We desperately need a new cutting edge. The one we have is almost a century old and it’s plenty knocked and chipped. A dull edge that can’t make a cut without slipping and gouging you but we still take it out of the drawer. The future we’re still trying to build is one that needs to be in a home for the elderly. Borrowed whole cloth from science fiction, we’ve spent a century trying to make genre fiction real. For a while we could pretend it was possible and that the promised gadgets just needed a little more time in the pot but now it’s almost a quarter of the way through the 21st century and things are noticeably running ragged.
I’ve written about science fiction before and how it’s helped to shape out current dystopia but the thing that has really been getting to me isn’t the rising temperatures or the resource shortages or the fact that consumer technology today is as good as it was ten years ago at best but rather that the same garbage keeps getting trotted out in front of us pitched as the future. We’re expected to clap like trained seals and be impressed by concepts that were graying into middle age when our parents were born. There is nothing more criminal than a failure of imagination and yet nobody even wants to think about confronting this. We’re still told that decades old boondoggles are brand new. On the off chance that someone points out that a technological concept that has been dredged up by some bureaucrat or MBA dipshit won’t live up to the hype though, a very curious slight of hand happens. An irrelevant side issue is brought up as the reason the technology failed while the actual problems go unanswered.
Let me give an example. Recently NASA unveiled the X-59, a prototype aircraft designed to explore the notion of minimizing sonic booms from supersonic aircraft. A private firm called Boom is allegedly working on a similar prototype though they’ve been claiming their prototype will fly every year since 2020 (as an aside the A-12/SR-71 was designed and flown in 5 years). Anyway, through the use of special aerodynamics, so the idea goes, the shockwave caused by a jet hitting Mach speeds can be made to damp itself out, thereby eliminating the loud thunderclap sound caused by breaking the sound barrier. This noise we are told, is what doomed super sonic transport (SST) development in the 1970’s. People were concerned about sonic booms and that led to SST’s being banned. By developing quiet supersonic jets the main obstacle to their widespread adoption will be removed and we’ll all be flying Mach 2 to London town again.
Only one minor problem. The sonic boom was irrelevant to the failure of SST’s. Their failure was predicated on our old friend お金. That’s cash/money for all you baka gaijin out there. Sure hippies bitched and moaned about the looming threat of sonic booms (boobs) but hippies bitch and moan about things that are a lot worse for the environment and a lot more profitable. Unsurprisingly the profitable industries win and the hippies find something else to complain about. SST’s were originally considered advantageous over conventional subsonic turbojet airlines (like the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC8 to name just two) simply because when an aircraft flies at higher speed it can make more flights per day. Instead of making a single round trip between two cities in a given period period an SST could in principle make multiple runs between the two cities in the same amount of time. Despite the higher fuel usage per trip, it was thought that the greater volume of flights would offset the higher fuel costs. This sounds good, but it ignored some key issues. Aircraft get exponentially more complicated the faster and higher they have to fly.
You can build an aircraft out of wood, canvas and what amounts to a lawnmower engine after all, but as a plane flies higher and faster you need more systems and subsystems to not only keep the plane flying at those speeds but also to keep the passengers and crew comfortable and safe. This adds maintenance costs, time spent in hangars and so on. Every minute not carrying passengers is money lost, and the simpler, less maintenance intensive subsonic jets required less hangar time. It’s also worth remembering that when SSTs were first conceived in the 1950’s and early 60’s they were designed to compete with early model subsonic jets. In that respect they were designed carry around 100-150 passengers as larger supersonic jets increased technical difficulties. By the 1970’s engineers at Boeing, Lockheed and Douglass figured out you could make subsonic jets but… large, and the increased passenger capacity would further erode the supposed advantage of faster transit time. Sure you could ferry more flights per day from city to city with an SST but a big jet like the 747 could carry two or three times the passengers with lower maintenance and operating costs. Ironically Boeing tried building a jumbo SST called the 2707 but cost overruns and chronic technical problems meant it never left the drawing board despite vast seas of federal subsidies. The 747 was simply a better aircraft.
In addition, due to the aerodynamics of supersonic flight, jets that are good at flying really fast aren’t very good at not flying very fast. This means they have high takeoff and landing speeds, which means they need long runways. Most airports, aside from a few major ones lacked the runway space needed to service them and as such this limited their potential service routes. A few places tried building new airports for SSTs but quietly shelved them as the reality of the situation began to sink in.
The final nail in the coffin was the ragged climb in oil prices in the 1970’s. Without cheap oil and by that I mean pennies-on-the-dollar dirt cheap 1950’s prices, there was no way to make an SST profitable even ignoring the increased maintenance and operating costs. In America, Congress voted to kill the Boeing SST project on budget grounds as I mentioned. The British and French decided to continue with their Concorde which remained in service as an expensive anachronism. Coach class seats that cost more than first class in a normal jet. It was withdrawn from service after a high profile crash in 2003 provided a convenient excuse to take it off life support. Meanwhile in the Worker’s Paradise, the Tu-144 only flew for a few months before high profile crashes and chronic safety and operating problems caused the Politburo to put its foot down and pull the plug in the early 80’s.
In short SSTs were never really something airlines wanted. They were something aerospace engineers wanted to build and politicians indulged their schemes with generous subsidies out of a misplaced sense of national (or in the case of the Concorde proto-EU) pride. But we’re told that the problem was the sonic boom, not everything I’ve been chimping out about for the past few minutes.
I find this tactic very odd, it reminds me of old PR ideas about narrative control. If you redefine the problem as being caused by a single issue that could be solved, well then the entire problem is solved and progress is made. That arbitrary definition, Overton window, frame control stuff works in PR but it doesn't work with physical machines in the real world. This is the core issue facing our vision of the future today. It’s Concorde all the way down. The technologies that we prioritize and fantasize about; Most of them have glaring flaws or are otherwise impractical and are only even semi viable because of vast subsidies coupled with lax regulatory oversight but we pursue them nonetheless. Of course the right people tend to get rich on these schemes and that explains part of why they are developed but it’s more than that. We believe that the future can only look like the cover of Amazing Stories and if not then the world can only be some sort of primitive wasteland. The fact that pursuing the former ultimately leads us down a path towards the latter is a source of amusement. But it is crucial to remember that these are not the only options available. There is indeed an alternative. Many alternatives.
Now when you start talking about the failures of modern science and technology people assume you’re some kind of anprim or follow some other back to the caves meme ideology. The reality is that there are whole oceans of unexplored territory for scientists and technologists, raw material for all sorts of strange and weird futures but they’re not found in the pages of 20th and early 21st century science fiction nor in the cargo cults in industry, government and academia that have grown up around them. As an example go browse this webzone for a little bit. The title is ironic, the technologies outlined and discussed and often implemented (!) are as high tech as they come but it posits a very different framework for the future than the typical Hienlein-Clarke-Gibson-Robinson fare (to pick on just four science fiction authors). Read old 1970’s documentation about weatherizing your home as a way to cut energy costs. Officially this is Not Sexy. Only some miracle green tech handed out from on high to power the ‘carbon neutral sustainable future’ that still manages to look like the dreary tomorrows from ‘IF: Worlds of Science Fiction’ will do according to our betters. Once you lean the basics of thermodynamics you can expand into other areas of science and engineering. Learn a traditional craft or skill and then see how you can apply it to your life and maybe take it forward. Dig through old hobbyist books on carpentry or electricity or gardening and composting. Not only for the practical skills but also for the baseline knowledge. Seriously you’ll get a better education from some of those old books, literal children’s books in some cases, than you’ll get from current year university programs. If you’re feeling bold dig through old scientific journals with an eye towards looking for interesting things nobody bothered to follow up on. William Corliss anthologies are a great help here.
The point I’m trying to make is that in both the applied and fundamental sciences there is a bunch of stuff that nobody has followed up on or even seems interested in, and many paths of technological development that were never taken for whatever reason are ripe for exploration. It is worth remembering that in the 19th century, the period of by far the greatest pace of technological development in human history, the vast majority of breakthroughs and discoveries came from gentleman amateurs, backyard tinkerers and other hobbyists. That culture died a slow and agonizing death over the course of the 20th century but there is no reason it should have and we desperately need it now. Not only because more experimentation leads to more options for the future but also because a technically literate populace will call bullshit on these senile science fiction fantasies still sold by our supposed superiors.
Would you like to pay taxes so some big brained bureaucrat can pour your money into the Loop System or LARPs like the Energiewende or whatever literal fecal matter the leading Disruptors are pushing this week or would you like to have that money in your pocket to design and build a future that you want? Taking ownership opens up new possibilities and new possibilities open up the potential for new futures. Anything is better than the endless rehash of pulp science fiction nerd nonsense. We don’t have to die with Concorde. Genre fiction is still fiction, live in the real world and realize the possibilities are much bigger than the narrowband swill we’ve been fed for a hundred years. There are still dragons out there, go find them.