4 ms·
I read the article. Superficially, it might seem informative. But if you look into the various industries, not so much. In aviation, engines have become 1% m
by redis_mlc 7y ago
I read the article.
Superficially, it might seem informative.
But if you look into the various industries, not so much.
In aviation, engines have become 1% more efficient per year, which means 3 related things:
1) they burn half as much fuel as ~72 years ago
2) the range is double, so that 737's can fly globe-spanning international routes now (this is game-changing)
3) engines are "powerful enough" for the first time - for any mission, there is an off-the-shelf engine. Until recently the v1 was always underpowered.
Computers might be banal outside of IT, but I remember when floating point was optional and compilers were a crap shoot. :) Also, Moore's Law kept pace in the time window the author wrote about.
We do need to put the pollution genie back in the bottle though. I remember when the Great Lakes and Niagara River were flammable, with green froth oozing from the banks.
There is little awareness of reuse in the West, which is hugely better than recycling.
Not well-known, while the US recycles 99% of cars, but most municipalities just landfill those blue bins since private garbage contractors can't make money off them.
- buboard 7y agoArent those incremental updates? They do not create new affordances for us. Longer flights are more economical but that doesnt enable much that wasnt enabled by a layover cross-world flight. One could say that the pace of progress has become so slow in so many things that we 've forgotten what it is like to have a breakthrough.
- nl 7y agoBut what of the things listed really was a breakthough? If we look at flights, he lists "8 hour Transatlantic flights" as being more important than the cell phone(!!). Is it 8 hours that was the breakthough? What about 9 hours? 10? It seems to me that if there was any real breakthough in that domain (and with travel generally) it's the change from "multi-day travel" to "waste one day in travel" to "I can go for a meeting during the day and be back in the evening". While Concorde technically moved transatlantic travel into the "there and back in a day" bucket, practically it didn't - the timing of the flights meant you had to stay overnight anyway. In that case, there probably aren't any more breakthroughs possible - except cheap, reliable, high quality video calling (which he totally ignores).
- buboard 7y agoefficient flights made transpacific flights possible, enabled the entire industry of tourism, and everything that has to do with global business / science . Sure, the cellphone was a major breakthrough as was the internet (and hopefully, remote work). the question is why not more. And we should avoid the Kelvin trap, as we can rarely foresee a breakthrough before it happens
- nl 7y agoI'm not arguing that flights weren't important! But I'd note that international tourism really took off when it became cheap, which was an efficiency improvement and mostly occurred after 1971. And your point about international business made me realise he has ignored all the huge innovations in the payments and international remittance space.
- vl 7y agoWith flight specifically the progress is not the time, but availability and affordability. Which are beyond anything available before in any point in history.
- nl 7y agoBut the drop in prices didn't really happen until airtravel was deregulated in the late 1970s. https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/history-of-flight-costs https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/history-o...
- marcus_holmes 7y agoAlso the numbers. 8-hour transatlantic flights were only available for the top 1%, they were ridiculously expensive. Cell phones have made access to information available to the poorest. A tuk-tuk driver in Cambodia can affordably stream YouTube all day long (and they do!). The impact of cell phones in the last 10 years is far larger, and will impact far, far more people, than all of air travel.
- s17n 7y agoYou could make that same argument about pretty much everything that happened in the "golden quarter".
- redis_mlc 7y agoI think it's more helpful to think of it as there are physical limits, so we approach an asymptote. Sure, if we had cheap fusion or room-temperature superconductors, that might be game-changing. Barring those, I'll take 1%/year improvement for 100 years or more. For example, you're not going to see supersonic flight again due to the parasitic drag (physics) requiring so much fuel. You could make ICE engines twice as efficient by cutting the car weight in half. Municipalities had this great program before - swap your old fridge or water heater for a free, more efficient one. Maybe have Amazon ship your items to a community mailbox without the brown box? Those are doable things that pay benefits immediately.
- harikb 7y ago> Maybe have Amazon ship your items to a community mailbox without the brown box? I ship to an amazon owned pickup location sometimes. I thought this would be enough of a nudge. But no, it still comes in a box. Because everyone walks in downtown, the first thing we all do is top remove the box right there, recycle it, and walk out with whatever small item we bought. Come on, just put the stupid thing in the lockbox. I am standing right on the other side :(
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- Haga 7y agoThe truth is humanity does non incremental breakthroughs only in total war times. As in wars where the leader of a nation has to fear for his her life at conflict end. Everything else breaks some corruption contract, thus threatens reign stability. I mean, look at resistance to solar. Can you imagine if some calinc brought you fusion in a bucket? So, TL, dr.. Nuclear deterrence killed progress. Mr Musks work is a great outlier.
- nl 7y agoI can't upvote this comment enough. The "Golden Quarter" wasn't.
- mattrp 7y agoI tend to think the answer is somewhere in the middle. The 60s promised fusion vtol cars and what are we talking about now? Electric vtol Uber’s. There’s a lot of similarities between both era that suggests to me we aren’t going to see half of what we can envision as being this “ “ close to reality. At the same time, I think a lot of what we did achieve in the prior era wasn’t complete - we didn’t know the questions to ask that today we take for granted. For example, we didn’t know back then that no one wanted SST’s flying over their house at Mach 2. Sure we could do it but not only did it piss off everyone, the planes themselves really weren’t sustainable. Look at almost any system these days from seatbelts to guardrails to the phones you use. Everything is more integrated, does more and works better than anyone in the 60s could have imagined. The next 40 years is really going to come down to one thing - can we avoid a global conflict that decimates whole regions and generations? If we can manage to do that, I can only imagine that the new paradigms were are only starting to experience now will really have an amazing impact on how we live in the future.
- dreamcompiler 7y ago> the range is double, so that 737's can fly globe-spanning international routes now (this is game-changing) And the price for that was the 737 Max, which cannot be made to fly safely but at least it only barely sips fuel when it crashes. Thank goodness it was designed by bean-counters rather than engineers. This reminds me of a line from Snow Crash describing kids' pajamas, which can either be flameproof or non-toxic but never both at the same time.
- _-___________-_ 7y ago> cannot be made to fly safely I doubt that very much. If the 737 MAX never flies again, it will be because of the same much-increased aversion to risk in modern society that the article describes, not because the design cannot be made safe.
- bawolff 7y agoIsn't it the opposite? Boeing cut corners with the 737 MAX. As a result bad things happened. If boeing had an appropriate aversion to risk they would be in a better place. Instead they took reckless risks and now they are screwed.
- redis_mlc 7y agoI wasn't referring to the 737 Max. Anyway it has a sensor system problem, not an engine problem.
- signaturefish 7y ago737-Max's problem started in the engines, from an informed outsider's perspective (it was an attempt to graft an engine with too large a nacelle to an aging airframe design). The sensor failure precipitated the crash, but it was not the only thing at fault.
- imtringued 7y agoThe 737 max crash was caused by software whose only purpose is exploiting loop holes in a law so that they do not have to recertify pilots for the new plane. The 737 Max can be flown safely without the compliance software but then nobody would have a license to fly the aircraft.
- randomsearch 7y agoProgress like you describe is incremental not revolutionary.
- ekianjo 7y agoContinuous improvement brings huge returns over long period of times though, as GP pointed out. in computing improvements in CPUs have been continuously improving at a regular pace for the past 20 years and you would not want to work with 2000 era CPU in 2020.
- usrusr 7y agoBut in 2000 you would not have wanted to work with a CPU older than two years. The difference between phases of radical change and those of incremental refinement can be huge. Is the fifty years anniversary 737 much better than the original? Ignoring the MCAS issue, sure. But compared to the best airliners from another 50 years earlier, those 737 perform virtually identical.
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