Putting on the Brakes: Mankind Nears the End of the Age of Speed(online.wsj.com) |
Putting on the Brakes: Mankind Nears the End of the Age of Speed(online.wsj.com) |
I'd like to think we've got something faster now that's just classified but I suspect we've gone to slower remote drones and satellite data that has less political repercussions.
Edit: Forgot to add the continued advancement of high speed trains (~360mph) and the Vactrain concept.
What killed the Concorde was not that humanity was no longer looking for faster ways to communicate, it's that most of their customers died during 911. For the rest of us Twitter / Email, Skype fill the role of quick highly personal information dissemination.
Companies like SpaceX and Virgin who dare to explore the boundaries of human travel will take humanity to ever greater heights. They are picking up the torch where the government left it in 1969. One of those two companies will eventually partner with FedEx to offer New York to Sydney 'yesterday afternoon' service. The companies that can capitalize on that kind of mobility and speed will rocket infront of their competitors.
Think advances in high speed rail, infrastructure development in mass transit everywhere (except North America, it seems)... Instead of pouring billions into a few showpieces like the Concorde, we're finally working on getting everyone moving faster, more frequently. This is a good thing.
Exactly -- we don't need fast human travel anymore. Our thoughts can travel all over the planet with almost the speed of light.
Travel is risky (however exciting), slow, consumes a lot of resources and causes pollution.
Indeed there is zero! Realistically speaking of course, a hard vacuum will be difficult. Even a 0.10 atmosphere would be a huge improvement. Or the intriguing possibility of pressurising but with a less dense gas. Helium, for example is about 1/10th the usual mix of gasses on earth. You could put a plastic sleeve over the shinkansen routes, fill it with helium, and see air resistance drop 90%. We might not actually have enough helium for that, though.
I'm just trying to say, there are options, if we truly care about speeding up point to point travel in-atmosphere.
Without even getting into problems that will occur at tectonic plate boundaries...
Not to downplay the size of the task, of course; it would be an astonishing feat of engineering and probably quite out of our reach for the foreseeable future, at any kind of reasonable cost anyway. The tectonic boundaries, as you say, would present a particularly challenging aspect of the project. However, theoretically it's probably the most efficient way from A to B on our little blue marble and so no doubt it'll be done eventually.