At 11:36 PM 4/23/01 +0100, J Corbally wrote:
>>Keep on packing your paperbacks when you are taking a long-haul flight
>>because supersonic planes are never going to take off.
>Guess I'll have to get that copy of "The Spike"
It won't help. THE SPIKE (2001 edition) is a substantial hard cover. :)
I suspect the spikish viewpoint would not be all that surprised if
commercial super- or hypersonic planes never make it. My general argument
is that singularity technology depends on the substrates being able to get
progressively smaller and/faster and/or cheaper. We don't have cities on
the moon for the same sort of reason we don't drive around in hypersonic
Porches the size of matchboxes, and I don't think we should expect to see
commercial aircraft changing radically any time soon. They're boxes for
moving humans around safely and reasonably cheaply. What *will* change, as
it has already, is replacement of much travel by virtual presence at the
speed of light. But I don't think that will kill face-to-face jumps around
the world either, or ever-growing tourism; I do kinda expect to see the
re-emergence of slow, incredibly luxurious lighter-than-air craft, e.g.,
though, the sort of thing Bucky Fuller imagined 30 or more years ago (but
this time built out of buckminsterfullerene).
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:59:56 MDT