Scientific American October 1997 [antikvár]

FROM THE EDITORS The Way to Go Modern humans probably walked out of Africa about 100,000 years ago, then kept on going. First by foot, then on horseback, boat, wheels and wings, our kind has charged across the land and seas to every part of the globe. While one courageous minority invaded the depths of the oceans, another built rockets to visit the moon and near space. Not content to go places once, our entire civilization is bound up with the enterprise of getting to places again and again: more quickly, more easily, with more luxury or more cargo or less expense. One striking point in most serious predictions is that modes of transportation in the next century will be, by and large, not too different from the ones we use now. (Well, there go my personal gyrocopter stocks.) Automotive technology will advance considerably, migrating away from so much reliance on polluting fossil fuels and toward use of electricity or other sources of power, yet the American love affair with the car will remain torrid. We may log proportionally more miles in aircraft or high-speed trains, but driving will still be our day-to-day first choice for most travel. Vastly more people around the world will be expressing the same preference, too, because they can afford to. Andreas Schäfer and David Victor explain why that will be so in "The Past and Future of Global Mobility," beginning on page 36. In aviation, the greatest changes may come in the numbers of aircraft, their safety, their efficiency and the transfer of advanced military technologies to the commercial sector. Average flight times may get shorter, not because new hypersonic aircraft will be making jaunts between Tokyo and New York in a few hours but largely because air-traffic management will be computerized and subsonic planes will get incrementally faster. Nevertheless, expect some novel vehicles, such as the vertical-takeoff planes described by Hans Mark (see page 78), to take to the skies. In this issue, we have highlighted some of the more important trends and innovations that will shape transportation—over the land, through the ail, across and under the oceans and into space—for the next few decades. Improvements even in low-glamour technologies, such as those for elevators and bicycles, can leave a big impression. But because travel and transportation are often fascinating for their own sake, we have also included a few ideas that lack something in practicality but make up for it in sheer fun. Human-powered planes, supersonic cars and microsubmarines are the perfect vehicles for chasing dreams. In your heart, do you know a better way to go?