Instead of following the traditional infrastructure expansion policy, current transportation research focuses on developing innovative and novel solutions to the aforementioned issues. In recent years, our surface transportation infrastructure is suffering from overuse, extreme traffic congestion, and roadway disrepair. 4Transport Research Institute, Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.3Motion Simulation Laboratory, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, United States.2Stephen Still Institute for Sustainable Transportation and Logistics, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, United States.1Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, United States.Hulme 2,3, Grigorios Fountas 4, Ugur Eker 5, Irina V. This subject will pop into the media as our climate situation worsens - large-scale modification of the climate of the Earth to prevent climate change and warming.Sheikh Shahriar Ahmed 1,2, Kevin F. I’m working on some predictions for the future. The two Mars movies of about a decade ago were a wonder of exploration movies. It started with “Star Wars” and “Aliens” and so on. That’s the most common motif of space travel now. In the science fiction movies of the ’50s they seemed very excited about space travel, robots and rocket ships. Who in the world wants to see the second-most prosperous economy in the world being in the hands of the Communist party of China? It’s a big change if the most powerful nation is the one that stops being optimistic. We’re far too aware of our growing limitations. We have the usual intellectual disease of middle age. Optimistic institutions tend to produce good results. Meanwhile, optimism is very high in Southeast Asia, China and India, because they’ve seen things improving and, frankly, have learned from us. We used to be the outstanding optimists of the world. It’s always easier to see problems than solutions. A certain optimism has gone out of American life in the last few decades, in part due to intellectual laziness. They were more optimistic, though they lived in the middle of the Depression. Do the predictions say something about the times in which they were made?Ī. They missed many of the applications they didn’t think about it in a deeply personal way. They did not get that (the Internet) would be used to look at pornography. They miss a lot of personal, easy use, for example EBay, matching-dating services. The visiphone of the 1920s and 30s is Skype on the Internet today.īut of course the tendency of all these things is to look at the high-minded purpose. They didn’t have the mechanism clear, but they did have the idea of being able to speak to people and see them in real time. It’s about getting places quickly and easily, which of course was a major theme of the 20th century. They’re called radio newspapers and radio letters.Īlso a lot of it is about transportation. Predictions of things like faxes occur as far back as the 1920s. In the 30s they predicted telephones would stop being rotary and become digital. Now I know several people who do, Dean Koontz among them. I never knew when I was growing up anyone who had a bowling alley or a shooting range in their home. There’s a whole panoply of things: proliferation of larger homes, much larger swimming pools, home recreation of varying kinds. Popular Mechanics pretty well predicted the nesting phenomenon, in which people would more and more spend their technologies on making their homes better through communications - that it would be possible to telecommute. What surprised you among the predictions that did come true?Ī. You have to have a reason to send people. Nobody believes you can do any surface exploration in any detail with robots - at least not for another 30 to 40 years. There are powerful arguments that it probably does. Manned exploration only has a really major scientific point if it’s focused on settling the question of whether life began, or still survives, on Mars, beneath the surface. Do you think we’ll be setting manned spaceflight aside?Ī. On the other hand, perhaps we should have been prepared for that, because that’s what happened when Leif Ericson went to the New World. I did not expect that we would go to the moon, and then not go back. Among the predictions that didn’t come true, what was the biggest surprise for you?Ī.
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