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Translation:- Larry Page is spending millions of his personal wealth - which he is entitled to do - into a development quest to develop personal dual-use road/a
by aurizon 10y ago
Translation:- Larry Page is spending millions of his personal wealth - which he is entitled to do - into a development quest to develop personal dual-use road/aircraft.
This will never become economic, although is has been shown many times to be doable, with numerous products developed. None survived the economic screen, let alone the FAA screen.
Let us see why:-
Ever see a traffic jam? lines of 1000's of cars stopped or going slowly in a wave pattern. - Yes - we see them all the time.
Can you see, in your mind's eye an aerial traffic jam, with 1000's of airplanes halted in mid air for a clear path? No. We have never seen them, and we never will, until we invent sky=hooks to hang them on, or a workable anti-gravity system(which may well be impossible).
That said, the planes will have to keep moving a little above stall speed. Can you imagine the air traffic control nightmare of these 1000's of carplanes?
So these are enough to defeat the mass aspect. They may well be viable in Australia, our back with large vistas of flat land and little weather on which 10,000 or more landing strips can be built. Well, we have that now in Australia, but we use airplanes to go from place to place over longer distances and we use cars/trucks for local use.
ALl this said, Larry will make his plane, he may sell a few to the idle rich, but they will never become commonplace.
- kefka 10y agoI get smatterings of your comments of the similar old idea of "Can you imagine a mechanical horse carriage where all 4 hooves moved in unison?! Balderdash, I must say. There's no way 4 legs could ever move that fast and that synchronized! It'll never happen. Now, Jeeves, go ready my carriage. We're going to meet a weird entrepreneur by the name of Henry Ford." You're right. With old "state of the art", and yes I do say old, having 100+ planes in a square mile would be very trying. But we're talking of no encryption, no authentication, no anti-jamming, no anything really. And that's from a 2012 presentation at Defcon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXv1j3GbgLk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXv1j3GbgLk
- aurizon 10y agoWell, cars came into being at first as steam driven, but the weight was high and there were no hard roads, so they got along on tracks = rail road. Later smaller gasoline driven machines came along (first Benz) and it advanced because it freed us from costly, maintenance intensive, food intensive and crap/pee intensive horses. Before cars many large city street were 2-3 feet deep in horse shit. As for control, huge latency issues would hinder large amounts of traffic.
- andai 10y agoThanks for the link, that's incredible. Like, incredibly bad. Have you heard any news on this?
- aptwebapps 10y agoJust skimmed quickly but I don't think they talking about actual flying cars, i.e., not dual-use. They're talking about small, electric, autonomous aircraft that can take off vertically that could be used on demand.
- aurizon 10y agothat would reduce the numbers and with automation and better batteries and a universal grid it might have a chance?
- zigzigzag 10y agoThe air traffic control issues are surely the easiest aspect of the whole thing. It's just a large 3D pathfinding problem, the kind of thing computers eat for breakfast. I don't think anyone imagines they'd be manually flown.
- aurizon 10y agoOne of the problems with denser and denser air traffic control is you can only speed up the computers. The flying objects still have speed, altitude, inertia etc and that sort of multipath problem (called the salesman's problem) soon becomes intractably complex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem