[extropy-chat] Communication vs transportation

[Eugen Leitl]

On Mon, Dec 01, 2003 at 01:57:22PM -0200, Henrique Moraes Machado wrote:

> I've been reflecting lately on communication versus transportation. The first is developing faster than ever, while the former seems to be stalled. Is it related? Are we concentrating our resourses in evolving our communication means because our transportation means are poor, or does de current pace of developments on comms in fact causes less effort on advancing transportation? Just thinking. Sorry for the bad english, but it's not my native language and I am still learning.

Current communications depend on advances in electronics
and optics; the signalling speed is about the speed of
light already. Electromagnetic communication needs
no wires but is limited in bandwidth/cell, the 
amount of wire/fibre buried is clearly
very limited (watch the current dark fibre debacle).
However, better coding and hardware can put 
more bits/s through a given infrastructure.

Transportation has stalled in throughput because it's
an infrastructure issue (new infrastructure can't occupy
the same space as old, need to be compatible and is 
intrinsically expensive), and speed is an energy and noise
issue (you want to stay subsonic, and evacuated channels
are ridiculously expensive).

If you want to go to orbit, you still have the atmosphere
to go through (and it *is* called rocket science not for
nothing). The best you can do is hypersonic scramjet,
and if you thought Concorde was expensive... 

So, yeah, communication is where it's at. Especially if we
get good telepresence. Online gaming is progressing nicely
towards VR already. Once we get head-up displays with good
head tracking and good body tracking you can mix both freely.

You can expect good augmented reality in about 15-20 years.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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