Miracles You’ll See in the Next Fifty Years (1950)

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/01/why-wer...

Still, it would be pretty sweet. Go downtown, check in, take a 10 minute pod ride, get strapped into your seat (there's no washrooms, or moving around), blast off and 45 minutes later you're on the other side of the world, another 10 minute pod ride away from downtown.

A moral here: align tech predictions w/ what most people want, don't assuming a kind of linear progression in advancement?

Compostable plates! They take a LOOONG time to dissolve, but they are water-soluble.

It is only 'trivial' in comparison with the challenges they would have trying to implement the same thing in 1950.

This is actually a hard problem. Although medical companies have solved it for the most part, and there are devices available. Still, regulations make sense, as our sensors, advanced as they are, can still provide erroneous readings. You can easily kill someone that way.

> 2 hours New York to San Francisco: we had planes for this in the 1970s but it was killed by regulatory hysteria.

That's oversimplifying. Yes, prohibiting supersonic flights over land had an effect of mostly allowing for intercontinental flights. Which makes the planes themselves less attractive and contributed to its demise. But by itself it wouldn't have killed it. There were multiple problems.

Some of the problems were:

1) Flights were _expensive_ . Supersonic flight is not that fuel-efficient, at least not as implemented by the Concorde. Takeoff (and sometimes climbing) was done on afterburners. It was capable of supercruise so fuel consumption was not much more than a 747 or the equivalent of a business jet (per passenger). It did not carry as many passengers though.

2) The aircraft itself was finicky and required a lot of training – for its 3 man crew. Yes, it still required a 'flight engineer'.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB106504293992222300

3) Environmental concerns (see 1). There were some discussions about Ozone layer depletion given its high flight altitude. Not sure how real those concerns were, but they existed.

4) The famous crash, and possibly 9/11 (it was scheduled to reenter service that year). Also increased regulations, meaning more time sitting at airports. 3.5h + 3.5h is already close to a full work day, add airport delays due to TSA and the like, and you can't cross the atlantic, have a meeting, and come back in the same day anymore. If it is going to take more than half a day each way, it makes more sense to take a normal flight.

5) Most airlines wanted aircraft that were more fuel efficient and carried more passengers. The Concorde was going exactly on the wrong direction.

The regulations just added insult to injury. Not may companies operating them, not many planes in service, not many routes. Any issues would then have an outsized effect. But even more importantly, it prevented development of successors.

Sonic booms can be mitigated to a large extent today. There are potentially better designs that would carry more people at higher efficiencies, including flying wings. We don't need miracles, we just need to make it worth it to business and first class travelers(at least, at first). Automation improvements means that we could have a two person crew, just like any other aircraft. And so on. But who is going to absorb that R&D with the Concorde gravestone around?

We'll have to be happy with subsonic aircraft for the time being. Unless SpaceX delivers. A suborbital flight probably makes more sense than the Concorde.

You don't have kids do you?

Pros: Corrosion resistant. Lighter and much easier to work with.

Cons: Expensive. Fatigue, so prob can't replace steel or wood for big projects.

Vinyl siding has replaced aluminum siding but aluminum siding was extremely popular for decades. So long as it's not dented, it looks and wears better as vinyl siding is more prone to sagging and cracking, especially if not installed correctly.

Suffice to say, having hundreds of thousands of gallons of standing water on the roof was not a good thing in the long term. Nor was it good in the short term. The extra weight. Algae. Mold. Icing. Leaks everywhere. Just awful.

The new way is to plant a garden up there, which seems a lot more reasonable and probably gives a similar thermal load.

Sun lamps on 200ft towers - definitely possible with modern lighting options, but horribly energy wasteful and likely to annoy people more than help them.

Thorium power generators - research is ongoing as you can see from the articles that often pop up on HN. The main barrier is still materials science.

Atomic "liners" (passenger vessels) - easily possible if not for general distrust and extreme regulation of nuclear power. For example, there are a number of nuclear powered ice breakers in service today.

Metal-walled houses - also possible, but so ridiculously expensive no one actually does it. Worth noting is a lot of commercial construction uses metal studs today.

Plastic modular houses - also possible (see mobile homes as an example), but the large majority of people don't want them because of the "cheap" factor. Also in many places the property costs a lot more than the house itself, so construction material savings is low priority.

Chemical hair remover for shaving - turns out this is harder than it seems. Chemicals that can break down hair have a rather annoying tendency to also be really harsh on skin.

Controlling weather - The amount of energy needed to do this is ridiculous, as are the environmental impacts of things the article suggests (covering the ocean in oil and lighting it on fire...)

Supersonic/rocket planes - The tech has been available for many decades, but the market demanded cheaper tickets rather than faster planes, so development went in that direction instead.

I mean, we just had a year of bountiful seedless grapes, and I'm pretty thrilled about that.

isn't that pretty much the case in Japan ? https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...

ADDED: And, yes, an implicit assumption is presumably that these personal vehicles are quiet but it's unclear what the mechanism for that would be.

The author disagreed with that, saying that predicting future technological changes is not really important. What is important is predicting the social effects of those changes. That's what a good science fiction writer should be figuring out.

They gave an example that went something like this. Imagine someone writing a science fiction story in say 1890 (although I suppose it might not have been called science fiction yet) set 100 years in the future in the United States.

Predicting that people in 1990 would have horseless carriages instead of horses, and they would be widespread enough for nearly everyone to have one is interesting, but according to author not really insightful.

The useful and insightful prediction would be for the writer to figure out, say, what affect that mobility would have on teen dating. In 1890, most of a teen's social life would involve other teens who lived within easy walking distance plus maybe some farther away that they met at school and either only socialize at school or at activities that are close enough to be in reasonably walking distance for both.

But in the future, when families have more than one horseless carriage and that teen has easy access to one, their social life can involve anyone in town, or in neighboring towns.

Also that 1890 teen that has to walk everywhere might have limited opportunity to get of parental supervision long enough to be alone with their boy/girlfriend. 1990 teens with their much greater mobility can much more easily get away from prying parental eyes and get up to things that would be scandalous in 1890.