The End of the "Age of Speed" 531
DesScorp writes "'The human race is slowing down,' begins an article in the Wall Street Journal that laments the state of man's quest of aerial speed: we're going backwards. With the end of the Space Shuttle program, man is losing its fastest carrier of human beings (only single use moonshot rockets were faster). 'The shuttles' retirement follows the grounding over recent years of other ultra-fast people carriers, including the supersonic Concorde and the speedier SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. With nothing ready to replace them, our species is decelerating—perhaps for the first time in history,' the article notes. Astronauts are interviewed, and their sadness and disappointment is apparent. In the '60s and '70s, it was assumed that Mach 2+ airline travel would one day be cheap and commonplace. And now it seems that we, and our children, will fly no faster than our grandparents did in 707s. The last major attempt at faster commerical air travel — Boeing's Sonic Cruiser — was abandoned and replaced with the Dreamliner, an airliner designed from the ground up for fuel efficiency."
uh? (Score:5, Informative)
a couple of unrelated decisions are a sign of ending "the age of speed"?
at the moment China is constructing 17000 km of high-speed railways [wikimedia.org]; *surely* the beginning of an age of speed.
sigh, media...
More people fly all the time (Score:4, Informative)
The world doesn't seem to need speed anymore. And that'd pretty believable; What's the use of shaving a few hours off your London-New York trip when you might as well just have a video conference with the people there?
Yet the number of air travelers increase year by year. Personal travel IS important. In the USA, domestic flights carry from 1 million to 2 million passengers each day. And speed IS important. What's the point in sitting in an airplane? We would like to reach our destination as soon as possible, otherwise we would take a cruise ship, not an airplane.
Unfortunately, physics is implacable, its laws are not subject to negotiation. Until we find ways to (1) move faster than sound without creating a sonic boom and (2) move faster than sound without spending much more fuel, we will be limited to subsonic travel.
Re:Is this really just a symptom of societal decli (Score:4, Informative)
Would you really call it Pax Americana, given the lack of "pax" around the globe over the past 200+ years (and especially the last 100)?
The Romans only had "peace" through slavery and oppression and there was continual fighting anyway. There has never been anything called a "pax" which deserved the name.
Re:Speed is NOT overrated (Score:2, Informative)
In case you didn't know, the "Oh my God, the sonic booms will [shatter windows|disturb sleep|puncture eardrums|kill kittens]!" hysteria is just that: hysteria. Cooked up Boeing in the 70's to try to get Concorde banned from as many routes as possible, because it knew it simply couldn't compete. It was successful too: in the end only the national flag carriers of France and the UK ever bought Concorde, despite initial interest from around the world. Once countries started to ban super-sonic flight through their airspace, the potential contracts disappeared.
Boeing got to sell lots of 737s instead.
I do know what Concorde sounds like when it takes off, by they way. I live in Bristol, a few miles from Filton, where Concorde used to regularly come for maintenance. Concorde taking off with full after burners was a glorious sound, but not loud enough to scare any grandmothers to death...
Re:Actually very true (Score:5, Informative)
Partly because our infrastructure is fundamentally unmaintainable.
In many cases, we've simply tried to "upgrade" ancient track sections, so our trains have to deal with curves no other high speed rail systems do. This puts extra stress on the trains and rails.
In many cases our passenger rail is shared with freight - horrible performance-wise, great cost-wise. Everyone says we have a shitty rail system in the United States - I've heard from numerous sources that in terms of freight capability, we have the best rail system in the world. It is just that passenger rail infrastructure and freight rail infrastructure have vastly different requirements. (Apparently freight rail in many other countries that have great high-speed passenger rail is rather poor.)
In every other country, they build special track for their passenger rail lines that makes it easier to maintain.
Re:Actually very true (Score:5, Informative)
History catches us up. We don't have high speed rail because we had a large rail system laid out that has remained intack. Germany and Japan and a lot of Europe however got the hell bombed out of their rail systems during the war and had to rebuild. Newer beds and rails allowed them to have an infrastructure that supports putting in high speed rail.
Another historical switch, Russia captured more German rocket scientists at the end of the war and was able to build huge rockets and got into space first, but with big dumb satelites. The U.S. however could only put up something grapefruit sized so had to develop new technologies to pack it in. IC's were created which overnight killed the Japanese transistor radio market.
China did not have a big telephone wire network laid down, so when their economy started to take off. People just used cell phones with no need for land lines. Now they are getting land lines because they want to have internet access. Our old land line structure is like our railroads, but that is being transformed to higher speed digital types because it can ride the back of the cable TV upgrades, and it is easier to lay down new wire than new rail or roads.
Sometimes being first allows someone else to leapfrog into the next level of technology.
Re:So what? (Score:4, Informative)
Just curious..what airports do you go to where they do all of this?
I usually get to the airport 1 to 1.5 hours before flight time max...I check most of my stuff, but my packpack and computer case go with me. Before I get to the TSA place I put my 'beepables' like jewelry, watch, phone...wallet..etc, into my back pack..so, I usually take off my shoes, put the stuff through xray and walk to the other side put shoes on and grab bags and I'm on my way to my plane.
I've yet to see all the groping, and long waits and all yet at any airport I go to.
I travel mostly in the southeast, but even when I went out as far as CO recently...no big deal really to get through security.