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The End of the "Age of Speed"
DesScorp writes "'The human race is slowing down,' begins an article in the Wall Street Journal that laments the state of man's quest of aerial speed: we're going backwards. With the end of the Space Shuttle program, man is losing its fastest carrier of human beings (only single use moonshot rockets were faster). 'The shuttles' retirement follows the grounding over recent years of other ultra-fast people carriers, including the supersonic Concorde and the speedier SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. With nothing ready to replace them, our species is decelerating—perhaps for the first time in history,' the article notes. Astronauts are interviewed, and their sadness and disappointment is apparent. In the '60s and '70s, it was assumed that Mach 2+ airline travel would one day be cheap and commonplace. And now it seems that we, and our children, will fly no faster than our grandparents did in 707s. The last major attempt at faster commerical air travel — Boeing's Sonic Cruiser — was abandoned and replaced with the Dreamliner, an airliner designed from the ground up for fuel efficiency."
it's bandwidth that matters.
So we are choosing to be more efficient than fast?
I used to speed a lot as a teenager- guess what? Now, I like to take my time, enjoy the travel, and save money on gas.
Like, say, the evolution of the average velocity for all mankind? All those people shifting from foot to bicycle should bump up the figure a lot, and reflect the true evolution...
TFA says:
Not everyone rues the slowdown. "I think speed's overrated," says Bob van der Linden, chairman of the aeronautics department at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, which displays many of the record-holding craft.
Ask him again next time he takes a flight from D.C. to Hong Kong. On tourist class...
With the pat-downs and all the hassle at both ends of a flight, why would we need a Mach 2+ vehicle in the middle?
This is similar to developments in computer systems - the emphasis switched from faster processors to multi-processor, multi-core, etc. Interesting parallel. rgds Dave
In other news, the Pentium 4 also proves that raw speed just isn't the answer. Build smarter.
There's not much point in plugging faster airplanes into a hub-and-spoke air transit system with chronic Air Traffic Control delays (assuming they're not asleep), 45-minute airport security lines and 20-minute waits for your baggage.
a couple of unrelated decisions are a sign of ending "the age of speed"?
at the moment China is constructing 17000 km of high-speed railways; *surely* the beginning of an age of speed.
sigh, media...
My father use to play with engines as teenager, toying with engines, repairing, fixing then.
I have grown repairing computers, fixing computer problems. I have absolutelly no fucking idea how to use a car, but I can write assembler sleeping (too bad dreams are stored on volatile ram).
It make sense to me that if this how everyone roll, on the end, our whole thing ( I don't want to call it civilization ), become more computer "cool" and less engines "cool".
Also, fast is not always the better thing. Theres something faster than very fast: do nothing, not needing to go or do something.
I can mourn the lost of the Concorde, but objectivelly was too expensive, and maybe to risky. Maybe like nuclear centrals.
-Woof woof woof!
Is it a necessarily a bad thing that efficiency has replaced speed as the new target to strive for? Easter Island's natural inhabitants sought to build the biggest and best stone heads; they devoured their natural resources and were the cause of their own extinction. I'd prefer NOT to go the way of the dodo thanks.
Sure, cars and planes don't go faster in 2011 than in 1980. So what?
But now we have the Internet. With it you can communicate around the world in real time. This is much faster than the fastest rocket you can imagine!
Even while our physical speed is slowing down, the speed at which our information travels is still growing constantly at rates physical speed could never match. Perhaps rather than us slowing down, we just shifted from seeing how fast we can move things to how fast we can move ideas.
Well perhaps for the upper class Americans for whom air travel was a given back in the seventies travel hasn't sped up. But for the 10s or 100s of millions who are being introduced to commercial air travel for the first time, let me tell you their average speed has really taken off. Air travel has become affordable for the first time to a significant fraction of the world's population. Rising living standards and cheaper flights due to de-regulation has done the trick. Living here in Vietnam I personally have taken many airplane "virgins" for a ride. ;)
(Due to an extremely fortunate set of circumstances, I must confess I was lucky enough to break the sound barrier in a Concorde flight way back when. It was interesting watching the digital airspeed gauge go higher and higher!)
While it may be the first time in history that there is know know group of humans on earth traveling at or near our speed records or at least won't be when the shuttle stops, its not the first case of regression.
As past societies declined people who commonly rode horses went back to walking, there is historical record of that. I think it could be argued that this might be more a symptom of the Pax Americana's end than anything else. Now that the great empire no longer has the capacity to project stability and order through the entire world, the worlds people are simply putting their resources into their more basic needs and into fighting over other resources; rather than into flying faster.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
At least on land; a 1000mph car, the Bloodhound SSC FTW!
it's bandwidth that matters.
A 200mph train link giving affordable travel between distant cities would be much more useful that a celebrity supersonic service.
I hope this applies to food as well.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
There are a lot of reasons we haven't gone supersonic with air travel. Sonic booms do things like shatter windows, set off car alarms, drive animals nuts, etc. The concord flights had to wait until they were 100 miles off shore before they would go supersonic, and they were also extremely inefficient, which means extremely expensive. It really is not cost effective for any airline to do supersonic flights right now, although Virgin has designs on a sub-orbital plane that will fly from New York to Paris in something like 2 hours. There are also new airframe bodies that do not produce a sonic boom when they break the speed of sound, but I'm not sure how efficient those are for air travel.
As much as I think space travel is cool, and the SR-71 was one of the more aesthetically pleasing aircraft ever, and similar sentiments, I can't really muster much pity for the disappointed astronauts and test-pilot types.
There's a saying from the murky world of the intersection between market actors and regulatory agents: "Nobody screams louder than the guy whose subsidy is being cut."
Astronauts, and their ilk, while they did the jobs we offered, fair and square, were (in terms of human speed) some of the most subsidized travellers in history. For a mixture of reasons, some more or less universal(scientific curiosity), some bound up in particular historical moments(Cold war dickwaving and spy games), we made comparatively massive investments in the velocity of a small number of pilots carrying out specific missions. I have nothing against the pilots, who largely executed their missions with skill and nerve; but that doesn't change the fact that those were some of the most expensive tickets in human history, made possible only by certain historical conditions. Those guys were playing with once-in-a-lifetime white elephants, not prerelease prototypes of consumer goods.
(Now, unfortunately, our extraordinary subsidies projects seem to be focused on our parasitic layer of financial services con-men, an entirely crasser class of people, with far fewer virtues and far greater dangers...)
The world doesn't seem to need speed anymore. And that'd pretty believable; What's the use of shaving a few hours off your London-New York trip when you might as well just have a video conference with the people there?
Yet the number of air travelers increase year by year. Personal travel IS important. In the USA, domestic flights carry from 1 million to 2 million passengers each day. And speed IS important. What's the point in sitting in an airplane? We would like to reach our destination as soon as possible, otherwise we would take a cruise ship, not an airplane.
Unfortunately, physics is implacable, its laws are not subject to negotiation. Until we find ways to (1) move faster than sound without creating a sonic boom and (2) move faster than sound without spending much more fuel, we will be limited to subsonic travel.
How it is that in a physical sense, our ability to get from point A to point B is slowing down; yet in a cultural sense, we are moving at a rapid pace? "In a hurry to get to a stop sign" - unknown (BTW The prior post beat me to this idea, so I must give kudos)
You could argue that it is a case of wealth being held away from the pockets of the people who would be willing and able to spend it on researching and inventing. Most of the major brilliant moments of discovery and invention in the past were works of single humans funding (at least in part) and carrying out their own endeavours. Now wealth is held by large corporations who restrict the kinds of people who in the past might have been the inventors to specific paths, and overall this leads to little genuine new thinking in the industrial fields.
We know that we can travel faster, but the cost of such speed is not offset by an equal reward.
Would you really call it Pax Americana, given the lack of "pax" around the globe over the past 200+ years (and especially the last 100)?
I traveled a lot in the mid-90s when my co had AmEx Travel people on premise who could cut boarding passes (REAL ones, not the oxymoronically named "e-ticket" crap) & all you had to do was go through metal detector & walk on plane. I once got to Hartsfield (Atlanta) for a 6:30 am flight, realized I'd forgotten my wallet but knew I had cash in my planner for cab & was meeting my director later, called AmEx who took care of the hotel & proceeded to make a 2-day trip to Houston & back w/no ID whatsoever!
nowadays I avoid air travel like the plague! I'm going to have to go to San Diego in Sep but that will be my 1st flight in almost 2 yrs & I assure you it ain't b/c I can't afford it... when (/if) the security theatre stops (ha! I kill me!) & I don't have to worry about my 6 yr-old daughter getting molested and/or radiation exposure I MIGHT resume my previous air travel level but I don't see that happening any time soon & we're driving distance to Port Canaveral so I'll be giving my $ to the cruise lines for the foreseeable future...
got that Delta/TSA/Obama?
(quick edit: ironically my captcha word was "oppress")
Well, duh.
It's almost as if our average speed was linked to the availability of cheap energy and the days of cheap energy were coming to an end.
While I accept that the fastest modes of transport are disappearing, I think the mean speed at which people travel during a year is almost certainly higher now than it has been in the past. The change is that a lot more people are travelling pretty fast far more frequently... and, arguably, this is far more useful than a handful of people travelling very fast very occasionally.
The human race as a whole != the handful of people who go top speed. Ever heard of averages ? I'm sure the millions of people in China and India and other countries who are getting their first taste of cars, air travel, underground... more thank make up for the disappearance of a few outliers.
Same as with money/health/culture/...: what counts in the end is not what the toppest top have/achieve, but what the masses do.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Its pretty basic...what has changed with how to FUEL planes since the 60's and 70's? Nothing significant...same fuel source, jetfuel/oil. Find a new, cheap, fuel source that can drive faster planes....and bingo! there will be plenty of faster planes. Its not the flying technology, is the daily operation costs that hold us back.
Keanu musn't let the bus go slower than 20 miles per hour!!!
Get off my lawn!!
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
the expanding population of humans and finite supply of oil, along with the exponential increase in our ability to transport information without transporting ourselves. Given these factors, it seems obvious in hindsight that commonplace Mach 2 commercial travel was way too optimistic.
So we are choosing to be more efficient than fast?
Nope. We've figured out by trial and error that traveling faster than sound isn't a good idea. It's expensive and makes people unhappy.
With the laws of physics setting an upper limit on speed it makes sense to concentrate on fuel economy within that limit.
No sig today...
petroleum is getting more expensive to dig up and process, as a function of more marginal types of deposits (oil shale, tar sands, etc), and just plain deeper to get to
at the same time, india, brazil, china: approaching western standards of lifestyle and energy consumption
this is a simple economic equation: decreasing supply, increasing demand, which means the age of cheap easy petroleum is over. and while we might be able to switch to electric cars relatively painlessly, i don't see electric powered aircraft in our future (battery weight/ energy density being the obvious issue)
which means air travel, a mainstay of middle class lifestyle, might move back into the realm of the upper middle class and the rich as it was in the 1940s. simply as a function of fuel prices
this doesn't have to do with speed, but it does have a lot to do with the related perception from the middle of the last century of air travel/ space travel becoming more and more ubiquitous and common place. think flying cars. but air travel is actually going to get less common, more rare
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Good, as a species we're finally starting to grow up.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Traveling at high speed is inherently an expensive pursuit, in terms of energy, materials cost, and engineering. We've burned through millions of years worth of petroleum in the last century, like a kid burning through the cash in a found wallet. Other natural resources are becoming scarcer as well, with a greater population every year to support. If we're honest, eventually another resource - cheap labor - will be exhausted, too, as standards of living rise. The Chinese aren't going to build stuff cheaply forever.
If our CURRENT population all rose to a 1950 standard of living, we'd only be able to afford 1900 technology. But the population won't stabilize without starvation; it's a biological imperative. So the balance will slip further.
Good, someone noticed this divergence!
Meanwhile we meet cool people around the world, have a blast, ... then slam into the physical speed barrier when it comes time to meet up IRL. Weren't we all disparaging the "virtual girlfriend" a few stories ago?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
> Travelling 4000 miles to speak to someone or just see their face is,
> for the most part, quaint and pointless.
And this is why nerds can't, for the life of them, design programs with actual people (users) in mind...they just don't get it what could possibly be so important about people...sigh.
When people have less money the focus is not on innovation but penny pinching. The big business which have the money to fund research and projects lock down tight and nothing happens. Stagnation. It won't go anywhere fast and may never again in our lifetime as the boomers retire and miser more.
The silver lining may be that the optimization that will happen will set a foundation for a huge burst of innovation once people spend again.
-Xen
Look at the bright side: Future generations will envy our use of high-power combustion engines that they will see only in museums. It turns out that fuel is expensive.
Would you really call it Pax Americana, given the lack of "pax" around the globe over the past 200+ years (and especially the last 100)?
The Romans only had "peace" through slavery and oppression and there was continual fighting anyway. There has never been anything called a "pax" which deserved the name.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The laws of physics shows that high speed travel demands a large energy budget. Atmospheric drag and the law of gravity can't be overcome. So forget civilian supersonic air travel, we can't afford it. While it's science fiction now, mag-lev trains traveling though a partial vacuum tunnel could give us supersonic travel between major cities.
This dream has been around for a long time. Time to start building them.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
will need faster transportation as physical violence during negotiations does not work with telepresence.
It's less about speed and more about efficiency and quality of travel for the user. Jets are fast but inefficient and the experience is so utterly miserable that more and more people are opting to drive up to 3 days in a row than put up with it.
High speed rail a-la the Japanese Shinkansen or French TGV would be a vast improvement over the creaky air travel system we have in America now. Regional travel or even region-to-adjacent-region travel would compete well on total travel time with air and vastly outstrip air for overall quality of the trip. Plenty of room on trains, outlets next to your seat, space to walk through the train and stretch your legs, better scenery, vastly fewer TSA thugs groping your children and gawking at your genitals. And if you don't mind boarding a train in the evening, sleeping on the train, and waking up in your destination then even coast-to-coast travel is doable.
Air, on the other hand, could be slower and lower. Dirigibles are more efficient and afford their passengers more space than planes. Their speeds are half of jets, but they can land on a dime and don't need much in the way of infrastructure, so you can liberate yourself from the established hub-and-spoke infrastructure and form another layer of air-traffic that won't conflict with jets because they fly at a lower altitude. You would still, of course, need air traffic controllers who don't fall asleep.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
really.. if you think about it,
http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=SL&p_theme=sl&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=0EB04F816AA79462&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM
it was possible to go from JFK to LHR in under 3 hours flight time.
Getting from middle of Manhattan to the airplane seat can take longer
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
So we are choosing to be more efficient than fast?
In regards to aviation...definitely. In fact, most of the time we don't actually fly as fast as the 707 used to. We probably fly 50-100mph slower than we did twenty years ago. In combination with congestion, flights across the US take about an hour longer than they would have in the 70s or even 80s.
Airlines have been purposefully flying slower and aircraft manufacturers have been designing aircraft whose fuel efficiency sweetspot is slower.
Money isn't really a physical thing. It is a unit of measurement. When you need a goods, and services you subtract your net value and give it to someone else. When you work you agree that your work a particular value and you add that amount to your net value. The problem is the goods and services to make one go faster have a higher aggregated agreed value, then the value the other party wants to provide. So the party will not request or give its net value to the other service.
Even if Money is gold base. Gold is only valuable because we as humans say it is so. If it wasn't a pretty metal its value would be less even if it kept is rarity and chemical properties.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Did the X-51 not hit Mach 5? Or the HyCAUSE hit Mach 10? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramjet_programs
price range when the Concorde went on the drawing board --- then the Arab Oil Embargo hit and the price reached levels the engineers hadn't dreamed of --- then came the tire blow-out and the day of the test for the replacement was 9/11.
While it's nice that the Concorde made it possible for Henry Kissinger to be in Europe for the day and back in the States that evening, it's rather sobering to look at its fuel consumption and consider how many homes could've been heated for a winter, or how many pounds of plastics could have been made &c.
Oil is no longer cheap and it's running out --- society has to face that, sooner, rather than later and come up w/ viable options.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
The space shuttle was always too expensive, satellites are almost always better and cheaper than the SR-71, and high-speed passenger services were basically only useful for the very wealthy.
Software, computing, and networks aside, it seems the US peaked in the 70's for engineering. As the article states, the SR71 which is still way ahead of current planes at Mach 4+, the rockets, landers, and support to take people to the Moon very safely many times, the highway and air transportation system, etc. All of this was from around the 1960-1970's (maybe into the early 80's). Same for the Space Shuttle. When did they go into service...about 30 years ago?? When I heard we were ending the Space Shuttle program without something to replace it, I knew, the US was declining -- from a science and engineering standpoint, which leads to an economic decline. Very sad to witness. If we were continuing to be on top of the world and thinking about our bright future, we would not care about the cost of the Space program just as in the 1960's. (note: I'm not attempting to be exact on dates, I am thinking about marco trends)
The Space program probably had a much higher ROI than our military. For example a bomb or cruise missile blows up some people in another country and what do you have afterward? No new revenue, no new tech that can be brought into the private sector, no new understanding of life or science. Just money gone and angry people who will want to get you back. We have lost our edge and are just reduced to bullying people.
I read some of the other posts about that or that makes sense because it is cheaper. Countries build infrastructure (trains, airports, bridges, roads, dams, power grids,etc) for future growth. We are not even maintaining what we have (much built 40+ years ago) much less investing in future growth. If China or somewhere else invests in building out infrastructure as well as produces future energy or bio tech innovations the world needs, they deserve the wealth and standard of living increases they bring. We (US) have been living off of the hard work of previous generations for a long time. How many bridges, dams, water reservoirs, rail lines or roads, are from the 1930's? When I travel to other countries over the last 15+ years I used to get mad (why do they have this and we do not), now I get sad because it is easy to see where things are going. If you disagree, get out and travel and see with your own eyes. In the 1950-1980's we were a producer and lender, now we are a consumer and debtor. Because of that extreme switch, I do not see how we can get back to the glory days or the 1960's when anything was possible...even man (specifically Americans) going to the moon and coming back home.
I love my country, but don't like its direction. So to the other parts of the world you will need to pick up the torch, we have dropped it. Best of luck to you.
I believe the root cause is more the loss of ambition of the general population. The climbing average age in the U.S. means that older and, generally, less ambitious people are at the voting booths. Their overall selfishness in old age and their cliches of "not in my backyard!" and "not with my tax dollars!" has lead to a completely different social environment for the youth of America than they had. During the cold war money was dumped into education, and the payoff was a very prosperous and advancing America. These days you'd be lucky to end up in a school district where your teacher isn't personally having to buy all the classroom supplies. You end up with teachers that are stretched too thin, broke, unhappy, non-engaging, and generally unmotivated anymore to what they enjoyed before. This results in kids brushing off that subject as unimportant, whereas an engaging teacher could possibly unlock a savant. We've likely already lost some brilliant and innovative American minds to our lack of funding for education, likely now working some crappy cubicle job being reminded by 4 different bosses about TPS Reports, rather than working in theoretical physics and propulsion. Our society needs to stop hacking at the roots to "save" the tree.
mod parent up.
While our time saw the death of the only supersonic passenger plane (the french/british Concorde), years ago already, it also saw the dawn of superfast trains, from the japanese shinkansen to the french TGV to the german ICE.
The french experience is, when you set up a fast train on a 500-km-like destination, you just shift 90% of the air traffic down to land.
Fast trains are still slower than aircrafts, but if you factor in starting, and arriving, straight in city centers -and generally a much lower travel cost, this is definitely a move ongoing in many parts of the world.
Herve S.
Wall Street Journal is great at making dumb little observations and not explaining them.
Speed is proportional to square of the energy you expend. After we learned to exploit fossil fuels, energy became cheap and we learned to go faster and faster. Now energy prices are going. Could we design a machine to even faster? Yeah. But we'd rather just send an email that goes anywhere in the world in under a second.
Perhaps not coincidentally, our tech obsession has shifted from engines which get faster from utilizing more energy to computers which get faster from utilizing less energy.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
The loss of these edges of technology that is in no way sustainable is something we would have to accept, I guess. At least the advances in human powered vehicles are still going strong. Pushing the limits what a person can attain by wasting less. Approaching 130km/h with only a human as power source is a huge achievement and an exceptional advancement over the speeds traveled 30-40 years ago (concorde/ SR-71 days). Even road going cycles capable like the ones built by velomobiel.nl give common folk the capabilities to travel at super human speeds of more than 30% what is possible with a regular racer.
!
It maybe is a stupid question, but the internet is full of references to exotic technologies like the TAW-50, which can go to 50 mach.
I guess all this stuff is not real, is it? any opinion on that or similar planes?
At least with regard to commercial air traffic, the focus is way too narrow.
Ignoring the intercontinental flights, what really is a higher speed worth? If you can cut down flight time from 4 hours to 3 hours, that's an hour saved - but it's not 25% of your travel time saved, because your actual travel time doesn't start with take-off and doesn't end with landing. Once you take into account the commute to and from the out-of-city airports, the security theatre, taxiing, etc. etc. that 4/3 hour flight easily becomes a 7/6 hour trip, and your time saved is just half of what you thought, in percent of the total time.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I don't think you guys get it. The astronauts are sad because the entire thinking of the American elite is "do with less" - at least for the regular people. When I was younger I used to think: how did those guys build the Hoover dam back 1930's, how did they go to the moon in 1960's, how did they go to the bottom of the ocean (Mariana's Trench) in the 1960's, how did we build the tallest skyscrapers. Now we do none of that. There's no "can-do" attitude. There's only what can "I get for free from the government".
It still takes people to orbit. Seems to me that that would make it just as "fast" as the shuttle.
We are entering into de industrialization de technologicification age. The end of the 21st century will look a lot more like the beginning of the 19th than the beginning of the 21st. My grandchildren will read about the Space Age and it will sound like mythology and folklore to them.
I disagree to some extent. Meetings which used to require a day's travel to attend, can now be conducted without leaving the office. We've not decelerated. We have greatly accelerated -- nearly to the speed of light. We are, virtually, in multiple "places" at once.
Proverbs 21:19
... at least in the US. The problem is that more often than not the connections among the various transportation providers is extremely poor making it at least difficult if not impossible to go seamlessly from air travel to rail to subway to bus. Europe, for whatever reason, has been much better at interconnecting mass transit so the system is usable.
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
- Mohandas Karamchand [Mahatma] Gandhi (1869-1948)
I come here for the love
Fuck the future generations. What have they ever done for us? I for one am glad we're leaving them a big mess. That'll toughen them up. Make men out of them jelly-boned subhumans.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
and you can go back to dark ages.
Actually, Paul Ryan said we were going to be going "back to the 19th century".
That's silly, of course. Today's robber barons have wealth and control far beyond what their 19th century predecessors could have every dreamed of.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Yes, the Shuttle is being retired. But Virgin Galactic is hiring pilots for SpaceShipTwo, which should hit mach 3 during ascent.
So... we've progressed from a very small number of people getting to go mach 3 in the SR-71, and another very small number getting to go even faster as astronauts, to commercial - albeit very expensive - availability of mach 3 joyrides in the next few years. And plenty of other companies are wanting to compete with Virgin, and there's talk of orbital tourism in the not-too-distant future.
All we're really seeing is the government taking a little step back and telling the private sector, "okay, we've been sending a few dozen people a year into space for long enough, let's see you guys really ramp this up."
If space tourism gets to the point in the next ten or twenty years where, say, a few hundred people a year orbit the earth, that'll be a huge increase in speed.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Age of speed is just starting. Look at the digital network speeds compared to 5 or 10 years ago. Concorde is not fast enough, when I can conference around the world instantly. SR-71? Mach 3+ is not fast enough when an satellite can take a picture and beam it down in realtime.
Going to the Moon? Ok, well you got me on that one.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
What we've lost is the sensational: the Space Shuttle, Concorde and SR-71. How many people got to experience any of those three? A infinitesimal percentage of the population. Look at every other mode of transportation, however, and it becomes readily apparent that we're moving faster than ever before.
Cars are significantly faster than they used to be, even fuel efficient models. And, more importantly, they're much more stable at those higher speeds. Even subsonic aircraft are very fast, faster than what any of us would be traveling in 50 years ago. And actually, 50 years ago, most of us wouldn't even consider air travel because we couldn't afford it. Forget the disaster that passes for the American rail system, trains are extremely quick too. Even commuter rail which might hit 70mph+ on some stretches is faster than most of what's come before. And this is not to mention high speed rail running at speeds in excess of 150mph.
So this so-called journalist looks at a single snapshot in time and makes assumptions based on that. It's like watching a 5-year-old for 30 seconds and complaining that he's not growing quickly enough.
This story is irrelevant. When was the last time your time in the air was the longest portion of your flight? Why is it important to have extremely fast spacecraft? Does it matter if they get there a day later? Why is a super fast spyplane important if you can use satellite imagery or local assets which can then beam you the information in real time?
The fact is, the reason we've slowed down is because we realized we prefer to be more efficent than really really fast. Just look at your processor. It doesn't clock faster, but it does more work and costs you less power. I don't think I can think of a single reason where increasing human speed directly equals increasing benefit. (And don't site that 14 hour flight to china. You were going to spend the first day aclimating anyway.)
I do security
17,000 x 7 (Shuttle) < 1300 x 120 (Concorde) < 350 x 500 = 175000 (TGV)
/. standard Libraries of Congress.
OK, maybe passenger miles per hour isn't the right metric either. The shuttle might still win on passenger miles.
For extra credit, convert to units of hogshead / fortnight or
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It's just the end of the age of physical presence.
When you factor in the instant communication available with teleconferencing, Skype, texting and e-mail a plane no matter how fast is just slowing you down.
This. There was near-constant warfare during the Republic and the Empire, both between Rome and other states, and civil wars which were mainly to decide who'd be Emperor until he got assassinated. It was only a peace compared to what'd happen if there /hadn't/ been a Roman Empire.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Even if a new hypersonic aircraft was developed that could go from New York to London in less time than the cab ride to the airport, people wouldn't take it unless it had similar costs to existing airlines.
Concorde ultimatly failed because it was too expensive and there just weren't enough people willing to pay (the Air France crash just hastened its demise)
High speed rail in the USA wont work unless it can be price competitive with the low-cost carriers like JetBlue, Southwest and Virgin.
Well-known rainbow-moonbat Jerry Pournelle described (in the collection "One Step Farther Out", for one) beaming microwave power from a SPSS to power jet aircraft.
OK, so the initial startup costs for infrastructure would be steep, but you get a real big-boy space program as a side-effect.
What would the economic effect of decreasing jet fuel use by 90% be? 95% ?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Indeed.
Anyone is welcome to dispute the term as its fairly recent history and the perspective of added years may or may not make it seem justifiable. Also just as the Pax Romana did not begin when Roam was first founded and nor did the Pax Islamica begin the day Mecca was captured the Pax American would not be thought of as existing until shortly after the conclusion of the second world war.
And again like the previous periods termed Pax before it, it does not imply world peace just a period where one power created large zones of political and trade stability. Its not to suggest that everyone under that power's influence liked the situation or that there were not corners of the world to where that influence did not extend were not experiencing the usual dust ups.
You could credit the Soviets allot as well, Eastern Europe, the Baltic region, and Russia proper was stable under Soviet rule .
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
s/Roam/Rome/g
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
> In the 60's and 70's, it was assumed that Mach 2+ airline travel would one day be cheap and commonplace.
Sure. On the other hand, in the 60's and 70's they didn't even have a significant chance of getting their nuts fondled before boarding, let alone having a government agent specifically assigned to the task.
As an aside, be a mensch; remember to bring flowers and call him afterwards.
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When your thoughts travel at the speed of light around the world, who needs Mach I (or whatever) airplanes?
And: so much more reasonable to explore space with robots. Enough with the human romanticism; it's killing our actual space research.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
In the days of the Concorde, if you could afford to fly from NYC to Paris, you could afford to do it on a supersonic luxury jet. Everyone else had to schlep along on the ground. Now, ordinary joes can afford to fly, and they provide relentless downward cost pressure, making fast-but-ineffecient things like Concorde unprofitable.
I would like to see someone travel on the ground from NYC to Paris. At some point during the journey, a car is going to lose traction due to the depth of the water in the North Atlantic Ocean.
Concorde tickets cost three to ten times the price of a subsonic flight. To say that if someone can afford a $1000 subsonic flight, then they can also afford a $10,000 supersonic flight is just silly.
I'm not sure where you live, but in the USA the 55 MPH limit is largely gone. I've been flying on jet aircraft since the mid 1970s (at similar speeds to today's air transport), and so have millions of others, so I'm not sure what your point is. Somehow losing the peak travel speeds of a small number of travels whilst not raising the travel speeds of the masses raises the average travel speed?
Putting moderation advice in your
When transiting through the airport takes longer than the flight itself?
How old are you? Your grandparents flew on 707s? My grandparents thought that the railroad was the bees-knees!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
cost-reduction is a downward spiral. while everyone tries to maximize profits, they minimize costs. this means lower wages. this means lower spending. the need to economize.
hypothetically capitalism would provide dissemination of the profits gained to public through shareholdership. but, inevitably, the ownership of the means concentrate on less and less hands, due to nature of profit mechanism - those who profit more through having more ownership in means of production, increasingly gain the power to obtain more percentage ownership of the means of production. this leads to consolidation. it reflects on all fields of life, from running of corporations (internet consolidating in the hands of a few big guys anyone ?) to income distribution and resulting spending
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
as you can see, 1% of america owns 53% of income and wealth, approximately. top 5% including that 1%, owns a whopping 72%.
bottom 85% people, who would be the target of all these innovations and speed as consumers, get only 15%.
naturally as you can see, suddenly speed becomes something that is very low on their agenda. they need to economize. you wouldnt want to fly at supersonic sounds by paying a few grants, while getting only 15% of the pie.
inevitable result of ownership and capitalism mechanics. the more, increasingly gets more and becomes an ever-shrinking group of people, while the masses get less and less and the numbers that get less grows.
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Speed isn't everything. Efficiency has increased tremendously. Today's modern aircraft can ferry more passengers further on less fuel than ever before.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
When SR-71 first launched we were communicating and coordinating the event via 75 baud TTY using crypto keys loaded on single Hollerith punch cards, hitting the "figures" or "letters" keys in succession as we paused in our thoughts to keep from dropping synch and having to start all over (when we weren't "streaming" pre-punched tape loads). Now we may perhaps fly physically a bit slower (though probably not on average...and do you know how fast an X-37B zooms?), but the comms sure do blaze over IP in comparison, and arguably a lot more secure (arithmetically at least).
You'll see things are still rapidly improving. Peak speed for getting a handful of astronauts to the moon or ultra-wealthy people to their beach villas is irrelevant to all but a truly tiny fraction of humanity. Statements like "And now it seems that we, and our children, will fly no faster than our grandparents did in 707's." just illustrate missing the point. None of my grandparents did any such thing, and most of your grandparents didn't either. But the fraction of people who have taken a plane flight in the current generation is rising steadily as air travel gets more and more affordable.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I don't think it's just speed of travel that's declining. I think that's just a symptom of the human race in general heading into a decline. All around me I see ignorance and superstition on the rise while logic, reason and knowledge are falling away.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The title quote is by Gandhi. While it is sad that this may be merely another indicator of some people resting on their laurels, I don't think it's a good idea to lament a greater focus on such things as fuel efficiency. Maybe some people's priorities are backwards, or at the very least, just a bit too slanted?
Nathan's blog
Agreed - the use of 'grandparents' flying on 707s is unlikely. Th 707 was a parents generation, not grandparents.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
We're constantly beating land-based speed records, making trains that run faster, providing access to sub orbital space flights, and so we are actually enabling more people to travel faster. Even if top flight speeds are not being broken, the total amount of human beings going faster is rising and perhaps the speed of the average person is increasing.
Twinstiq, game news
I can video commute to nearly any major city in a few seconds. Voice gets me even farther. The age of 'road warrior' business travel is closing, with high fuel prices and much, much better telepresense on the horizon. Admittedly the options today kind of suck, even the really groundbreaking ones like Skype. But that growth curve is just starting -- I'm going to have a large screen, high band telepresence rig in my home office before I hit retirement.
If you want to increase my personal travel speed, get some fiber piped to my house.
except for the whole loss of power by cube of the distance thing
yes i know you can create focused beams and microwave lasers
so then we're talking scattering and dissipation
efficiency is your achilles heel here
you should dig up tesla and ask him how this idea goes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_Tower
wireless, of whatever electromagnetic radiation, is wonderful for transferring signals. not very good for transferring power
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
People are choosing careers that have little effect on the physical world. It's all world of man stuff involving careers that focus on money (finance, investing, banking) parasitism (lawyers) or administration (computers / IT). These careers' primary effect on the world is simply that the workers are consumers. Being an engineer or scientist, fields that would do the "speeding," are simply not attractive anymore.
Going faster had a purpose. It wasn't the end goal of a productive process, it was a metric.
We've pretty much run out of ways to go faster, and reasons to do it.
It will come back, when we try to get to Mars.
The space shuttle is as you describe it specifically because the congresscritters decided that lawyers like them could design a space craft better than engineers could. There were several major re-designs caused specifically because of congressional stupidity and the demands of campaign contributors. Also, keep in mind that the shuttle was supposed to be replaced in the 1990s by a new spacecraft build with superior technologies, but that Congress again decided that lawyers were better judges of the technology than engineers were and said that the shuttle could keep on flying for another decade and a half.
And people wonder why I'm cynical about our country's future . . .
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
"In the near future, it will be possible to take off from Paris at 8 a.m. for a breakfast meeting in Manhattan. ...
A new approach to supersonic design makes all this possible. It is like nothing that has come before, but may well herald the shape of business travel for decades into the future. It is the Aerion Supersonic Business Jet. Welcome aboard."
Soon, only the little people will fly subsonic.
So we are choosing to be more efficient than fast?
Yes, that pretty much sums it up. People lament the "decline of rail", but our rail sector is bigger than it's ever been. So what those people are really lamenting is the the decline of passenger rail, which was largely replaced by personal automobile ownership and the rise of air travel. What remains is a large, thriving cargo rail industry that for the dollars spent, is among the most cost efficient ways of moving goods on Earth.
Similarly, in the air, we came to the conclusion that it was more efficient to move large amounts of people at subsonic speeds than it was to get smaller amounts of people to their destination faster. As a lifelong aviation freak that thrilled at the sight of fast airplanes, my logical side reluctantly admits that the Concorde model of flight... small numbers of people, expensive fares, fast travel... is never going to be as economically feasible as cramming lots of people in a boring subsonic airplane. With the ability to get work done over the Internet, there simply isn't that burning need to get to the other side of the country an hour faster.
My one hope for a silver lining in the death of civilian supersonic travel is that perhaps it will open up room for older (and just as romantic) modes of travel: airship and passenger ship travel. Airliners destroyed those sectors (along with passenger rail) because they were the fastest way to travel. Perhaps if the speed of "gettin' there" is no longer as important, there will be room in the market for economical, trans-ocean travel on airships and ocean liners again. A slim chance, but it's there (and no, I don't count vacation cruise ships as the same thing... I'm talking about regularly scheduled efficiency travel from non-carribean seaports).
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I'm pretty sure anyone smart enough to use the term "pax Americana" is using it in an ironic sense.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
What's that? Did Timmy fall down the well?
...
Oh, nobody's answering your questions? That's terrible. Almost like they don't respect you at all.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
In the 70's, 80's and early 90's we shifted from raw power and speed to more efficient, but when the power and speed came back it was more efficient, faster and safer.
The Mustang , Camaro and Corvette are perfect examples, they went from a big honking gas guzzlers in the early 70's, to nearly commuter cars in the late 70's and early 80's, to what they are, now. Newer models are so much better in every way. The same is happening with airline industry, and when the industry rebounds it will be far better off.
This could also signal a technological shift. You can only go so fast in the confines of the earth's atmosphere before it becomes inefficient. An ICBM can get to Russia in 45 minutes by running on the edge of space, based on the number of space travel companies starting, they may end up replacing the airline industry for long distance travel. Planes may stick around for shorter distance travel and cheaper commutes, but by the time the industry rebounds it may be very different than it is.
Unfortunately, physics is implacable, its laws are not subject to negotiation. Until we find ways to (1) move faster than sound without creating a sonic boom and (2) move faster than sound without spending much more fuel
We already know ways to do both of those things: run a maglev train in a vacuum. The problem is an engineering and economic one: how to build a very long, safe vacuum tube. So go and blame it on the engineers and leave us physicists alone!
Actually, I think a +1 Over Dramatic mod would be highly appropriate for this post of yours too.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
This just in, it takes a lot of energy to maintain those speeds. When we invent a new power source that can easily sustain those demands then speed will drastically increase to practical levels once again.
Until then, we're stuck with fossil fuel.
lets not pretend that the shuttle was a advancement on anything that had come before. it set back spaceflight 30 years while it sopped up large swathes of NASA's budget, while dithering about in low earth orbit. roll on spacex say i.
Rome if you want to
Rome around the world...
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Yeah, apk, pretending to be a second person doesn't really work. We all know you're still just your adorable raging self.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
Of building Mach 2+ airliners to fly from NY to LA if they make you show up 2 hours in advance for security checks. And then you get delayed again because its LaGuardia of course.
No one wants to go faster. They want to make more money.
I disagree with the statement that "human race is slowing down". Probably certain species are slowing down, but not the race as a whole. In contrast to the '60 or '70s when only a few people could reach the highest speed, the humanity now prefers to make it affordable to everyone, and slowly goes toward this point. If we calculate the average speed people travel now all over the world - I'm pretty sure it'll turn out that it's a way faster than ever before. This explains why we prefer more efficient vehicles to a faster one: because we want to speedup ALL people, the WHOLE race. So it's more like we have tried to reach certain limits by sacrificing lives of a few people, proved that we can survive that, and now we're ready to bring those technologies to the majority. There is nothing new with that - that's exactly how the humanity has been developing through it's entire history and I believe there will be new breakthroughs in the future.
gentoo people
From the documentaries I watched on Discovery, the reason supersonic travel isn't here for the masses is because Boeing couldn't catch up with Concorde. Boeing persuaded Congress that overland supersonic flight broke windows and killed cattle so they banned flights over American soil. Other governments caved in as well. This effectively meant that the only route possible was over the Atlantic. Concorde2 would have carried more passengers further and more efficiently, but it was canned because there was no where to fly to.
No sharp objects, I'm a programmer!
I think the real issue is that from an economic perspective, getting someplace faster, isn't necessarily better anymore.
It used to be that travel time was down time. Whatever the mode of transport was, you couldn't really be productive (in the traditional sense) while you were on the move. The less time you spent in the metal tube meant more time you spent someplace where you could do something other than pick at "chicken ala mystery". The Concorde was better, because you spent less time in the plane doing "nothing".
Now you can be connected wherever. Sitting on the plane is no different than sitting in an uncomfortable office. How much is it worth to get there faster now? Some? Maybe. But not very much. And certainly not the difference in fare prices between First/Business class on a 777 and the Concorde.
There's obviously more to "productivity" than "presence", but for the sort of folks that are forking over that kind of money for a plane ticket, it's pretty important.