By
Gwen Brown
This is sort of a briefing, or prequel for my next story, just to get people thinking.
When I was a child, we came from San Diego to Portland before I-5 was done. I can remember being halted in the Siskiyou Mountains, while crews were blasting to build it. We were the first owners after the original homesteaders, of a farm at Ladd Hill. That was the winter of 49-50 and first winter, we had about 3 feet of wet, heavy Oregon snow.
I’m not going into any of my TG stuff, but it was certainly present then. He’d have killed me if I had not learned to hide it right away.
The place was about half wooded and the rest brush land. I was very young and tiny but three boys and he cut all the brush down and burned it in the spring in piles half as big as a baseball diamond. We even had the Fire Department out one night because they were thinking we’d burned the place up.
In those days, it was common to hear B-36 and B-29’s growling their way up the sky from various airbases. There was Kingsley, down by Klamath Falls, and another near Salem, Oregon. One was at Portland, and another up near Tacoma, Washington called McCord. B-29’s had a tendency to blow up in mid air and one happened near us.
The B-47 was the first of it’s type but soon the B-52 came along and eventually replaced it. I don’t remember seeing gas fired, propeller driven Fighter planes around, but I do remember seeing a Sea Plane called a PBY once in a while and I fell in love with them.
Almost anyone knows the Fighter Jets better than I do. When the U-2 and then the SR-71 came along I thought we were well on the way to space, but in the last 70 years, it seems like we have screwed the pooch. Did Aliens more or less ground us, or are we just too stupid?
Lately, I have been looking into supersonic private Jets, and there is one that is due out around 2020 that will do Mach 1.6 at I think 100,000 feet and no sonic boom that will reach the ground. I’ve been watching the V-22 closely, hoping for more, but there seems to be some engineering barrier that keeps them timid. Though I hear that a lot of superior design is happening in Germany and Switzerland. I did see a four rotor “drop ship?” in the design stage.
Is it disappointing that the fastest chopper is not modern combat chopper but an old two rotor CH-47 Chinook, though recently several single rotor machines are barking at its heels.
So, what is a “drop ship”? Google gets very confused about that and wants to stick with a certain kind of shipping. If you are patient with google it eventually comes up with some very mean looking, non-rotor, things with huge combination Jet/Rocket engines.
So if we have some wars between now and 2050 will the Military demand and get the very swoopy, hot war ships like the gamers like to draw? Me thinks that most war monger nations will run out of money to wage war unless there is a major new funder. My guess is that before 2050 most of those expected to fight said wars will be too fat to do it.
Comments
Don't forget the Space X Falcon heavy lift vehicle
100% reusable and the lifting power of a Saturn V Perfect for the Air Force space shuttle. We ARE getting there. But a lot of it is being done very quietly.
Falcon X
Yes, absolutely. Musk's rapid progress makes me wonder what NASA has been doing? Perhaps they had sort of an organizational paralysis from the deaths?
21st Century.
Ah, my favorite subject - the near future.
Unfortunately, it is the latter. For some reason we keep thinking that politicians can handle things more complex than collecting the garbage and fixing the potholes. I do not blame the politicians. The voters are the problem. That would be you and me. Well, collectively, if you get my meaning. I'm sure I'm not that dumb, and I'm pretty sure you aren't. But SOMEONE out there is still voting.
Mongering is difficult to model accurately. It is a moving target. Costs change, and capabilities change. And then to really complicate things, our ability to generate surplus wealth (most of which the politicians immediately confiscate and "invest" for us - for example in a war) changes as well.
Productivity (which is, approximately, our ability to generate said surplus wealth) has been growing well above average since WW II. This growth leveled off in the last decade or so, but since it grows in a compound manner it leveled off with productivity at a historically high level.
Efficiency has been growing as well. Our total cost of getting around is lower today than 50 years ago, even though there are more of us doing more getting around. Most of our electrical appliances are also using a lot less energy to do a better job. These changes suggest that your feared 'major new funder' is actually quite likely. Bummer.
But - what if something unexpected happens?
Something that makes it unlikely that politicians will still be around to screw actual human beings?
Politicians will find it harder and harder to convince people to vote for their BS (or even to bother voting), as the more and more automated factories and farms and delivery trucks are able to keep us going without them. Hmm. We might not have much need for lawyers, either.
A dream? Hell yes. But it is a nice dream, isn't it?
Oh, BTW, said automation is coming. Soon. Advanced 3D printers, in your home, that can make a lot of stuff, will be a major part of it. Even (especially?) in what we now think of as Third World countries.
The real question is, will our politicians give up without a fight?
T
I Largely Concur
I don't have Economics expertise, so all I can do is observe what I see and come to conclusions based upon what I have experienced. I've considerable conservative theological background and that colors those conclusions. Though, presently I feel that we are approaching a nexus, or none of it is true, me thinks.
The change that I have experienced in the last 70 years would have been unimaginable to me when was aged 10. We were totally enured to listening to the radio every evening for the news, and then perhaps 20 minutes of "The Green Hornet". TV was a complete surprise but eventually my backslid-den Amish stepfather managed to get one on the farm. The men put an antenna on top of a tower made of sections of pipe, and held aloft by guy wires.
At one time I wanted to be a pilot and even took lessons, but frankly my fear of height and airsickness stopped that. My lessons were in an already old Cessna 150, and over the years, from a distance I've seen these aircraft get even older. Lately I've seen several private aircraft powered by tiny turbine engines. How much longer will the piston engine in aircraft survive?
It seems like lots of the engineering in private aircraft is being done outside of corporate entities. I'd not be greatly surprised to see private spacecraft even more numerous than what Elan Musk can produce.
It is only logical, as population increases, that someone will build orbiting stations that grow things, build things and are lived in. I have a suspicion that humanities future on earth will only be around 100 years. I agree with Hawkins.
I've a 25,000 word "near future" story coming. Just waiting for "Baby, Baby" to clear off the end of the runway. It's called "Balmoral", and then there is a serial story that I think is around 200,000 words, that I'll likely call "Hala's Saga", to follow if I can get it out before I am moldering away in the dirt.
recent revelations
"But more to the point, one bomber with 25 or 50 smart bombs can do a much better job of destroying the Bad Guys' war factory than 1,000 bombers with many thousands of dumb bombs did 50 years ago. Even better, the school and the hospital next door will probably only suffer a few broken windows. So when the Good Guys win there will be less rebuilding and restoration needed to get the much larger number of survivors back on their feet."
Do you remember during one of the Bush wars, we were treated to oft repeated footage of a "smart" bomb falling down a chimny? It came out recently that the chimny in question was attached to a children's hospital.
I sort of leaves one wondering who the good guys were, or were we just incompetent?
Liz
Greed and Big Egos
I felt that Bush and his unholy trio vastly over reacted. There really wasn't much reason to go into Afghanistan enmass. He might have been hiding in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan, but I think it was rather easy to get him to leave.
I'd been a devout Christian, and had been out on the Mission Field. After 9/11 I was shattered by the Christian's reaction, And Greed drove America to go to Iraq. The big oil guys wanted to steal the oil there.
I'm still very ashamed of the murder of the children in that hospital. Our troops behaved abominably.
Smart bomb problem
Liz it is unfortunate that the bomb is only as smart as it’s programming. Targeting is limited by “military intelligence” identifying the target. One of the measures of the evil of some of our enemies is a propensity to co-locate important military targets with things like hospitals to human shield them. In this communication age the ability to ignore collateral damage (as we did in WW2) is nil. This allows our opponents to paint us as evil to all and sundry in the all important propaganda wars. Even much of our civilian population sees us as evil. (This is how the North Vietnamese beat us.) sooo? Not much we can do unless we collectively decide to own the evil as Truly us.
BAK 0.25tspgirl