Alas, I’m old enough to remember the first Space Shuttle launch some thirty years ago. Back then, I was a space-crazed kid and was excited beyond belief at the world’s first reusable spaceplane. Closer the Earth, the Concorde, the world’s first (and only) SST, was also in its heyday. Although the latter was prohibitively expensive and the former was nowhere near taking passengers, it wasn’t hard to connect the dots of the previous two centuries — from the early steam engine to the internal combustion engine to the propellor plane to the jet plane to the rocketship — and foresee an era where supersonic travel between cities and orbital or interplanetary flights were commonplace. Thanks to Hollywood and its revived interest in sci-fi and special effects, detailed renderings of such a fantastical world were beaming onto screens big and small.
The first terrible, tragic unwinding of the dream happened in 1986, when Space Shuttle Challenger blew up in mid-launch, taking its first passenger, New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, and six other astronauts to their graves. Then came the investigation, and the realization that the Shuttle program was plagued by flaws, that launches were being rushed in order to satisfy the long-prophesied two-week turnaround time. Still unfamiliar with the ways of the world and the detailed mechanics of real-life space travel, I was floored: yes, the Shuttle had cost billions and taken years longer to complete than expected… but shouldn’t that have led to an ironclad prep process and flawless missions thereafter? In later years, after the Columbia disaster in 2003, I learned that NASA itself was deeply flawed, a cacophony of squabbling experts and boondoggle contracting arrangements for a vehicle that was far, far more complex than originally imagined. If this was the Final Frontier, it sucked.
Ditto the Concorde, which never found a successor and had a tragedy of its own back in 2000. The retirement of the fleet back in 2003 felt like a whimper, a lame-duck end to what should have been the next, grander step in aviation history. Apparently, back when the now-ubiquitous 747 jumbo jet was developed, it was expected to be a mere stopgap until the day of widebody, double-decker SSTs.
All this makes me wonder: are we backsliding? Indeed, the rapid movement forward from horse & buggy speeds is, if nothing else, an anomaly in the long history of human transport: we remained at horse speeds for millennia. Caesar’s chariots and American pioneer wagons travelled at roughly the same pace. So maybe we are in for a long, protracted period of stagnant transport developments; in that area, we haven’t really budged since the 1950s, when the SR-71 Blackbird and Sputnik emerged on the scene.
But then, what really links all these fits and starts is the dirty little secret of our age: energy production — or rather, its impending scarcity.
Theoretically, the notion that we’re “running out of energy” is a canard. More sunlight strikes the Earth in an hour than we humans use in an entire year. The amount of energy in an atom’s nucleus is so tremendous that only a tiny amount of fissile material can produce enormous energy output. No, our problem isn’t the availability of energy; it’s our talent at harnessing it.
Until the Industrial Revolution, that overwhelmingly meant the use of raw human and animal power; for fuels, it meant wood, supplemented by small quantities of plant and animal products such as whale oil. Then we discovered how to burn coal to create steam — and suddenly a relatively small quantity of raw material could perform all manner of tasks, from running factory machinery to powering vehicles on land and water.
The next big leap forward, of course, was oil, which was even more energy-dense and versatile than coal. But from its earliest days, oil had one big drawback: nobody knew how much of it was in the ground. Wells would flow then gradually run dry, leading to boom-and bust ghost towns all over early oil country.
Still, in the early days of the twentieth century, the future looked bright: those early prospectors at Spindletop, in Beaumont, Texas, thought they were merely getting rich when they blew the greatest gusher of the time back in 1901. In fact, the discovery of petroleum on a hitherto untold scale helped usher in a new age. Today it’s unthinkable to imagine a world without cars or jet planes or plastics.
But, alas, what happened on a micro scale in the early oilfields of western Pennsylvania is now happening on a global scale: back in the 1950s, petroleum engineer M. King Hubbert predicted that, like any bell curve, U.S. oil production would peak sometime between 1965 and 1970; he was right on the money. The real reason for America’s pre-eminence through the 20th century lay largely in the country’s energy independence and status as a net oil exporter. The Saudis could have done all the embargoing they wanted in 1953 and it would have hardly made a dent in the U.S. economy; twenty years later, such an embargo nearly reduced the country to ruin.
Nowadays, peak oil is a widely-accepted concept, and predictions are afoot estimating that we’ve already reached the peak or are about to reach it any year now. I can’t help but look at this and at the falloff in innovation around transportation and see a connection. Oh, I know there are other factors: when the Industrial Revolution kicked off, there were fewer than a billion people on the planet and the notion that we little primates could overwhelm Mother Nature’s restorative capacities was unthinkable. But as human population mushroomed and we began to use planetary resources at a greater clip, the toll we’ve had on the Earth has become apparent. So now we’re faced with an added challenge: how to produce and consume energy in a fashion that doesn’t demolish the ecosphere on which we depend for our very existence.
I, for one, am not one of those pessimists who believes the problem intractable. Maybe it’s all those years of watching hopeful (and dystopian — cautionary tales have their place) speculative fiction, but I believe in the potential to get out of this fix we’re in and continue our forward passage toward ever-greater travel and exploration. I’m very much on board with the environmental movement, but if there’s one area in which I part company with them it’s the notion of austerity, scarcity, shortage. I think this is what doomed Communism as well: no, we don’t all want to be equally poor. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want greater equality, nor does it mean we don’t want better, safer, and more sustainable ways of harnessing energy.
Ultimately, it’s going to be our ability to solve the energy problem — to squeeze more out of what we already have, and to find ways of making much more of it in a restorative, balanced fashion — that will put us back on a path toward ever faster, ever farther. It’s in our nature to travel, to explore, to want to go at ever-greater speeds to ever-more distant places. But we’ll only be able to do so if we find the energy — literally — to make that happen.
Hats off to whoever wrote this up and potesd it.