The Rodney Brooks Rules for Predicting a Technology’s Commercial Success (2018)
a_imho 2021-08-19 11:05:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I'm only suggesting that we properly gauge the difficulty of whatever we are told could be the next big thing. If the idea builds on practical experience, then guarded optimism is in order. If not, then not
helsinkiandrew 2021-08-19 12:13:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]
There’s been no massive technical breakthrough in solar (or even wind) power for many decades - the improvements have been as a result of steady iterations as more panels have been made. They've gone from being expensive, fairly low performing and of interest to a limited set of people (solar at any cost) too much greater performance and lower cost which makes them attractive to a wider set of people.
djmips 2021-08-19 09:42:25 +0000 UTC [ - ]
rkangel 2021-08-19 10:54:40 +0000 UTC [ - ]
blitzar 2021-08-19 11:53:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]
sgt101 2021-08-19 12:22:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I once did a talk at MIT and he made a comment about people wearing cowboy hats but not having any cattle, which made me sad. Still, it's not surprising that we have work to live up to our idols standards.
ZeroGravitas 2021-08-19 13:08:41 +0000 UTC [ - ]
If you owned a 300 mile right of way between your two destinations, is it actually substantially better than a train in terms of speed or energy use? Or is it only because it can burrow under existing infrastructure that it becomes worth doing?
credit_guy 2021-08-19 14:54:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]
* cheaper to acquire rights to build. Elon envisioned the tubes suspended on some pillars built on the median strip of existing highways. No need for eminent domain, or difficult land acquisition negotiations
* much lower air resistance: the pressure (and so density) of the air in the tube is supposed to be about 100 times lower than the atmospheric pressure. So the air resistance should also be 100 times lower for the same speed.
* lower track maintenance: high speed trains are supported by steel wheels getting in touch with steel rails on a tiny area. Therefore tremendous pressure and vibrations. The load of the hyperloop train is supported over a huge area via air pressure. The load felt by every single square inch of the tube should be thousands of times lower than the load felt by the train rails when the wheels pass over.
* potentially higher speed.
renox 2021-08-19 14:56:04 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Especially when one of the selling point of the hyperloop was that they would use "air cushion" to float above the ground but then they switched to "magnetic levitation" so now it's a maglev train variant, an even more expensive one than the current maglev trains..
marcosdumay 2021-08-19 14:34:50 +0000 UTC [ - ]
That's the idea. You can get one or the other, or a mix of them, but if it's built, you'll probably get speed, because energy consumption isn't a viable commercial feature of high-cost transportation.
stonemetal12 2021-08-19 14:08:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]
djmips 2021-08-19 09:39:08 +0000 UTC [ - ]
noneeeed 2021-08-19 10:54:13 +0000 UTC [ - ]
> I am by no means saying that developing electric cars or reusable rockets is not brave, hard, and impressively inventive work. This work does, however, build on large bodies of prior work and on existing physical and business infrastructure, all of which increase its chances of success.
gilbetron 2021-08-19 13:46:37 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Case in point: flying cars. He lists fine and dandy engineering points, but the reason we don't have flying cars, and almost certainly never will without inventing magical tech, is logistical and societal. Airspace isn't really 3D, but rather "2.5D", and putting vehicles up there in any significant amount is a really difficult problem. In the end, we'd just put congestion in the air. Imagine how loud (prop) airplanes are, now imagine hundreds flying above you all the time.
But even more fundamental is safety. Right now, it is a frequent occurrence to see a car by the side of the road. Imagine that is a flying car, except instead of pulling safely to the side of the road, it plummets to the ground. In most places you want to use a flying car, there is a high probability that you end up on someones house. This is bad. Sure, you can invent tech that prevents that, but it is mostly of the "never fails", aka magical, variety. In short, failing when you are hundreds of feet in the air is far more dangerous than failing on the ground, for everyone involved.
AnimalMuppet 2021-08-19 16:12:34 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Safety isn't an issue for flying cars as long as they're as safe as regular cars. We have something like 40,000 deaths a year from regular cars, so flying cars don't have to be perfect.
(At least, they don't have to be perfect for social reasons. They may have to be perfect for legal reasons, to avoid the manufacturer being sued to oblivion. If they're not perfect, the crashes will have to be attributable to driver error instead of product defects, or they're gonna get mega-sued.)