The future requires unity
I recently attended a talk that included a discussion on why outside of information technology, we don’t seem to be achieving the future that was promised to us in science fiction. Aviation stopped getting faster and electric power has not yet delivered on the future we read about in science fiction novels despite it seeming so close. This stimulated a productive conversation with my friend Kane Hadley.
Some of the problems of the world are science and engineering problems that require really smart people to take a crack at them. The solutions so far elude us. However, Kane and I came up with a list of problems that we (perhaps naively) think require minimal technological advancement to provide a piece of the future today. Instead, these pieces of the future are mainly stymied by our inability to agree on things. Some of these will be familiar, others maybe new. I’m not an expert on any of these topics, but I’d like to see what others think about these suggestions. In any case, let’s start with something interesting:
Going fast
From at least the 18th century, people moved faster and faster. We had walking, horses, cars, and then planes. Aeronautical engineers designed faster and faster planes topping out in the 1960s with the military reconnaissance aircraft, the SR-71 Blackbird which was designed to fly in excess of Mach 3. Aerospace got better in some ways, but it still feels like the 1960s and 1970s were the heyday of space travel until SpaceX came along to reignite a little passion (though they haven’t quite gotten to the moon yet).
In the consumer sphere, things got faster and faster, culminating in relatively cheap flights that crisscross the world. However, the top speed of consumer aircraft topped out well below the speed of sound, with the exception of the now-defunct transatlantic Concorde. The main reason for this is some combination of unit cost (“£6,636 Standard return fare from London-New York” in what are probably 2003 dollars) and sonic booms being disturbing over land.
To remedy this, Elon Musk and others proposed the Hyperloop. It’s innovative, and once proven, it will quite possibly be a very nice additional mode of transport between intermediate distance cities like Boston and New York. For transcontinental migration in the US, it doesn’t seem like anything is getting faster anytime soon.
This brings me to my completely unstudied, but I think interesting, point. While this research into making sonic booms tolerable to the public might yield fruit, what if we simply defined one or a few supersonic corridors across the country and zoned the land under it appropriately? I’m not sure what the environmental impacts would be, but if they were mitigable or not too bad we could have high speed transit from NYC to LA.
Again assuming the environmental problem isn’t bad, the major impediment to having very fast, cheap transit between our coasts is coordination. The Concord flew at Mach 2.04, or 1,354 mph. That’s 2.38 times faster than the common passenger 747–400 which has a cruise speed of 570 mph or Mach 0.85. That would make a transcontinental flight somewhere between two and threeish hours as it would take time to accelerate and decelerate at a comfortable pace. That cuts a five to six hour flight about in half and makes it possible to take a day trip to the other coast.
So what prevents us from having this? We’d need to either buy, negotiate rights to, or take land by eminent domain on a large scale. We’d need to consider the environmental impacts.
Both of these things should be evaluated in proportion to the benefit of the supersonic corridor. Maybe when plotted out, the corridor isn’t accessible by enough cities or has enough capacity to make it worthwhile. Nonetheless, it’s clear that this isn’t a technology problem that keeps the future from being here today — it’s our choices.
Update: Supersonic discussion on reddit.
Let’s run with the numbers provided. According to this article the presumably 2003 price for a round trip ticket was £6,636 to make a London to NYC hop in 3:15. According to this Forex site, and a little spreadsheet magic, the average exchange rate for $/£ was 1.635 for the year. That is, a round trip ticket for the Concorde was $10,849.86 USD in 2003. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator, that’s $14,041.84 in 2016 USD.
By comparison, according to ITA Matrix, a two night round trip from New York City to London booked a month in advance (May 16 to June 16), costs $940. That’s about a 13.9x premium to save time on an admittedly punishing 8 hour to 11 to 14 hour flight depending on whether there are any transfers. That is to say, in the best case you got a 2.46x increase in service and in the worst case a 4.3x increase. But man, if you can afford it, I can see why you’d rather travel in supersonic style on a totally tolerable three hour flight than a seemingly endless one, possibly next to a screaming baby.
According to the reddit discussion above, if we incorporated modern technology, we might be able to achieve a 30% reduction in fuel costs (assuming they aren’t dominated by takeoff and landing) using compression lift and some small additional savings by removing the now obsolete flight engineer position which has been automated away. Let’s blithely assume that the staff position accounts for the takeoff fuel and assume we could get a full 30% reduction in fuel costs. According to this chart, fuel costs are about 47% of an aircraft’s costs. The Concorde is probably more than half (though I wouldn’t be perfectly sure, it needs a tire change every 30 flights instead of every 200), but conservatively using that number, if all of the savings are passed onto a passenger, that $14,041.84 falls to $11,863.96.
For some more hope, check out this article on how a supersonic jet could get even more efficient and less noisy.
Update Nov. 2, 2016: Vox did a feature on reviving supersonic travel. There is appearently someone who thinks they can bring the costs down to $5000 a ticket. Check it out!
Global electrical power
It’s pretty clear these days that solar power is going to be a really large piece of the energy production pie. That’s great, as most other sources of energy from wind, to waves, to coal, to oil, to natural gas, to biomass can be described as diluted sunlight.
A big problem with solar though, is that it only works while the sun is out, and the sun can be interrupted by clouds.
However, if we created a global solar grid, and shared with each other, there would be a continuous stream of electrical power worldwide. The sun is always shining somewhere on the planet. Or, as the more traditional, but dated, saying went: “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” Look ‘ma! No batteries! (Okay, many fewer batteries.)
At first I wondered if it was feasible, but then I ran some numbers and found this article by serious electric power engineers in IEEE Spectrum. I’ll let Mr. Gellings speak for himself, but let me run a few back of the envelope numbers for you.
The circumference of the Earth is 40,075 km (google) and the transmission losses of High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) are quoted as 3.5% per 1000 km (wikipedia). For the sake of argument, let’s assume that at any given time half the Earth is bright, and half the Earth is dark. That means that the shortest path to the farthest dark point is a quarter the total distance, and you can run lines from all over the great Manichean circle, both on the side light is retreating from, and the side the light is advancing towards.
This simple model, which doesn’t account for amount of sunlight, seasonal changes in the size of light and darkness due to axial tilt, distribution of generators, actual pathways for interconnection, or AC/DC conversion, says:
That is to say that the edge of light to the deepest darkness incurs a transmission loss of about 41%. That is quite substantial, but it is the worst case under our simple straight line assumptions. As you get closer to the edge of light, you’ll do much better. If the solar power losses are too onerous, you can use reserve battery power or simply spin up a natural gas for an hour or two a day near the region of maximum darkness. Of course, wind blows all day.
This is something we could start doing right now. The idea of global power coordination gives me a big headache though. Just ask the UN. The idea doesn’t seem totally insane. The solar technology is getting more efficient every year. I have a feeling the technology is there, but maybe not the political will. That is to say, whether we do this is largely a choice.
Universal food, clothing, education, and housing
These are famous. None of these things require a technological breakthrough to deliver these things universally in a first world country. All of these goods are produced, or could be produced, far in excess of the minimum required to provide for everyone. It only requires that we choose to do so.
Are these ideas totally wrong? Are there other visions of the future that would blink into existence with a little kumbaya? Let me know what you think!
