@crumbleneedy They thought that about combustion engines, atomic power, computers and smart-phones.

Now we know better and the world is fucked. It's not the invention that's the problem; its the fame-hungry scientists and the too wealthy sponsers that fund them.

#ScienceAhead #FutureIsHere #climatechange #technologicalprogress

Just to call out a couple of examples above: the Hyperloop and Airships.

The Hyperloop is based on vacuum-train designs dating to the nineteenth century. There was actually a pretty big engineering proposal in the 1970s. It largely concluded that costs, risks, and engineering challenges would be really high.

Airships are another concept that gets trotted out every decade or so --- I've seen four or five revivals of interest. And there's been some real progress ---- we're no longer literally sewing together gasbags from oxgut (as was the case with the Zeppelins). We've got modern synthetics which are extremely thin, strong, and nonpermeable. Better living through plastics ...

But ...

... airships have other tremendous challenges:

• Rather than floating on a fluid, as with marine ships, or generating dynamic lift as with airplanes, airships are suspended in a fluid like a submarine. And it turns out that that neutral buoyancy is difficult to maintain and tends to compound on itself. A ship, as it settles deeper in the water wants to rise more. An airship as it sinks or climbs, wants to sink or climb more.

• Unloading cargo must be balanced by either loading ballast or venting lifting gas. Depending on your lifting gas that's expensive dangerous or both.

• Airships fly low and slow. They're most efficient within only a few thousand feet of the ground, which is where most weather and turbulence are. Jet airliners are popular, amongst other reasons because they fly above the weather, most of the time.

• Airship's structures must be extremely light but face tremendous forces. They're far more susceptible to high winds than rigid airplane fuselage and wing assemblies are.

• Neal Stephenson "Diamond Age" vacuum airships ... simply are not possible with any known structures we have. So hydrogen and helium are the best lifting gasses we'll get, and those are barely sufficient for even noncommercial applications.

TL;DR: airships are hard, and face tremendous challenges. The opportunities for advance are ... fairly slim. Better approaches exist for most transport cases (trains, marine cargo), and in the few cases airships might offer some benefits ... those are still fairly slight.

So again, see the questions in the prior toot and keep them in mind.

#TechnologicalProgress #Breakthroughs #Realism #CurbYourEnthusiasm

Edits: tyops and speling. 2022-11-21

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Basically, when you see a novel concept publicised, ask:

• Is this really new?
• Has it been tried before?
• If so why wasn't it adopted then?
• Have those blockers been removed, or ...
• Has some new benefit / capability been introduced?

If there has been some remarkable breakthrough or progress then the concept might have legs. Often, though, there hasn't and it doesn't. It turns out that real progress is hard. Not impossible, but much of the easy stuff has already been tried.

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#TechnologicalProgress #Breakthroughs #Realism #CurbYourEnthusiasm