From: Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Date: Sun Aug 22 1999 - 17:52:34 MDT
Philip Witham wrote:
> Massive mis-information on this thread, I'm afraid. I'm very surprised. Billy Brown and Spike got it right. Here's a few comments:
Thanks Philip, but Doug Jones was right too. He put the equations in his
post, whereas I merely stated that the equations suggest this air car task is
mach harder than it looks.
Which is how this thread started, more or less. The Jetsons [admittedly
a comedy] and the latest installment of Star Wars [arguably a comedy]
both have cars that hover noiselessly with no evident engine running,
yet require some kind of action on the part of some propulsion unit to
actually move forward (!). I think there is a futuristic Bruce Willis movie
that has this too. They sidestep the fact that just hovering is one hellll
of a difficult task. Basic forward propulsion is quite simple in comparison.
I think Doug the Rocket Plumber would agree.
The basic idea here is that many people view the future with no real
idea how difficult some tasks are with respect to others. Scientists
for instance have managed to develop agriculture to such a degree
that perhaps ten times the number of people per acre of cultivated
land can be fed, yet we seem powerless against the much more
difficult task of convincing the indigenous populace on that land
to stop overbreeding. Consequently, hunger persists.
We have wonderful life extending technologies *right now* so
that people live more or less healthfully into their 80s and 90s,
yet we are damned if we can figure out how to keep the seniors
from feeling so left out and depressed that death comes to some
as a welcome release. We have developed wonderfully effective
antidepressants but are stumped by the more difficult task of
getting the patients to actually swallow their medications.
This lack of understanding of the difficulty of a task leads to the
comments I have heard since childhood: "If those smart scientists
can put a man on the moon, you would think they could...[fill in
the blank]" This blank is often filled with some comment that makes
no sense at all, such as "build a car that runs on water" or equivalent.
Consider the miracles all around us, that many of us take for granted,
such as the machine you are sitting before right this minute. We run
slothware that is so commically inefficient [by design perhaps] that we
fail to realize how brutally powerful these devices can be, yet we pay
for them only a couple days wages, a week's wages for a complete
system. So we dont have flying cars. And probably wont, for the
immediately foreseeable. Look at what we *do* have! I mean it, this
ww web is *far better* than a flying car, it really is. And no one
really saw it coming, before the early 90s [other than Eric Drexler
and a few other gifted visionaries, who see everything coming].
Just one short anecdote on this. I had never heard of the web when
one of my coworkers showed me a web browser [1992]. He said one
merely typed in keywords that one is interested in, and the crawler
finds a website that contains those keywords. So I typed in
rockets and helicopters and jets. Immediately up came a news
story that was then only an hour old: American fighter jets had fired
rockets and downed two helicopters over the Iraqi no-fly zone
carrying American diplomats.
So, that was extremely depressing, but we immediately realized that
this web business changes everything. And it has, no? This was an
incredibly powerful technology that *just showed up* one day. I
dont recall any sci-fi stories that anticipated the web. Anyone?
I suspect that many future technologies that will change everything
will be more like the web than flying cars. spike
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