"Chen Yixiong, Eric" wrote:
>
[strawman arguments deleted]
>
> I hereby propose using an integrated, autonomous EM rail system. This system can move people and goods at up to speeds of a bullet train, from factories and offices directly to your homes and apartment blocks. This system can also link to an extremely long and powerful EM rail gun that allows one to travel over continents at speeds over a few times that of sound via heat shielded pellets fired into precision sub-orbital flights to land on a corresponding decelerator gun at the other end.
Nice dream, but this hasn't even reached proof of concept hardware. For
5000 km range, you'd need an accelerator 100's of km long, beating the
passengers with multiple gees. This launcher would be a massive piece
of civil engineering, useful only for one route, and just as vulnerable
to kinetic attack as the WTC towers were. Far from being flexible and
robust, it would be single-purpose, fragile, and uneconomical.
> This would, in general, obsolete our primitive, disintegrated transportation systems that cause us travel headaches in terms of time needed to travel, and also very importantly, in terms of the uncertainties involved during transportation. In addition, unlike the case of densely packed modules such as airplanes, one runs much lower risk of hijacking, or terrorists taking control or destroying the "control" stations for malicious purposes.
>
> Imagine the scenario:
> 1) We can have our personalized "cab" arriving in front of our doorsteps within half a minute to deliver us automatically to where we need.
And you implement this how? Placing rails down every street in the
country?
> 2) Instead of making multiple reroutes via different transportation systems to get to where we want, we let the system take care of itself by locating the fastest route possible. We can get to where we want as easily as we make a phone call.
Do you have *any* idea how expensive tracked systems are? How poorly
they serve distributed areas? How vulnerable they are to sabotage,
weather, and mishaps?
> 3) We could send a parcel to another person as easily as we can make a phone call, at rather low costs. We can also optionally track the process of its delivery over the transportation network.
We can ham & eggs for dinner, if we had some eggs. And ham.
> 4) We no longer need to worry about traffic rules, care ownership and alcoholically doused drivers. The system can work by itself quite fine, even in the event of the Central Coordinators failing (but with a correspondingly reduced efficiency).
Uh huh. And utopia is just around the corner.
> This transportation system will truly revolutionize both local and global transportation, if implemented. Our current transportation and delivery system, with its massive inefficiencies, will not suffice for continual use into the 21st century. We must seriously consider alternatives, such as this proposal.
Oh, boy, so now a computer virus can produce real crashes and not just
computer crashes. Your dreams are not realizable this side of the
singularity, and are utterly worthless for the near-term problem.
Thank you for playing, insert two quarters for a new game.
Pardon my sarcasm, but as an engineer with 20 years experience in real
world design, build, testing, and analysis, I get A BIT TESTY when
starry-eyed dreamers throw out utterly impractical castles in the sky
without have *the least clue* that they are, indeed, impractical. The
disconnect is so complete that a meaningful discussion is almost
impossible, like virgins speculating about sex.
-- Doug Jones, Rocket Engineer
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:56 MDT