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"We are pleased with this joint effort between the US and Australia and believe that a hypersonic airplane could be a reality in the not too distant future."

It's the first time they dare say "not too distant future"; before they refused to mention the word future at all.

“This technology has the potential to put numerous defence and civilian aerospace applications within our reach during the next couple of decades,” Dr Harch said.

Here they even go so far as to speak of "the next couple of decades"...!!!


In short, we have to take into account huge leaps in efficiency, that break common projections about how technologies can help overcome Peak Oil (projections a la Hirsch).

Hypersonic scramjets would reduce energy consumption in aviation by up to 95% per passenger mile. This is rather impressive.

Of course, hypersonic scramjets are an extreme example of a mega-increase in efficiency. But still, stuff like this counts.


Also: out of all scientists that ever lived, 99% live today... growth in technological progress is exponential. We can expect many leaps in efficiency over the coming years (I would even say: days).

Bioman wrote:Hypersonic scramjets would reduce energy consumption in aviation by up to 95% per passenger mile. This is rather impressive.

Care to back up that claim? Its not mentioned in the article

Regardless of any fuel efficiency gains, the drag force still increases as a square of the velocity, which means that the energy requirements are escalating hugely with small increases in speed. It's not going to matter much that you saved a little fuel with a more efficient engine if the energy required to overcome all that extra speed far outstrips those savings.

I don't understand how the development of functional scramjet technology would have much impact at all on civil aviation. Unless you are suggesting that commercial airliners make a move into the hypersonic?

From my understanding, the benefit seems to be primarily a military one, though I could see how scramjets could be very useful in the private space sector that is currently taking off.

Bioman wrote:Also: out of all scientists that ever lived, 99% live today... growth in technological progress is exponential. We can expect many leaps in efficiency over the coming years (I would even say: days).

I know, it's amazing, isn't it? I mean just consider the rate of accelerating progress for a moment. Roughly the first 20 years of this century will see the equivalent of all the scientific and technological progress that the entire 20th century enjoyed.

Of course at the same time, we are facing far greater problems than we've ever faced, but it's great to see another poster here that understands there are two sides to the story of exponential growth.

ARE YOU ON CRACK ?

The pace of tech progress has done nothing but slow over the last few decades. Other than the personal computer I can't think of any significant invention in those decades - as opposed to the beginning of the 20th century when we had DOZENS of them.

Everything is the same - only moreso - and a great deal of the blame for that can be placed at the foot of the govt since they've pretty much legislated innovation out of existence.

kochevnik wrote:ARE YOU ON CRACK ?

The pace of tech progress has done nothing but slow over the last few decades. Other than the personal computer I can't think of any significant invention in those decades - ..

The last few decades:

The Good:
1) computers/ networks - plenty
2) consumer electronics - iPod, HDTV, cellphones, videogames

The Questionable:
1) materials engineering - composites (nice but nothing huge)
2) jet propulsion/space travel - ?
3) power generation / power grid - (falling apart)
4) cars - hybrids (not exactly new)
5) freeways - ramp meters (huh?)
6) water treatment - (shortages)
7) structural engineering - (taller skyscrapers and longer bridges but nothing amazing)
8 ) railroads - HSR (nice but not overwhelmingly impressive)
9) food production - factory farming (highly unsustainable)
10) containerization - (technically not a technology but a process)
11) medicine - (still looking for the cure for cancer and the common cold)

Read it and weep folks. If you can get past the media hype about the supposed "information age" and instead look at what keeps civilization afloat aka "infrastructure" you'll notice it's being severely stressed.

Bioman wrote:

"We are pleased with this joint effort between the US and Australia and believe that a hypersonic airplane could be a reality in the not too distant future."

It's the first time they dare say "not too distant future"; before they refused to mention the word future at all.

“This technology has the potential to put numerous defence and civilian aerospace applications within our reach during the next couple of decades,” Dr Harch said.

Here they even go so far as to speak of "the next couple of decades"...!!! .......

....Hypersonic scramjets would reduce energy consumption in aviation by up to 95% per passenger mile. This is rather impressive.

Of course, hypersonic scramjets are an extreme example of a mega-increase in efficiency. But still, stuff like this counts.......

They still haven't figured out how to steer that thing, nor how to land it safely. So far it's just a missile.

cube wrote:The Questionable:
1) materials engineering - composites (nice but nothing huge)

Huge. Really huge. Nanotechnology (way overhyped, but in real world applications already, and with strong success), ceramics, fibres, biomaterials, you name it. Huge advances, still huge potential. Ever saw a windmill from the 50s? Saw those laughably tiny blades?

2) jet propulsion/space travel - ?

Who would care about space travel? By the way, fuel efficiency more than doubled from 1970 till today (way after jet trubines becam standard), simply amazing, yet people simply do not notice.

3) power generation / power grid - (falling apart)

What on earth are you talking about? North Korea? Zimbabve? Anyway, this has almost nothing to do with technological progress per se.

4) cars - hybrids (not exactly new)

Drive around in a 70s car, drive around in a 2007 car, then tell with a straight face there were no significant improvements. Obviously, fuel efficiency was not greatly improved, mainly because the customer did not demand so forcefully.. And, a hybrid for an almost competetive price, that's totally new and nothing to scoff at.

6) water treatment - (shortages)

Zulu? Egypt? What are you talking about? Water management became way better in many countries, due to better consciousness about it, better infrastructure, and computer usage for monitoring. On the same time, water resources got under heavy stress in many parts of the world, since we all wanted more and more and more of water--consuming services, but this has almost nothing to do with technological progress per se.

7) structural engineering - (taller skyscrapers and longer bridges but nothing amazing)

What on earth do you expect? A Transfomer[tm] skyscraper which doubles as a spacecraft for our daily afternoon trip to Betelgeuze? Buildings are built way faster, way more energy efficient in saner countries and (for the middle class) way more individual than anybody in 1970 could experience. And if you don't find the shanghai skyline amazing, I can't help it.

8 ) railroads - HSR (nice but not overwhelmingly impressive)

300 km/h on the railroad, top velocities of >400km/h on maglev,
what shall those guys do to impress you? Let the train be pulled by flying pigeons?

11) medicine - (still looking for the cure for cancer and the common cold)

They DID find cures for cancer. Lots of them. No wonder-all-gone cure, but still amazing achievements. The success in childhood non--leukemia cancers is particularly astounding: Longer--term (naturally, no till-end-of-life estimates can be given now) mortality rates dropped from over 80 to under 20 percent.

Read it and weep folks. If you can get past the media hype about the supposed "information age" and instead look at what keeps civilization afloat aka "infrastructure" you'll notice it's being severely stressed.

Whatever this means. My impression is rather that people are spoiled from the technological revolution which came with computers, and now expect a revolution of some sort every year, while evolution, i.e., gradual improvement, is the natural course of technology 99% of the time.

katkinkate wrote:They still haven't figured out how to steer that thing, nor how to land it safely. So far it's just a missile.

That's true, but there will definitely be a need for highly efficient missiles in the post peak world. So it will help in that area

kolm wrote:gradual improvement, is the natural course of technology 99% of the time.

Didn't someone just try to say that the course of technology follows an exponential curve? That must mean that, even though fusion is always just 40 years away, we'll get to each successive 40-years-away even faster. Perhaps rapid expansion of technology will also give us even more ways to use up our depleting sources of energy.

All I see are fancier mousetraps and a shinier veneer on society. There's nothing on the market right now that is going to do anything but postpone the inevitable.

to: kolm

I guess it depends how you want to look at it. I never said there has not been tech advances outside of computers. I'm trying to make the point that not all technologies move exponentially. Just because you can slam twice as many transistors into a silicon wafer every 2 years does NOT mean we'll have:

200 story skyscrapers
120 mph freeways
3 Giga-watt nuclear reactors
2 years from now.

In fact some technologies advance at the rate of "turtle speed". Take for example freeways. Sure so now we have electronic toll booths, traffic monitoring, and the asphalt has some recycled tires mixed in but I certainly don't see anything amazing that happened for the past 30 years. Furthermore isn't technology suppose to make things "cheaper" to build (like what happened to computers) --> that has not happened with freeways. If you wait 30 years into the future freeways will still be the same. Please don't tell me we'll have nano-tech asphalt that will be self healing therefore eliminating the need for expensive road maintenance....we all know that's not going to happen.

BTW I'm still waiting for nuclear power to make energy "to cheap to meter".

Hey, can't blame the nuclear industry for not guessing that meters would become so cheap.

I agree with kolm’s sentiment:

kolm wrote: My impression is rather that people are spoiled from the technological revolution which came with computers, and now expect a revolution of some sort every year, while evolution, i.e., gradual improvement, is the natural course of technology 99% of the time.

We are surrounded by amazing progress on a regular basis, and yet some people seem to think that the latest iPod represents the pinnacle of our achievements and a lack of jetpacks and flying cars indicates that progress has been slowing down.

I found these statements about IT particularly amusing:

kochevnik wrote:Other than the personal computer I can't think of any significant invention in those decades - as opposed to the beginning of the 20th century when we had DOZENS of them.

cube wrote:The Good:
1) computers/ networks - plenty
2) consumer electronics - iPod, HDTV, cellphones, videogames

The reason these viewpoints are so off is because they fail to appreciate the nature of progress. Saying we only had IT, compaired to say flight, the light bulb, the automobile etc, really misses the very important point of how progress works: we increment technology by building with the latest tools.

Essentially all technological progress has been an evolutionary step forwards. The idea of a sudden breakthrough is a misconception; in reality every development results from progressing forwards by using the latest technologies. And this is why IT is of such massive importance in our accelerating progress. IT gives us a powerful toolset to develop the next technology, which is an accelerating process since each new evolutionary development improved upon the last, giving us ever more powerful tools to more rapidly develop the next technology.

A simple example is the development of early CAD systems that enabled the more rapid developed of more sophisticated computers – which in turn allowed for more advanced CAD systems which allowed for more rapid developments of the next generation of computers.

But the remarkable progress in IT doesn’t only translate to faster computers. Take medicine for example. Efforts to sequence the HIV virus began in the early 1980’s, and were completely sequenced by 2003 (link). In contrast, the SARS virus was sequences in 31 days (
link). Dr, Gerberding (director of the Center of Disease Control) called this rapid sequencing “a scientific achievement that I don’t think has been paralleled in our history”.

Scientific and technological progress is clearly accelerating, and our increasing computational abilities play a tremendously important role in this.

Omnitir wrote:Roughly the first 20 years of this century will see the equivalent of all the scientific and technological progress that the entire 20th century enjoyed.

kochevnik wrote:ARE YOU ON CRACK ?

The pace of tech progress has done nothing but slow over the last few decades.

Actually, I think one would have to BE ON CRACK to look at the accelerating progress all around us and manage to see tech slowing. Or does the lack of Stanley Kubrick's 2001 vision make you conclude that tech is slowing?

Though you're use of all caps is certainly a striking and definitive argument.

The Law of Accelerating Change shows that given the accelerating rate of change, about the first 20 years of this century will see about the same amount of progress as the entire 20th century.

It is an amazing concept, but in theory it is perfectly valid.

katkinkate wrote:They still haven't figured out how to steer that thing, nor how to land it safely. So far it's just a missile.

?

This is all about developing and testing a new type of jet engine - one that needs to be travelling at hypersonic speeds to work. This test is not about building a new aircraft. We already know how to build aircraft, but not how to build scramjets. Once the scramjet technology is fully developed, building these into an airframe that can manovour and land will be childsplay.

It's a bit like someone successfully testing a new car engine that runs on some alternative fuel, and saying "yeah but it's got no wheels".

It's just a test, it's the scramjet technology that matters.


I have to wonder about this technology for civilian use though. Even if it works as expected, and can send a passenger flight around the world in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost, it still seems problematic. I can't imagine lots of passengers wanting to sit on a ballistic parabolic flight, complete with extended periods of negative G-forces. Well, I guess they won't be serving food on such flights...

Omnitir wrote:...
The Law of Accelerating Change shows that given the accelerating rate of change, about the first 20 years of this century will see about the same amount of progress as the entire 20th century.

It is an amazing concept, but in theory it is perfectly valid.

Let's see how valid this law holds up when we hit PO and the population + economy goes down the toilet.

cube wrote:

Omnitir wrote:...
The Law of Accelerating Change shows that given the accelerating rate of change, about the first 20 years of this century will see about the same amount of progress as the entire 20th century.

It is an amazing concept, but in theory it is perfectly valid.

Let's see how valid this law holds up when we hit PO and the population + economy goes down the toilet.

Indeed.

Though it's interesting to note that both the Great Depression and WWII (which both devastated much of the developed world), did nothing to slow the rate of progress over these periods. And there is much more "fat" in the system today. Let's see how valid PO collapse and die-off theory is if it takes more than a couple of decades to unfold.

omnitir wrote,

Though it's interesting to note that both the Great Depression and WWII (which both devastated much of the developed world), did nothing to slow the rate of progress over these periods. And there is much more "fat" in the system today. Let's see how valid PO collapse and die-off theory is if it takes more than a couple of decades to unfold.

The Great Depression and WWII took place in a world where overall availibility of energy per capita was increasing. We are facing into a future where overall global energy per capita is decreasing on two levels. 1.) The population is increasing and 2.) the availability of energy is decreasing.

cube wrote:

Omnitir wrote:...
The Law of Accelerating Change shows that given the accelerating rate of change, about the first 20 years of this century will see about the same amount of progress as the entire 20th century.

It is an amazing concept, but in theory it is perfectly valid.

Let's see how valid this law holds up when we hit PO and the population + economy goes down the toilet.

But why do you think Peak Oil will be a problem? There are so many sources from which we can obtain useful energy. There's coal for hundreds of years, carbohydrates and sunlight for billions of years.

The era of plenty is only just beginning.

Moreover, between 2050 and 2070 world population will have reached its peak. Thereafter, it declines. So I don't really see the problem.

Also: because the trend of exponential growth of the scientific community itself, by 2050/2070 the share of scientists in the general population will have become huge. By then we will probably even have artificial scientists capable of having tea with people like you, and of feeling emotions. They will say that Doom is fun, but only a hobby.

They will smile when they convince you of the fact that the era of plenty is only just beginning.

Madpaddy wrote:omnitir wrote,

Though it's interesting to note that both the Great Depression and WWII (which both devastated much of the developed world), did nothing to slow the rate of progress over these periods. And there is much more "fat" in the system today. Let's see how valid PO collapse and die-off theory is if it takes more than a couple of decades to unfold.

The Great Depression and WWII took place in a world where overall availibility of energy per capita was increasing. We are facing into a future where overall global energy per capita is decreasing on two levels. 1.) The population is increasing and 2.) the availability of energy is decreasing.

That's not entirely correct, I think: 1) for the first time in history, mankind is capable of predicting the fact that world population will be declining: somewhere between 2050 and 2070, so we can plan well ahead; and 2) the availability of energy technologies is increasing with giant leaps; today we have hundreds of efficient ways to convert energy into useful stuff to heat and cool our homes with, to fuel our cars and airplanes and ships, and to recharge our toys and our robots.

Never before have we had so many different highly efficient energy technologies available.

Bioman wrote:...
But why do you think Peak Oil will be a problem? There are so many sources from which we can obtain useful energy. There's coal for hundreds of years, carbohydrates and sunlight for billions of years.

The era of plenty is only just beginning.
...

There are 2 types of people in this world:
1) Star Trek people - these people believe in infinite and perpetual growth. There is no technical problem that cannot be solved with human ingenuity. Give humanity enough time and we will invent nuclear fusion. If we wait longer warp drive propulsion will be next! And finally the ultimate destiny of humanity is to become like the Q Continuum - the ability to "fold" space and travel across the entire universe in a blink of an eye!

2) Planet of the Apes - civilization moves in a cycle. No matter how advanced you become or how many engineers with PHD's there are --> collapse is unavoidable. However on the bright side there will be a re-birth after each collapse. The technological ladder will be climbed up slowly from stone-age to modern once again by whoever inherits the planet next...let it be engineered apes, robots, aliens, humans again???

I fall into the Planet of the Apes category.