Videos such as this lead a chap to wonder where all the optimism went and why guilt supplanted so much of it.
We might say that Firebird III was bonkers, but it was nowhere near as bonkers as we are. We are encouraged to like the idea of eating insects, pretend that men and women are the same and worry about the climate among numerous other insanities.
6 comments:
Bonkers, especially the gas turbine engine. But lots of those features are now standard on our humble VW Tiguan. No mechanical linkage, self-steering, the "sonic key", and probably loads more. Perhaps we are now in an age where the optimism has been invested into giving the general public this stuff at an affordable price. A bit like how phones haven't got any really new technology; it's all smaller and cheaper, though, and in one gadget.
Gas turbine vehicles simply turned out to be an impractical idea. Concorde turned out to be wildly uneconomic.
Such things happen. The problem is that they are not happening enough now. Nobody who matters is laughing at wind turbines as wildly uneconomic, or EVs as impractical. Nobody much is rejecting global warming as a scam. Nobody who mattered opposed lockdowns, mocked the Astrologer Royal's predictions, or cautioned against using grotesquely undertested vaccines.
And there's no use complaining that politicians know no science. They hired a barrow load of scientists during the pandemic and the advice they gave was uniformly awful.
It's the Decline and Fall of a civilisation accompanied, demonstrably, by a decline in the IQ of its citizens, of their levels of education, and of the habit of critical thinking.
Me? I'm optimistic. I expect my electric flying car to be delivered later this year, charging the batteries with fusion power too cheap to meter.
It will still take a fortnight to get a doctor's appointment though and months or years to get surgery on the NHS.
You've got to hand it to the 'greatest generation' they had some forward thinking. But you have to remember that it's only, for all it's technological planning and elegance, a concept of technological possibilities. The possibilities of mass practical realisation in the form of production costs, environmental effects on the technology, which is still very problematical (witness the cars dropping dead with software/sensor failures today), are not covered and many would perhaps not have been understood, or even in today's examples, not cared about in pursuit of other commercial goals.
There is certainly optimism in technological development today in similar abundance, and the same uncalculated real world problems intrude.
Dearieme: "Nobody much is rejecting global warming as a scam"
I am nobody much!
http://markwadsworth.blogspot.com/2022/05/debunking-other-cornerstone-of-agw.html
Sam - I'm not optimistic about our next car though. Too expensive, too complex and it isn't clear what environmental lunacy will be inflicted on us next.
dearieme - "The problem is that they are not happening enough now." That is the problem and it is very widespread. That barrow load of scientists came from institutions which seem to have given up their independent integrity in favour of political influence and a chance to hobnob with ministers.
DJ - if fusion power ever threatens to become too cheap to meter, I suspect we'll never see it at all.
Tammly - much of the optimism is political though, such as wind turbines, solar power, electric vehicles and so on. It's not a suck it and see approach, but a take the subsidy and pump out the propaganda approach.
Mark - it has an impact though. Media people must know there is credible climate scepticism out there.
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