Thursday, April 5, 2018

This Would Obviously Be A Very Satisfying Technical Challenge To Solve

But is this really a priority right now? Do we really need to get the few people who are going to be able to afford to do this a few hours faster to their destinations? When tens of thousands of us can't get to any safety right now at all? When tens of thousands of us have no viable habitat to go to in the first place?

Wouldn't it make a whole lot more sense to be spending precious research dollars on perfecting a much more flexible, and much larger scale, form of air transport? You know... Say like a Hybrid Dirigible Blimp transport that could be linked into air trains? Because what we really need right now is a lot more, affordable, transport capability, even if it only flies at 300 knots or so.

And sure, hypersonic is one of the weapon techs that everybody is worried about now, but doesn't that suggest the possibility that we might be better served in doing a lot more negotiating, than building, every new weapon idea that comes down the pike. Because I can assure you that this is what is going to be needed if we're ever to be able to start stepping back from all of these dangerous competitions we so deeply into now: competing for markets. Competing for ever more scarce resources. And now competing on too many technical fronts for too many scary new weapons capabilities. It has to stop at some point or other after all. And for no other reason than we are living in interrelated systems that can only handle certain levels of carrying capacity in any kind of "bad effect" you might want to talk about. The only real question is when, and how. Of whether we address these thing proactively, or whether we have them get addressed for us; just as surely as gravity can make a big rock fall where you least want, or need it.


QUIET RIOT


Flying faster than sound is the easy part. The real trick is doing it without creating the eardrum-battering sonic boom, a key hurdle to reviving supersonic flight for civilians.







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