Re: Zen and the Art of Flying Saucer Maintenance

Hara Ra (harara@shamanics.com)
Fri, 18 Jul 1997 04:17:41 -0700

Michael Lorrey wrote:
> Michael M. Butler wrote:
> > >Man made air vehicles have always had maintenance requirements of between
> > >20-100 man hours per flight hour.
> >
>
> You think that there will be less than 1 maint hour per flight hour? It
> hasn't happened yet, and the curve averages upward over time, so I doubt
> that it will happen for anything but the most low stress flight regeimes
> for quite a while.
>
So far the examples mentioned here are for military aircraft. What about
small planes for the average Joe pilot, like Piper Cubs??

> Because Occams razor

Not Occam's Razor, just that "things never change"....

> tells me if screwed up creatures like us with our
> screwed up ways of doing things can make it, then any visitors are just
> as likely to come from screwed up planets as well, and just as likely to
> have short sighted, self centered, idiotic politicians and bureaucrats
> in charge of things on their home planet. The ideas that people get from
> Star Trek are much more unlikely than things continuing much as they
> are now.
>
> Read Scott Adams new book, Dilbert Futures, in which he states "The
> future will NOT be like Star Trek." because people will still be as
> screwed up as they are now, they'll just have cooler high tech toys to
> be screwed up with.

I tend to hope that the transhuman ideal includes being less screwed up.
We are learning more and more about redesign, and Nature isn't the most
logical designer around... AFAIK, Dilbert is in the wrong future here...

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| Hara Ra <harara@shamanics.com> |
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