They predicted us traveling by rocket much quicker across the globe. I see this mentioned now and then with disappointment that the one thing close to a rocket - the Concorde - was discontinued.
But what happened in the aerospace industry is that we instead focused on fuel efficiency and lower noise, which lead to the high bypass turbofan engine.
Instead of accelerating a small amount of air to supersonic speeds, which is both extremely noisy and fuel inefficient, we moved to a system that takes that small amount of air and uses it to drive a much larger fan which then takes a large volume of air and accelerates it to subsonic speeds. That's why 'jet engines' of the old days were much thinner and noisier than the really fat engines we have today.
This led to much cheaper and quieter air travel. This is a huge benefit - just not quite as spectacularly "space age" as the sci fi authors of the 1950s envisioned.
That might not be too far away - SpaceX does want to use their Starship to fly point-to-point across the globe. I suspect the noise, will make it infeasible for all but a few major destinations. They'd likely have to have a sea-based platform 20-30km away from the city, then use a floating tunnel with Tesla/BoringCo pods the rest of the way to actually get downtown.
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.
As anyone who lived in Central Florida or the Space Coast in the 80s and 90s can tell you, sonic booms from hypersonic objects returning from orbit are no joke. It's worth putting up with once or twice a year when you know the space shuttle is returning from orbiting the planet. But I imagine most people would be pretty annoyed with constant sonic booms from rich people traveling across the globe.
> I suspect the noise, will make it infeasible for all but a few major destinations.
I think the issue will be more geopolitical than anything. Few national defense organizations will trust an ICBM heading toward "just next to (no seriously, it's fine)" one of their largest population centers, even if it is from someone they consider friendly.
Not insurmountable, but definitely an uphill battle.
And yet they are perfectly content with thousands of inbound jet planes flying into all their major cities. Which could just as easily have any payload they want.
Naw, this is what intelligence is for. It's not like these launch points aren't known in advance. Is Russia really going to lack awareness of a launch from a common civilian launch point? Plus they could always have court mandated blackout periods. World tensions heating up? Shut down landing points to anywhere 100km of Russia or you get fined.
I'm fully aware of MIRV and a number of other issues related to arms control. I'm not concerned about governments thinking a ICBM is incoming because it shows up on a radar. We have plenty of technical and social solutions to this. Nations do not just nuke a single city out of the blue.
How would you avoid the TSA? Or the urge of people to arrive early lest they miss their prepaid flight and have to pay rebooking fees? I doubt it's economical to just schedule those rockets no matter how many passengers take them.
The TSA makes people take off their shoes, but in the rest of the world that doesn't typically happen. Somehow, there aren't loads of shoebombs blowing up planes in Europe.
The TSA don't do anything constructive. It's a jobs program justified through fear mongering. The supposed threat they guard against is a million times rarer than lightning.
I don't disagree, but whatever official arguments the TSA has for existing would also apply to intercontinental missles regularly launched from american spaceports.
High bypass turbofans can be used for supersonic transport, as can even more sophisticated efficiency wins, like geared turbofans. SST was killed by noise regulations in North America, which in turn were largely protectionism that Boeing demanded because their own SST project was a failure. It's not a coincidence that somehow no other country in the world had problems being overflow by supersonic jets.
1. Expensive. For sure, it inherently uses a lot more energy. There's not going to be an economy class on these and they'll never replace jets en masse.
2. Security. Not really. He talks about hijacking/terrorism, but these things won't have pilots or free movement on board. Everybody's going to be strapped into their seat for 45 minutes to withstand the forces and the rocket's gonna do all the flying.
3. Spaceports. See my sibling comment, these will have to be build on water far away from cities.
4. Inconvenient. No, these will be massively convenient if you can afford them. It takes 90 minutes to complete an orbit around the earth, so any two points will be at most 45 minutes away. Spending a bit over an 1hr flying New York-Sydney downtown-to-downtown is incomparable to the slog that exists today.
> Security. Not really. He talks about hijacking/terrorism, but these things won't have pilots or free movement on board. Everybody's going to be strapped into their seat for 45 minutes to withstand the forces and the rocket's gonna do all the flying.
Superpowers already have the capability to intercept things that travel faster and are smaller than these.
> It takes 90 minutes to complete an orbit around the earth
Except these are suborbital. And 90 minutes is for a full orbit around ISS altitudes. For most routes, it would be around 30 minutes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0)
> 2. Security. Not really. He talks about hijacking/terrorism, but these things won't have pilots or free movement on board. Everybody's going to be strapped into their seat for 45 minutes to withstand the forces and the rocket's gonna do all the flying.
It isn't just the cabin that is a potential terror threat, but a huge part of the supply chain and operations/management.
If these are built on water, a distance from land, it should be possible to construct a nearby floating rectenna to crack and cryocool hydrogen and oxygen for propellant via beamed energy from a solar sat. Granted, there is a fair bit of infrastructure requirement, but with interest rates so low, compounding interest isn't a big deal, like it was in the original SPS calculations.
> If these are built on water, a distance from land, it should be possible to construct a nearby floating rectenna to crack and cryocool hydrogen and oxygen for propellant via beamed energy from a solar sat.
That's such an enormous undertaking that it dwarfs the rockets themselves.
SpaceX, which is the only company that's even close to achieving this, prefers kerolox.
So what threat are we trying to mitigate? Liquid oxygen is not very problematic. We transport large amounts of the stuff on roads with no issue. Kerosene is used everywhere.
The Raptor engine for SpaceX's next rocket that would do these orbital/sub-orbital flights is fueled by liquid methane and LOX. A better fuel in many ways and much easier to make on Mars.
I would argue that the market demanded lower cost travel rather than higher speed, so the technical development followed suit. Fuel efficiency and lower cruising speeds were simply a result of that demand.
>This led to much cheaper and quieter air travel. This is a huge benefit - just not quite as spectacularly "space age" as the sci fi authors of the 1950s envisioned.
A moral here: align tech predictions w/ what most people want, don't assuming a kind of linear progression in advancement?
At cruising speed the Concorde was as efficient as a commercial jetliner of the day. The issue was they had to be subsonic near land due to noise and in that mode of operation they were extremely inefficient.
2 hours New York to San Francisco: we had planes for this in the 1970s but it was killed by regulatory hysteria.
Shaving by chemical: chemical depilatory actually already existed for over a century by 1950, not sure why they included this
A microwave oven? As the captions says, that was already on its way.
Water soluble plates: how could this possibly be a good idea?
Waterproof furniture: unclear how this actually makes cleaning easier.
Electron microscopes, yep, although again these were really invented in the 1930s.
Replacing steel with aluminum in construction: never really happened although unclear why this would be a good idea.
The reference to a battery powered automatic insulin dispenser is painful. The technology to do this is trivial today but it's not really available due to onerous medical device regulations.
Wasn't regulatory hysteria. We just chose a more environmentally friendly and quieter technology to focus our energy. See my other comment about high bypass turbofan engines in this thread.
Well, yes, but I don't call it regulatory hysteria to ban planes from making sonic booms over land so that wealthy people can get from one coast to the other faster.
If you want to be extremely kind to American regulators, you could argue that they banned sonic booms out of an overabundance of caution and wanted to see how bad of a problem it was. But it was clear after years of Concorde flights over Asia and Europe that it was non-issue. They kept the rules on the books as a favor to Boeing, Lockheed, and McDonnell Douglas.
It's not a ban on sonic booms. It's a ban on supersonic flight. Even if someone invents a quiet supersonic aircraft, or flies at a higher altitude to reduce noise, the current FAA rules ban it.
"Replacing steel with aluminum in construction: never really happened although unclear why this would be a good idea."
My house, built in 1976 in Washington, actually has aluminum framing as do the few houses next to it built at the same time. From what I heard there was a short period where aluminum was cheaper than wood for framing and caused the switch over. I'm not sure how localized this was. All the contractors I worked with find both the framing and how the house was framed unique but they are still able to work with it.
> Replacing steel with aluminum in construction: never really happened although unclear why this would be a good idea.
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.
Yeah I did a degree in structural engineering and they introduced aluminium like someone would introduce lambdas in python. Right time, right place, but usually a very minor role. Expensive, no resilience, and a host of other problems like how it is very soft, corrosion has strange properties (creates kinda a shell around the material), low thermal capacitance, and expands at a different thermal delta than concrete (unlike steel which is pretty close).
Lifting heavy objects is relatively easy so why not use steel?
Personally, I prefer wood or glulam over steel and concrete but they all have their places. Stone is nice too, lasts forever even if it is expensive. Ultra High Performance Concretes like Ductal are wild, but unfortunately building codes in most countries haven't kept up.
10+ years ago there seemed to be a rise in interest for precast stone blocks, seemingly part of the larger trend in precast blocks (e.g. foam blocks), which in turn seemed like a precursor to the 3D-printed hotness. One project in particular, using precast faux-limestone blocks, has stuck with me: https://www.scrapbookscrapbook.com/DAC-ART/building-concrete... Not sure that's ideal for a humid Alabama climate, but seems perfect for a drier, mediterranean environment like in California.
Is that stuff--specifically large, precast stone blocks--forever in the future, at least in terms of wide availability and construction know-how? Have the costs even come down?
EDIT: This DAC-ART seaside cottage used aluminum framing for the roof: http://www.concretecottage.com/roof-framework.htm That's what initially popped into my head regarding the question of why use aluminum over steel for construction. michaelbuckbee's post about the Dymaxion house elsethread is probably on point regarding what the article author actually had in mind.
> The reference to a battery powered automatic insulin dispenser is painful. The technology to do this is trivial today but it's not really available due to onerous medical device regulations.
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'.
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.
I'd like to read a breakdown on this - what is actually impossible, what is infeasible but will be in the future, and what is something we don't aim towards anymore.
I can give you a data point on one. I used to work in a factory/office building that had a water-retaining roof like the one described in the article. I'm wondering if the architect was reading this magazine - the structure was built around the same time.
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.
Here are some mentioned things we don't often see:
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.
There are plenty of metal-walled houses mate... down under we call them sheds, fair dinkum. https://www.google.com/search?q=metal+clad+house+australia (Thermal transfer properties are notably different from traditional building materials!)
Plastic modular houses ... not quite houses but used structurally where providing novel utility. For example they fill two-part fused thermoformed plastic containers with water for crowd control in riots. Recently half of Hong Kong was filled with these. https://www.google.com/search?q=water+filled+barrier
"is the standardization of life to be deplored if we can have a house like Joe Dobson’s, a standardized helicopter, luxurious standardized household appointments, and food that was out of the reach of any Roman emperor?"
> One of the more remarkable electronic machines of 2000 is a development of one on which hundreds of thousands of dollars had been spent in the middle years of the 20th century by Dr. Vladimir Zworykin and Dr. John von Neumann. The purpose of this improved Zworykin-Von Neumann automaton is to predict the weather with an accuracy unattainable before 1980. It is a combination of calculating machine and forecaster. The calculator solves thousands of separate equations in a minute; the automatic forecaster carries out the computer’s instructions and predicts the weather from hour to hour. In 1950, meteorologists had no time to deal with the 50-odd variables that should have been mathematically handled to predict the weather 24 hours in advance.
"Nobody in the year 2000 would consider building a house to last more than 25 years" seems so odd to my "modern" ears.
Is that because housing at that time was focused on industrialized pre-war / baby-boom production to meet demand and not on dwelling? Mortgages were still 30 years, right?
So interesting to read these things. A true time capsule.
Probably born of thinking of housing as basically a manufactured somewhat disposable consumer good. Something like Levittown was probably not that far off.
The problem is that typically you buy a house attached to a piece of property. So if the house is 20 years into a 25 year life, you have an issue of trying to 1) dispose of the house at the 25 year mark, and 2) finding a place to live for several months while the house is demolished and rebuilt. The only way this would work is with manufactured homes. Even then, I haven't heard of anyone having their existing home hauled away while a new one is wheeled in place the same day (except on the lower end, with park model campers).
Not only is it better for the environment (less land and energy use, less greenhouse emissions) but this week in Australia, interestingly as a result of COVID-19 panic buying, meat (particularly mince; also rice, pasta, cereals, toilet paper and hand sanitizer) have been sold out in most retailers whereas mushrooms remain available. Still more evidence of my personal opinion that mass psychology effects of the current scenario are far more dangerous than the disease.
I wonder how much of the perceived lack of innovation today is because we now have to divide the same resources among 7.8bn instead of 3bn.
In those days I feel like pop culture thought of innovation as 50% better everything, but we had to shift to making 50% cheaper, less resource-intensive everything instead.
examples:
- making furniture out of sawdust not better wood furniture
- tiny scooters and fuel-efficient cars not faster cars.
- plastic not shiny metals/wood for most household items
These constraints aren't, I don't think, evidence of an impoverished world, but of wealth disparity. After all, there are many people who have better wooden furniture, but market forces squeeze all innovation into cost-cutting measures.
One fairly subtle point the writer gets more or less correct is how people will travel more but supersonic flight will be mostly for the rich. (Obviously supersonic commercial flight doesn't exist today but, if it does get resurrected at some point, that will almost certainly be the case.)
While true, ubiquitous personal air transportation was pretty much a staple of a lot of futurism. I suspect that part of it may be that this is from a time when air travel was nowhere as widespread as it is today--at least normally. As a result, people were probably not nearly as exposed to issues around noise from aircraft as they are today.
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.
Certainly. But that's not personal helicopters or whatever. We ended up without supersonic flights everywhere (expensive or otherwise) but with pretty cheap ubiquitous jet travel.
I remember reading something by, I think, either Asimov or Heinlein talking about how many people think that the utility of science fiction (beyond just transitory entertainment) is to predict what technological changes are coming.
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.
I think that also depends on city design too. A teen living in a dense city in 1920 with a working metro had a lot more options than the teen stuck in 1960s american suburbia or the 1990s teen living with helicopter parenting.
And in the end, it didn't really matter that much, since most teens only dated people in the same school, church or other social institutions they attended anyway.
I think we've been learning people had no trouble getting up to scandalous things in 1890. It was just swept under the rug more carefully. (For example, see 23andme saga)
Its really hard to go back and look objectively too. The movie Philadelphia is now really hard to watch because of the aggressive homophobia, and yet that is how most of the US felt about gay people at the time. It almost seems unrealistic in how blatant and evil it was - yet nobody watching it at the time would have felt that way since those sorts of conversations were happening in bars and workplaces everywhere.
Mores will change and change again. 'Sem sex' activity in Rome would have been even more normal than now for most citizens (the term 'same-sex' would have no analogy), but 'same-sex marriage' would have been nonsensical and/or scandalous.
We think we are now 'very moral' but I'm doubtful of that. If you want to play the devil's advocate it's not hard to point out obvious hypocrisies in much of our current social line of thinking. During any era of 'change in one direction' all arguments in the opposite direction or all arguments that have nuance and don't 100% back the current populist trend are utterly oppressed as 'vile'.
Alcohol is an interesting one that goes through phases: prohibition was hand and hand with women's suffrage because 66% of men were wasted every day or every few days and either not coming home, or beating their wives. Without that social context, we look at alcohol differently.
So there's comment here about 'how technology changes people' which is exactly right.
The big one is not how 'horse and buggy' affects dating, it's how contraception has affected us.
50 years ago - sex almost instantly led to children - period - no debate. If your daughter was sexually active, she would be pregnant almost immediately. Your son would technically be a father. This has vast, vast social consequences that affect every part of life. We now have a lot of 'sex positive' people who're ideology wouldn't really even be fathomable just a generation ago, let alone popular. Contraception is as big as the combustion engine.
One interesting detail is that the sudden drop in birth rates that happened around the introduction of the pill also happened in countries where that never became a very popular method of contraception, Japan being an example.
Birth control was not widely accessible, reliable, available in pill form etc.
Around this time, due to commonly available forms of contraception: the nature of sex changed, family roles changed, the workplace changed, gender roles changed, birth rates plummeted, demographics changed fundamentally, family structures changed fundamentally.
I've read that Japan legalized birth control in the late 40's 10 years before the US did. The post war constitution gave women a lot more rights. And also Japans sudden inability to feed itself left a mark on government policy.
I don't know if that is true. I would say we are solidly middle class (our neighbors on our street include a paramedic, an elementary school teacher, a hospital receptionist, a paralegal, a yoga instructor, a non-profit office manager, etc.). My wife is a stay-at-home mother to our 7 children (though the 2 oldest are away at college) and hasn't had a paycheck since we were in college. We have 2 cars, a house with all the automated amenities, etc. I just work as a programmer making about $100k a year. After taxes, we live on about $4k a month.
When people ask me what my wife does for a living, I tell them she's working as a full time mom to our 4 kids. She likes that a lot more than being a "housewife". :)
Ok, but as the median salary for an American citizen is $31,099 per year, you’re at least one, maybe two standard deviations above what a typical American makes.
This isn't fully true though. 'Middle class' means something vastly more dramatic than it did in 1959. Homes are 2x bigger, 2x nicer, they are fully automated (washing machine, dishwasher, microwave), we have internet, cellphones, 2.5 cars per home instead of 0.8, we travel farther and more often, there's infinitely more variety in food and every other commercial product etc..
Aside from real-estate - a family could live on one income if they wanted to give up all of those things.
I'm not entirely disparaging your point, other than to say the entire system has changed, it's not like 1950's standards now cost 2x.
But yes, surely it's a weird artifact of classical liberalism that 'freedom' is somehow implied to be 'now you have to work for money or starve'.
Edit: I should add, that by any economic definition, if during one era only 'one parent' is working, and during a different era 'both parents' tend to be working, it's just a mathematical reality that those with only 'one parent working' will move down the economic ladder relative to others. This would be true before a single sociological artefact contextualised the fact.
But what happened in the aerospace industry is that we instead focused on fuel efficiency and lower noise, which lead to the high bypass turbofan engine.
Instead of accelerating a small amount of air to supersonic speeds, which is both extremely noisy and fuel inefficient, we moved to a system that takes that small amount of air and uses it to drive a much larger fan which then takes a large volume of air and accelerates it to subsonic speeds. That's why 'jet engines' of the old days were much thinner and noisier than the really fat engines we have today.
This led to much cheaper and quieter air travel. This is a huge benefit - just not quite as spectacularly "space age" as the sci fi authors of the 1950s envisioned.