TL 9 prototypes

[Tom Mazanec]

As for flying cars.. they are actually a problematic tech with the noise you will generate any time you displace large volumes of air at high speeds like you need for such.

Thus the dozens of startups touting "drone flying cars" seem quite questionable at best.

And they will have to have perfect self-flying capability as well.
Otherwise thousands of bozos and drunks who can hardly manage 2D driving on marked roads will be crashing and colliding, or
A 99.9999% perfect flying car will crash and kill a child and the news sites will be cluttered with "FLYING CAR KILLS 10-YEAR OLD CHILD" and demands that Congress "DO SOMETHING!".

[Willy]

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

And they will have to have perfect self-flying capability as well.
Otherwise thousands of bozos and drunks who can hardly manage 2D driving on marked roads will be crashing and colliding, or
A 99.9999% perfect flying car will crash and kill a child and the news sites will be cluttered with "FLYING CAR KILLS 10-YEAR OLD CHILD" and demands that Congress "DO SOMETHING!".

Which means they need a anti collissions system most likey a better LIDAR than nowadays in cars, cameras as backup, a automatec landing if the battery gets to low to fly futher safely, automated navigation GPS and inertial navigation, and a parachute is everything gets wrong for the whole thing including the pilot. All that overriding the pilot, if he didn´t react.

I guess we have to wait a long time for this, just the needed extra power and weight for this systems would easily double the load, which leads to stronger engines and fans which leads to .... .

Given that the battery is now the biggest solo weight, and that actual multi fans are just playthings who can carry 1! adult alone, it will take a lot of time.

Due to high costs low useful civillian use it will be a niche market.

Once we get a lightweight solid state battery everything goes. The military use of low flying quick transport possible armed with loitering ammo / AT missiles, or a machingun / grenade launcher would be tremendous.

Because all known air defense systems including anti drone weapons need a line of sight to detect you,this systems are all useless, if you can fly with say 100 miles/h able to touch the ground with your hand.

It wouldn´t replace attack helicopters due to low self protection and high casualitys, but for quick strikes in wooded areas doted with hills you have the surprise on your side and are back before the emeny can react.

On the other hand the pilot can fly such systems via remote control or you make the attack versions fully automated, which is the way actual research goes.

[weby]

Originally Posted by Willy

Which means they need a anti collissions system most likey a better LIDAR than nowadays in cars, cameras as backup<snip>.

And/Or traffic control.

Today there are already traffic control systems in testing for drones, so that would not be out of place.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

I'm a skeptic and a pessimist. I'd say that we're living in a Retarded Safetech world, and that we won't get to TL9 until at least 2050. The biggest limitations are power generation, which in turn retards transport technology. I'll get back to you as soon as I get my AI-controlled flying car.

Technological progression has certainly slowed compared to what it was 100 or 75 years ago, but it's still rolling on. Historically, that's been the pattern, periods of very fast technological (and other) change that last a century or 3 and periods of slower, steadier advancement between them. We look to be emerging from one of the fast periods into a more normal one...but there's absolutely no way to predict when the next fast one will happen.

You're dead on that energy is the key technology, the one that underpins just about everything else (materials science might be the #2). The key to the fast advancements in our grandparents' time was partly the revolutionary improvement in power supply. The electric grid, the internal combustion engine, the jet turbine, the nuclear bomb/reactor, high end rocketry, they all involved tremendous increases in the amount and density of available energy. That's what permitted people who spent months traveling westward on wagon trains in their youth to make the same trip in late life in hours.

Think I'm kidding? The time from the 1880s/90s, when wagon trains were a major method of travel from the eastern States to the west coast, to the period of the 1930s when cross-continent air travel became a serious thing was the same time period as from 1972 to today. No longer. A 20 year old who travelled west on a wagon train to settle in California in 1885, needing a good part of a year to do it, could fly from California back to his home town at 70. A teenager who fought in the Civil War could just conceivably have lived to see Hiroshima.

That's a rate of change made possible by improvements in energy supply of revolutionary degree.

Since the mid-20C energy density and supply has increased only marginally in comparison to the immediately previous lifespan, and as a result technological change has become more hype and less substance.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

I'm a skeptic and a pessimist. I'd say that we're living in a Retarded Safetech world, and that we won't get to TL9 until at least 2050. The biggest limitations are power generation, which in turn retards transport technology. I'll get back to you as soon as I get my AI-controlled flying car.

Technological progression has certainly slowed compared to what it was 100 or 75 years ago, but it's still rolling on. Historically, that's been the pattern, periods of very fast technological (and other) change that last a century or 3 and periods of slower, steadier advancement between them. We look to be emerging from one of the fast periods into a more normal one...but there's absolutely no way to predict when the next fast one will happen.

You're dead on that energy is the key technology, the one that underpins just about everything else (materials science might be the #2). The key to the fast advancements in our grandparents' time was partly the revolutionary improvement in power supply. The electric grid, the internal combustion engine, the jet turbine, the nuclear bomb/reactor, high end rocketry, they all involved tremendous increases in the amount and density of available energy. That's what permitted people who spent months traveling westward on wagon trains in their youth to make the same trip in late life in hours.

Think I'm kidding? The time from the 1880s/90s, when wagon trains were a major method of travel from the eastern States to the west coast, to the period of the 1930s when cross-continent air travel became a serious thing was the same time period as from 1972 to today. No longer. A 20 year old who travelled west on a wagon train to settle in California in 1885, needing a good part of a year to do it, could fly from California back to his home town at 70. A teenager who fought in the Civil War could just conceivably have lived to see Hiroshima.

That's a rate of change made possible by improvements in energy supply of revolutionary degree.

Since the mid-20C energy density and supply has increased only marginally in comparison to the immediately previous lifespan, and as a result technological change has become more hype and less substance.

It's all about energy.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

It's all about energy.

I don't agree with that. Certainly energy was the key to the technological revolutions from around 1700 to 1950, say. But information has been the key to many technological changes since 1900 and certainly since 1975 or so. Telecommunications, computers, artificial intelligence, molecular genetics, brain imaging, and simulation as a third scientific method (joining theory and experiment) all go beyond anything that was even imagined at the start of the twentieth century, and at least starting around 1960 they have been enjoying a phase of extraordinarily rapid increase in capabilities.

Energy technologies let us do things that the human body was incapable of; information technologies let us do things that the human mind is incapable of.

[Willy]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

SNIP

It's all about energy.

Nope, definitely no. Because if you look into the past and see where the industrial revoloution really starts, it goes nearly hand in hand with big medical progress, namely vaccination.

Small pox alone killed or incapacitated so many persons in the midst of their years there was always a lack of skilled workers, not to mention that taking care for crippled family members took a lot of resources. Many jobs needs years of study and learning especially jobs who bring the society forward, now that persons had a good chance to finish learning and more medics, scientists and engineers brought further progress.

There were some studies about the effect, and all say it was a driver of industrial revolution.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Willy

Nope, definitely no. Because if you look into the past and see where the industrial revoloution really starts,

I recommend the book The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2009) by Robert C. Allen (professor of economic history at Cambridge University). Reporting a vast scholarly investigation into the history and nature of the Industrial Revolution, it shows that it began a the mineheads of Scottish coal mines, where energy was cheap, spread to places where labour was comparatively expensive, and consisted of the substitution of (non-animal) energy for labour. The key precursor was the construction of houses and tenements heated by coal fires (in London), which necessitated the invention of suitable grates, stoves, and chimneys. Excellent book.

Vaccination originated in China in 1549 or earlier, and was introduced into England in 1700 by people who had learned about it in India.

[Willy]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

SNIP

Vaccination originated in China in 1549 or earlier, and was introduced into England in 1700 by people who had learned about it in India.

I added another book to the ( long ) list of book I want to read if I ever have the time for it. Thanks for the tipp.

The precursor of the coal was wood and thanks to felling all good trees to build ships, make charcoal or heat houses, there was a time when a saying said that judas would be spared because there was no tree to hang him in good old england. You can still see the deforestation in GB, and what follows in a lot of places nowadays. The people needed another fuel and the former despised coal took the place of wood. Needing as you wrote a complete hardware and the indutry which produced this all.

Vaccination was clearly invented outside the western nations, but not popular in the west unless people like Lady Montagu made a example and researchers had breakthroughs in the years after ( around 1760 and later ).

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Willy

The precursor of the coal was wood and thanks to felling all good trees to build ships, make charcoal or heat houses, there was a time when a saying said that judas would be spared because there was no tree to hang him in good old england. You can still see the deforestation in GB, and what follows in a lot of places nowadays. The people needed another fuel and the former despised coal took the place of wood. Needing as you wrote a complete hardware and the indutry which produced this all.

Just so. The new technology of houses heated by coal allowed the development of coal mines (which led to coke replacing charcoal in metallurgy, but that's another story). And coal mines produced a very cheap source of energy at the mine-head: waste coal that was broken too small to sell for heating fuel and was therefore not worth shipping away. The first steam engines that we see in actual use were at the mineheads of coal mines in Scotland and the north of England.

The progress of mechanisation consisted of substituting on one hand plant and equipment and on the other hand energy from streams and later coal for animal traction and human labour. You would expect that to be of most advantage and progress fastest where fuel and capital goods (ironwork, timber framing) were comparatively cheap and where labour was relatively expensive. Allen's vast researches into historical prices and wages show that it was indeed so: London had the highest wage costs and the coalfields of northern England the cheapest energy at the time. Allen even shows that industrialisation was attempted in France &c. at the time of the English water mills, and failed because it was unprofitable where wages were low and energy and capital goods were comparatively expensive. Newly-invented machines were economic only where the ratio of wages to energy costs &c. was highest; engineering refinements made the machines cheaper and more efficient, which gradually lowered the critical ratio of wages to energy prices and allowed industrialisation to spread. It took off first in places where coal was cheap and labour expensive (e.g. the Netherlands, the Rhineland) and then spread as technological progress made it profitable at ever-lower substitution ratios.