{"id":69,"date":"2008-06-27T23:31:17","date_gmt":"2008-06-28T04:31:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/27\/the-heat-barrier\/"},"modified":"2009-04-21T03:06:58","modified_gmt":"2009-04-21T08:06:58","slug":"the-heat-barrier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/27\/the-heat-barrier\/","title":{"rendered":"The Heat Barrier"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Technology improves at an overwhelming pace. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailygalaxy.com\/my_weblog\/2008\/06\/exponential-tec.html\">The prospect of exponential growth has some people making fantastic predictions<\/a>.  Eg. &#8220;In 15 years, life expectancies will start rising faster than we age&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m a big believer in the power of human invention. But I stumbled upon a somewhat sobering magazine article a few days ago.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/blog.modernmechanix.com\/2008\/05\/17\/can-we-crash-the-deadly-flame-barrier\/\">CAN WE CRASH THE DEADLY FLAME BARRIER? (Oct, 1955)<\/a>  <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Fly a plane fast enough and friction will melt it. Can we \u201cput out the fire?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>As near as I can tell, the answer is <em>no<\/em>.  Worse, <strong>maximum airspeed has declined over the years<\/strong>.  For example, the absolute air-speed record of 2,194 MPH was set in 1976 with <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/SR-71_Blackbird\">a currently <em>retired<\/em> aircraft<\/a>.  In 1976, we came up against the heat barrier, and could not break it.  Since then, we have also retired the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Concorde\">only<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tupolev_Tu-144\">two<\/a> models of supersonic transport aircraft to see active service.  <strong>The minimum time to cross the Atlantic is higher today then 20 years ago.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Now it&#8217;s safe to say that miles per gallon of fuel, and speed \/ gallon, have increased since 1976.  This is almost certainly of more practical importance to the world.  But I think it&#8217;s worth noting an example of a purely-technological dimension that has regressed with time.  Not everything in technology <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Moore's_law\">doubles every two years<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Technology improves at an overwhelming pace. The prospect of exponential growth has some people making fantastic predictions. Eg. &#8220;In 15 years, life expectancies will start rising faster than we age&#8221;. I&#8217;m a big believer in the power of human invention. But I stumbled upon a somewhat sobering magazine article a few days ago. CAN WE [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[389,64,117,62,390],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research","tag-aircraft","tag-failure","tag-futurism","tag-technology","tag-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}