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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.'"
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.
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/
I have no idea about maglev, but conventional high speed rail (current best is about 350kph or 220mph) claims to be about 10 times less carbon producing than the flights it replaces -- i.e. relatively short distance flights. Long haul flights are more efficient, but the train still wins. Also, the plane puts crap into the upper atmosphere (bad!) but the train can put it anywhere, since you get to choose where to site the power plant. The maglev is flexible in it's energy. The wheeled train has the advantage that if prices get really bad they can just slow down to save fuel.
Reliable Tires (or that fail gradually) - Tires are still based on air-filled balloon technology, making them problematic.
Michelin is working on that, they call it a Tweel and it should be on production vehicles by 2016.
Considering airplanes can now take off, fly and land all on autopilot, the real solution to hijacking is a command override.(Over ride, where is the over ride!)
Yes, you read that right they can take off and land on their own, and often do.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
IRAQ HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH 9-11
You can't take the sky from me...
- 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
$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.
Actually - they are usually failsafe. You don't need residual power.
Think about what that means - their failure mode is safe. It is a well established design and engineering principle.
For example, the brakes are held open by compressed air. If something goes wrong the compressed air supply shuts off and the brakes stop the train.
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".
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Right. Because sharks are widely known for their successes at destroying viruses, bacteria, cancer, and other dangerous oceanic life forms.
I did a robot project once, a little one. It was supposed to follow a dark black printed line around a racetrack, run three laps (the start/finish line marked by a line perpendicular to the track) and then stop. The hardest part of the darned project was getting it to recognize when to stop; it only had two little infrared sensors.
Your little nano-robot toy is going to have to deal not only with power supply issues, durability issues, and how-do-you-actually-destroy-this-thing issues, but it also needs to tackle Recognition issues. This Recognition, besides needing to be near-perfect (at least as far as false positives are concerned) needs to run through a very narrow sensory interface, and proceed with very little computational power (as much as you can fit into a cell, basically). And it's just fundamentally impossible to do that with anything that even resembles 'mechanical'. You need something else, something optimized down for size to make the most of every atom. You need to build it all off of Chemistry. It'd be the most fantastic masterpiece of chemical interaction - of anything - that mankind has created.
Or just settle for stimulating existing immune mechanisms (with boosts, and some way to make them fight certain things, or not fight others if it's an autoimmune problem). That's actually downright Feasible as such things go. You can put real Hope into that one.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
A very good point. But consider this: For something as expensive as maglev, tunneling is relatively cheap. Where as regular railroad might become 10 times more expensive if you do it underground, maglev might only becomes twice as expensive. And because of the great speed, the average number of passengers going through that tunnel will be many times higher than ordinary subway, so it might actually be economically feasible.
Also, since maglev requires a very, very straight path to go fast, you will almost never see it going flat on the ground. If you don't build a tunnel, you will have to build bridges everywhere, thats part of the reason why maglev is so expensive.