Marshall Brain's Blog

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November PopSci

The November 2003 issue of Popular Science covers the future of flight. Just about everything in the issue is about flight in some way. There were two articles that were particularly interesting.

The first was a one-page blurb on a model airplane built by Maynard Hill. The plane weighs less than 11 pounds with fuel, but was able to fly for almost 39 hours, traveling 1,900 miles and crossing the Atlantic Ocean from Newfoundland to Ireland. The 11 pound weight limit means that it carried only about 1 gallon of fuel. A GPS-based autopilot kept it on course. Average speed was 49 MPH. This BBC article has several photos.

The second was a panel discussion on the future of flight. The most provacative statement in it comes from Burt Rutan, known for his round-the-world-non-stop Voyager airplane, and now a serious contender for the X Prize. Here's the quote:

"Don't people realize that business travel is almost defeated already? In my company, I've lost half the demand for business travel just in the last three or four years, and I am very much looking forward to not having to do any at all."

The idea is that much commercial travel will become irrelevant thanks to high-fidelity virtual reality networks. "In only 20 years, we're going to have systems where we can 'sit down' with someone and it will be indistinguishable from being there," Rutan continues. "There is such an enormous demand to do that, to get rid of this quagmire of gridlock and these enormous airplanes aren't going to solve the problem of getting to the airport. You might ask where the money is going to come from to make this technology flourish. It'll come from the porn industry.

"The ability to go out and buy an orgasm with a beautiful woman with no risk of disease will also create the kinds of things that you will need to truly make it so that you don't have to take a business trip the feel of that handshake, all the senses you have of knowing that you are there. Phenomenal amounts of money will be dumped into phenomenally good virtual reality, so we won't have to go to the damn airport in the first place."

It's a fascinating article overall, and gets you thinking about air travel and aircraft in a very different way.

For truly realistic virtual reality you need the Vertebrane System. Meanwhile, there's WebEx, LiveMeeting and Video Conferencing.