> > humanity was stepping back from an advanced transportation > > method (think about going back to horse-and-buggies after > > having automobiles). If you think about it, in a lot of ways, > > that's what the current space program represents. > Actually, this happens in all mature technologies. They will go through an exponential growth period, and pundits will project them growing forever just before they level off. In railroad trains, there was a hundred years of exponential development of ever more powerful engines. Finally, in the '50's I believe, there was a workhorse railroad engine that was used quite a lot. Someone decided to build a much more powerful one, since many companies were stringing two or three engines together to pull larger loads. However, the bigger engine was not cheaper to produce per horsepower, and it's low volumes could not outcompete the high volumes of the smaller engine, so it was still more economical for the railroads to buy two little ones versus one big one. So humanity stepped back from advanced transportation methods once a technology was mature. The modern 747 has a lot of years on the design. The only competitor nowadays are Airbus proposals that have to run a lot more efficiently to even be considered. Once you break the sound barrier, efficiency drops out the floor, so barring a large paradigm shift it will generally be cheaper to fly long flights at subsonic speeds than supersonic speeds. Most people won't pay extra to halve the commuting time when all destinations are less than a day's travel away. Public transportation has devolved steadily since the 1930's, when you could catch an intercity trolley car between many eastern seaboard cities. Now it's personal automobile or air travel, or nothing in many cases. You could say that public transportation stepped back from advanced methods in the US at least. Seen many Monorails lately, outside of Seattle? Where's that bullet train? Greyhound is nearly bankrupt. Personal automobiles all go 70MPH in the US for safety reasons, no matter how powerful they are, and have done so for two generations. On the racetrack, exponential growth in racing speeds leveled off 50 or 60 years ago. Yes we can build a rocket sled that Yeager could break the sound barrier with, but what use is it? Here we have stepped back as well. Space has hit a similar crisis. We thought we would use the moon as a stepping stone to explore Mars, however the costs and risks are exponentially higher in a Mars mission and the benefits don't look too good. Earth orbit satelites have exploded commercially, but nobody sees enough economic benefits in the Moon as of yet, let alone other destinations, to try for commercial apps. Heck, commercial spaceflight for live astronauts is not even off the ground yet, with several teams competing for the prize. The Moore's law expansion of silicon technology is going to level off, and soon. Cost of new Fabs are going up dramatically, and people like MCHIP are buying up old fabs at garage sale prices to make commodity chips. Much of MCHIPs business is in providing microcontrollers with LESS capability, like 8 pin devices for four bit prices (pun intended). Already, computer sales are flat, because a consumer with a 200Mhz computer can browse the web just as efficiently as a consumer with a 2GHz computer. The PC industry should get over moore's law and realize they have already hit the knee of the malthusian crisis, even though physics says they can build a much smaller silicon transistor. The computer on my desk at work is a 1.6 GHz P4 model, the one at home is 200mHz P2, and I literally cannot tell the difference in performance. Why upgrade? Do you remember the performance difference between a 25 MHz 386 and a 100 MHz 486? Dramatic! -- Lawrence Lile Jake Anderson Sent by: pic microcontroller discussion list 12/03/2003 05:27 PM Please respond to pic microcontroller discussion list To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU cc: Subject: Re: [OT]: NASA's new mandate ??? not really actually a friend of mine works in the biz and an analisys/redesign was done using all the computing power availablle today they could only lighten the structure by a few % the concord is probbly about as good as we could do. this story is related through a long chain so there may be a bit of "purple monkey dishwasher" (chinese whispers, though thats probbly racist or something) to deal with in here. > -----Original Message----- > From: pic microcontroller discussion list > [mailto:PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU]On Behalf Of Mike > Sent: Thursday, 4 December 2003 6:09 AM > To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU > Subject: Re: [OT]: NASA's new mandate ??? > > > On 3 Dec 2003 at 8:44, Mike Hord wrote: > > > Let's keep our hopes up, shall we? > > > > I read an article not too long ago that argued that the end > > of the Transatlantic service by the Concorde was a herald of > > the end of mankind's technological dominance. The argument > > was something to the effect that, for the first time ever, > > humanity was stepping back from an advanced transportation > > method (think about going back to horse-and-buggies after > > having automobiles). If you think about it, in a lot of ways, > > that's what the current space program represents. > > You believed that? > > They phased out the Concorde because it cost more to keep the > damn thing in > service than they were bringing in from the flights. > > I'd venture to say that we can build better planes today than we > could when that thing > was originally built. > > > > BRs, > mike > > -- > http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic: > [PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads -- http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic: [PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads -- http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic: [PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads