21–30 of 75 posts
So there's this puzzle that people enjoy thinking about regarding space travel. Say that it finally becomes possible to reach a planet of a nearby star. It's a new technology that enables it, and we can build a spaceship that will support several generations of people during the trip. Maybe it takes 500 years to get there. Well, 500 years is a long time. It's not as if our technological development will stop in the m…
In 2030-2050, passenger rail will be obsolete. Self-driving cars will surpass them on every metric. After AI* obsoletes physical safety as an engineering problem, cars will shrink to tiny, weightless pieces of plastic most closely approximating today's motorcycles. And following Jevon's paradox, the massive efficiency gains will push economic driving to extreme speeds. As fast as bullet trains, without the timetables…
The idea that in 20 years we'll have self-driving cars on any substantial scale is totally ridiculous. If I had to bet money, we won't even have a substantial electric car deployment by then, much less self-driving cars. Also: the physics of high-speed cars makes the concept of cars traveling as fast as bullet trains totally ridiculous. The fact that a car is self-driving doesn't change the physics of tire/road frict…
Social forces will drive the former, economic forces will drive the latter.
So there's this puzzle that people enjoy thinking about regarding space travel. Say that it finally becomes possible to reach a planet of a nearby star. It's a new technology that enables it, and we can build a spaceship that will support several generations of people during the trip. Maybe it takes 500 years to get there. Well, 500 years is a long time. It's not as if our technological development will stop in the m…
But the argument for high-speed rail isn't that it will serve as a stopgap measure until we have self-driving cars, it is that a railroad train is vastly more efficient than any imaginable car technology. Railroad trains are very energy-efficient, compared to cars driving along a road, or even trucks driving along a road. And if we suddenly had self-driving cars, packed close together and safer than the existing syst…
First we need to fix regular passenger rail in this country. As long as interstate passenger rail is controlled by the Amtrak monopoly, and its attendant unions, rail travel in America will continue to fall behind the rest of the world. There's not even regular rail service between most major US cities 3-8 hours apart, even though tracks exist and demand would exist if trains ran as fast as driving.
So there's this puzzle that people enjoy thinking about regarding space travel. Say that it finally becomes possible to reach a planet of a nearby star. It's a new technology that enables it, and we can build a spaceship that will support several generations of people during the trip. Maybe it takes 500 years to get there. Well, 500 years is a long time. It's not as if our technological development will stop in the m…
Infrastructure technology progresses extremely slowly, in a way I think is hard for people used to the progress in computer technology to understand. Most electricity in the U.S. is still produced by coal power, in plants that usually aren't dramatically more efficient than they were a century ago. 2050 is 37 years from now. 37 years ago was 1976. Most of the transit infrastructure we use today was already built by 1…
Infrastructure does not always move slowly. When it's time, it actually moves quite quickly.
In 2030-2050, passenger rail will be obsolete. Self-driving cars will surpass them on every metric. After AI* obsoletes physical safety as an engineering problem, cars will shrink to tiny, weightless pieces of plastic most closely approximating today's motorcycles. And following Jevon's paradox, the massive efficiency gains will push economic driving to extreme speeds. As fast as bullet trains, without the timetables…
The idea that in 20 years we'll have self-driving cars on any substantial scale is totally ridiculous. If I had to bet money, we won't even have a substantial electric car deployment by then, much less self-driving cars. Also: the physics of high-speed cars makes the concept of cars traveling as fast as bullet trains totally ridiculous. The fact that a car is self-driving doesn't change the physics of tire/road frict…
So there's this puzzle that people enjoy thinking about regarding space travel. Say that it finally becomes possible to reach a planet of a nearby star. It's a new technology that enables it, and we can build a spaceship that will support several generations of people during the trip. Maybe it takes 500 years to get there. Well, 500 years is a long time. It's not as if our technological development will stop in the m…
But the argument for high-speed rail isn't that it will serve as a stopgap measure until we have self-driving cars, it is that a railroad train is vastly more efficient than any imaginable car technology. Railroad trains are very energy-efficient, compared to cars driving along a road, or even trucks driving along a road. And if we suddenly had self-driving cars, packed close together and safer than the existing syst…
And if the government is involved, forget about it. It will be a massive mess of cost overruns and other financial shenanigans. And Amtrak proves that the government can't even run a railroad, let alone build one.
Historically I have been a big supporter of trains in the US. Recently, I have decided that the cost may not be worth the benefit if future technology is considered. The future is going to involve self driving busses, self driving cars, self driving trucks etc. The primary thing I enjoy about the train is the additional space. Fundmantally, that is the problem with trains too. If they jammed people on a train the way…
And that will be even more true if the US decides that 220 mph is too slow (because it is just as fast as everyone else) and they might want to skip that milestone and go for 350 mph maglev trains ;-)
So there's this puzzle that people enjoy thinking about regarding space travel. Say that it finally becomes possible to reach a planet of a nearby star. It's a new technology that enables it, and we can build a spaceship that will support several generations of people during the trip. Maybe it takes 500 years to get there. Well, 500 years is a long time. It's not as if our technological development will stop in the m…
But the argument for high-speed rail isn't that it will serve as a stopgap measure until we have self-driving cars, it is that a railroad train is vastly more efficient than any imaginable car technology. Railroad trains are very energy-efficient, compared to cars driving along a road, or even trucks driving along a road. And if we suddenly had self-driving cars, packed close together and safer than the existing syst…