[ok] Re: [extropy-chat] Communication vs transportation

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 01:07:51PM -0200, Henrique Moraes Machado wrote:

Can you please wrap your lines? You're difficult
to quote otherwise.

> Well, I'm not thinking only about intercontinental flights, but also our day-by-day transport, such as automobiles. You can put a hybrid engine in your car, you can use stem cells, you can put any kind of electronics in it, but it's still a car and will be stuck in the same traffic jam with all the other less advanced cars. You can make planes faster, but you'll still need to go to the airport and check-in and pass through the same metal detectors and deal with the same overbooking and wait lists.
> What I mean is that todays means of transportation follow the same old paradigm of fifty years ago. They improved, of course, but they are still intrinsically the same. The most advanced jet and the first airplane use exactly the same principles to fly.

Intercontinental flights have the largest payoff, because
here the pure flight time counts most. A suborbital
flight is essentially orbit, once you go through the
atmosphere and back. You can't shortcut these much, because
no known material will survive several cycles of that plasma 
bath, nevermind the accelerations required (Shuttle already
is pretty close to what humans can stomach).

You can't do better than orbit, because you need to accelerate
all the way, and you need a nuke drive for that. Things look
much better in vacuum, where you can use large circumsolar hardware
clouds pushing your sail-driven probe at several g for months.
It is not obvious we can do better than this, but our knowledge
of physics might be incomplete in that respect.

Planes yes, so here an individual VTOL can make sense,
even if it's slow and uses a lot of fuel. You don't have to go
to the airfield, and pass security (in fact, there are people
who collectively rent a pilot and a small jet, the advantage is
that they land on small airfields with less security overhead -- 
less hassle can be worth a lot to some people). You certainly
can't do long-distance VTOL without refuelling, and a larger
plane will be always better on longer distance even with
security overhead.

If you look at cars, it's obvious that volume is better
than surface, so an orthogonal matrix-bus based traffic
system in a large volume is pretty optimal (smallest
average distance possible, no blockage at crossing),
but for many reasons people choose suburbia, arguably
the opposite point in design space.

Suburbia might actually have a point, if you consider
that this is _insolated_ surface. Suburbia can become
energy-self reliant, not inner city centers. It's
a question of surface/volume ratio. 
 

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20031203/11314bc7/attachment.bin>