seven of those NY to LA maglev trains for what Bush has spent so far blowing stuff up in Iraq. Put another way, we could have built a national long-haul maglev infrastructure and had enough left over to roll out fibre to the curb nationwide.
The war in Iraq is pricey, but look at all the dough we waste on social security and medicare. That's almost a trillion dollars a year and would allow us to have a couple of Iraqs, a moonbase, and maglev trains, but oh no, we have to have entitlements going up at twice the rate of economic growth now for decades on end.
Time to cut the old people off and start spending that money on cool stuff. I'd say, cut medicare spending in half, cap the rate of growth, and let people take a ticket and wait.
This is my sig.
1. A water faucet that maintains your preferred temperature so you don't have to fiddle with the controls.
2. A non self-serving government. Ironically, this would save rather than cost money.
We will get used to the change to the worst when you get used to some fundamental truth as in : your war caused this and was based on fundamentally wrong premise.
But even if we get used to this, this does not change the premise of the op , that jihad terrorist blowing shit in america =3 or maybe 4 incidents. and NONE of them had anything to do with Irak. So showing the terrorist card to say that it would not be useful to have a maglev NY-LA if terrorist blow it up is downright misleading.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
>Saddam's government was in no way connected to Al Qaeda or any similar terrorist organization.
You're flat out wrong on that. Saddam was harboring Abu Nidel until we invaded at which point Saddam's security forces murdered Nidal.
Colin Powell's speech to the UN mentioned camps in the northern part of Iraq that we cleared out within a few weeks after Baghdad fell. And Gee Whiz, they even found traces of chemical weapons at one of the camps.
On 9/12, in his speech before Congress, Bush made it clear he was going after any country that harbored terrorists. Iraq harbored terrorists and Bush followed through. It made no difference whether they were connected to Al Queda and 9/11 - Bush's point was that if we let countries harbor terrorists, we'll eventually end up paying the price for it.
The OP would have been informative if he had provided checkable reference. He did not. And what I find on the web is the contrary to what the OP said (hinting that he was either spitting BS, or that he repeated somebody BS and it was modded informative) : concord crash caused by burst tyre
:
There are also hint that BOTH airline decided at the same time to STOP concorde due to a significant increase onf maintenance cost by airbus : BA and AF decision to stop concorde due to maintenance money increase and downward profit
QUOTE (italic emphasis mine)
Both airlines announced the decision Thursday immediately after Airbus, which makes Concordes, said the planes would need an "enhanced maintenance programme in the coming years."
"British Airways has decided that such an investment cannot be justified in the face of falling revenue caused by a global downturn in demand for all forms of premium travel in the airline industry," the company said.
"This is the end of a fantastic era in the world of aviation but bringing forward Concorde's retirement is a prudent business decision at a time when we are having to make difficult decisions right across the airline," said BA Chief Executive Rod Eddington.
The airline has been forced to cut more than 13,000 jobs since just before the September 11 attacks.
BA has been only flying half the service it used to following the Paris air crash. Concorde was out of service for more than a year after the crash.
Article information
1) BA and AF decided to stop because of increased maintenance cost
2) Premimum travel global downturn made future profit less certain or even downright not happening
3) and if I read some paragraph correctly, BA was flying while AF was not
so apparently it is not "the french killed it" but "money (lack of prospective profit) killed it".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
What are the chances of an undersea cable being cut?
The chinese can solve such problems in a smart and cost effective way, they just move a few million people to a different place if they are in the way. And I'm not being sarcastic now.
Realistic, readily available sexbots will end war and crime and hate. Trust me. I have deduced that most world problems stem from too few people having a good fuck on a regular basis.
The first British maglev in Birmingham has a track of about 600 metres and passengers stand in it.
Having ridden it a few times, I'm quite happy that it's not reaching speeds in excess of 300 MPH over such a short track.
I can't be bothered to calculate the actual g force involved in going from 0 to 300 mph in 300 metres and then decelerating from 300 mph to 0 on the same distance, but I'm pretty sure I'd need more than a hand rail to hold on to to be able to ride that puppy!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
The Germans (a consortium involving among others Siemens and Thyssen Krupp) have been trying to sell a Maglev train, called the Transrapid for over a decade now. So far, the only customers are the cities of Munich and Shanghai. The thing has a cruise speed of 250mph.
Unfortunately, one big disadvantage of Maglev trains is that they cannot run on standard rail tracks, of course. Rebuilding a whole new track is expensive, especially on long distances. That seems to be the main reason why Germany, France and Japan (the three biggest countries with real "high speed" rail connections) have all opted for traditional trains (the ICE, the TGV and the Shinkansen), which do their high-speed travel on purpose-built tracks but invariably also use older standard rail tracks on parts of their routes.
I'm sure China would love to keep the cost of it's maglev down, but they can't. That's why they've already cancelled future extensions in favor of conventional high-speed rail. Apparently they couldn't get the cost below $70m/km. Not only that, but roads allow you to skip that extra step of changing modes of transportatino to get to and from the train station.
With decent public transport it's easier than using roads: less congestion, no effort.I agree trains can be more efficient than road traffic in certain situations, but we're not starting with empty land. Building out a high-speed rail system only makes sense if you're looking out generations into the future, because the building costs for the road network are sunk already.
So... it makes sense then?(I agree that conventional rail seems better in this case than Maglev because of the costs, flexibility and existing infrastructure)
There is also the cost of kicking hundreds of landowners out. American ones have rights and can usualy get a fairly reasonable price for their land, chinese ones can just shut up.
Birmingham, England, had the first in the 1980s, though the promise of airliner-like speeds on land is still unrealized.
The first maglev prototype was built in Sutton Gault, Cambridgeshire, adjacent to the flood plains of the Ouse Washes. These days there is no sign of the maglev tracks, the area is now a microlight airstrip.
This is a google maps image of the area. That large blue strip moving through the picture is the Ouse Washes - the largest wildfowl water area in Europe, currently flooded (as it should be at this time of year). The whole area is very flat, for miles in many directions and most of it would be underwater if not for the work of some Dutch Engineers a few hundred years ago. The flood plain stretches to the North Sea, joining it at The Wash, in Norfolk.
Sorry, it sounds good but I doubt you will find many people who actually pony up. I know people who bitch about the long time it takes to fly to LA from Atlanta, you think they are going to wait longer on a train? Let alone a train that stops for other people? People pay extra already to not have connecting flights
American's are impatient. We want it now.
I really tire of all the people who bitch about the lack of trains. There are many reasons it just doesn't work here.
1. Its on a schedule, which usually isn't the one you want. Unlike most airports where there are many options
2. Its still requires connecting transportation (cars, buses, etc)
3. Its still slow over long distances.
4. It already died because the public didn't want it. (Amtrak - goes where, well hell, who cares)
Elevated trains? Lets see, cost? Lack of use of existing facilities means its get harder to make the case to spend the money. Unlike most countries American's are used to not being near where they work. Its called independance. We are free to live where we want and how we want. We can change jobs frequently as well. People tend to no longer follow jobs. Its no fun uprooting family. Used to be you went where the work was. Now too many people get by living off of government handouts (I have friends in rent controlled apartments who basically don't work - 30% of their income is the max charge the apartment can do... they get their limited disability checks and others each month and do what, play EQ and WOW, why does that work, because some people will accept a lower lifestyle if they don't have to do anything)
back to the point.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
s. subj
I want magic !
(In my lifetime)
The reason north station and south station are not connected through boston (and if you take the T enough, you realize that it isn't even easy by T) is because way back when north station and south station were being built, the taxi lobby successfully blocked the connection.
Read that again. In the 1910's lobbiest twisted arms, and got what they want, and anyone who wants to travel from the north of massachusetts to the south of massachusetts has to get off the commuter rail in boston and hoof it to south station (much faster than the T if you don't have luggage) or vice versa.
Lobbyists for who? Taxi's, who are even slower than the T crossing boston's congested streets and will cost you an arm and leg.
Pay attention to what your politicians do today: Our kids are going to be paying for it.
However, we call them aircraft carriers. Nobody but the military is willing to spend that much money. I personally think that space based solar power is more worthy of a mention in this article than floating cities.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
We are pretty close already with Real-Dolls and such.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
...* Scan & Download Brain to Cheat Death I can never quite understand how people think that making a copy of themselves means they personally will live forever. The copy is a separate individual from you and when you die, you are dead. Granted there's now a copy of you running around but that's all it is, a copy. It isn't you.Think of it in the converse; if someone made a copy of you and the copy died would you be dead? No, it is copy-by-value, not copy-by-reference. When the copied object is garbage-collected (dies) the original object still remains.
http://technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=1319
Sarcos is way cool! We could have a tethered mecha in real life with their technology.
Even the most libertarian dream government will have some parenting to do. Mostly because adults, like children, are ignorant, impulsive, greedy, lazy or downright evil. To secure your freedom to live another day there must be a law against killing. You give up your right to kill whomever you please to gain the right to not have whomever kill you. Social contract. Is that a fair exchange? So it seems like we either have anarchy or some degree of authoritarianism. Anarchy sounds great, unless you live near anyone else. Then things get tricky. Why shouldn't i kill you and take you stuff? The only thing stopping me might be that you've got a longer range rifle. Killing you takes very little effort, and the benefit of taking your stuff and having less competition is pretty big. But you don't want me to kill you, and vice versa. So we make laws, and pay people to enforce them.
Your parents act as parents because as a child, you don't understand the world, how dangerous it is. You're driven by your impulses to eat doritos and stay up late to watch cartoons rather than do your homework. Loving, intelligent parents make decisions on your behalf and against your will because they know that while you might enjoy playing Zelda more than doing homework, that grades are far more important than entertainment.
The truth is, adults are just as stupid. Left to their own devices they would drive as fast as their car would carry them, with a cell phone in one hand, big mac in the other and no seat belt. So we have a choice: Restrict people's behavior, or deal with the social cost of tons of dead motorists. The idea that people will do the right thing with no one watching is naive in the extreme. People keep their speed below 80 because they don't want to be arrested for reckless driving, not because it poses a danger to others. When no one is watching, people are at their worst. Note that most crimes are committed with some degree of subterfuge and obfuscation. Bank robbers wear masks because they don't want to be held accountable for their actions. i wouldn't pay my taxes if i could get away with it.
People need parenting, not only for their own good, but for the good of everyone around them. So fine, call it authoritarianism if that makes you feel good. Some degree of it is far better than not enough or too much. Pretending that everyone is smart and responsible is foolish. We've seen how that goes. Every warning label on every product is some paternalistic fascism telling you what to do/not do because some idiot did the very thing they shouldn't.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
The chief obstacle to a nationwide network of high-speed trains isn't technical, it's the capacity of our national rail infrastructure. Most main line intercity rail routes (owned by the six major US freight railroads) are at or near capacity. While you could buy 90 or even 120 mph diesel passenger trains more or less off-the-shelf, you wouldn't have any place to run them. If you try to intermix 90 mph passenger trains with 40-60 mph freight trains, you need a lot more track capacity than you have now. Why is that the case when railroad tracks don't look as busy as interstate highways? Because switches, sidings, and other places where the passenger train can pass freight trains are pretty far apart. One train passing another, even on a two-track main with centralized traffic control, ties up a lot of railroad, forcing traffic coming the other way to stop and wait. One can think of the railroads as a series of one-lane highways linked together. Furthermore, a lot of main lines are single track and not double track: single track has much less than half the capacity of double track. Now the economics are such that the railroads only build and maintain the capacity necessary to handle their primary freight operations. If the railroads had capacity to spare, they'd have to pay taxes and maintenance expenses on it, as well as pay the cost of capital needed to build it (bond interest and/or stock dividends). Stockholders rightly won't stand for their company spending money on assets that aren't earning a competitive return. As long as railroads are built with private capital, taxed on their land value and improvements, and regulated strictly; while highways are built with public capital, tax-exempt, and regulated loosely, the full potential and efficiency of rail transportation will not be realized. Matthew Mitchell Delaware Valley Association of Rail Passengers Philadelphia www.dvarp.org
I'd be happy if we developed Bussard's Polywell reactor, and turned death valley into a giant desalinization plant.
Essentially free energy and free water. It'd be damn good for the economy, but the powers that be would never let it happen.
A company called MPS (Mechanized Propulsion Systems) is already making an anime style mech. It is going to be controlled by AI and be used for light construction and Forestry initially, it has tons of applications. Military is a bit down the road yet, but the concept is there and being developed.
www.mechaps.com
The connection could have been almost *free* if it had been built as part of the "big dig". There are a lot of questions about why it was not done.
http://www.costofwar.com/ and various other sources estimate something like $400 to $700 billion total since the beginning of the war, which is more than all of those things except the tunnel combined. If you factor in some possible indirect costs, maybe we could have built that tunnel.
It costs $300 million PER DAY.
http://www.google.com/search?q=cost+of+iraq+war
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/business/17leonhardt.html
* One chick at some time.
...years in Iraq cost-wise?
And why not a giant mecha robot? I'm sure some gov't contractor could easily find a way to slip some no-bid maintenance clause fraud on top of that, and there'd probably be less people hating us for it.