28-01-2017, 11:36 AM
(This post was last modified: 28-01-2017, 11:39 AM by Valvebloke.)
Honestly Bob, the absolute speeds don't matter. What matters is that if we set our mind to it we can achieve remarkably complex things under autonomous control. As complex as this http://sci.esa.int/cassini-huygens/34956...eparation/ and this https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/resources/7580/.
More to the point we have regularly been landing passenger aircraft autonomously under circumstances where it would be just too unsafe for a human pilot to do it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland. The capability's been around for decades. Autoland is not perfect yet. One major problem is that the safety standards for it are set so high that the number of autolands per hour is limited - when fog descended on Heathrow in Dec 2006 airlines were so used to relying on autoland that they all turned up only to find the landing capacity had been halved, but in a sense that's testimony to its everyday acceptability.
As for your assertions about life expectancy, maintenance costs, repair costs etc I'm afraid the onward march of progress simply refutes them. Mrs VB was a telecoms engineer with Vodafone for 25 years. When she began there the phones were large, expensive and unreliable. They handled voice only. Look where we are now. When I was a student in the early 80's telex was sometimes easier than e-mail and I was still driving an (admittedly old) car which had a choke and a starting handle. Look where we are now. The first domestic VHS recorder was huge and expensive. Look where we were fifteen years ago when you could buy one for £19.99 in Comet.
As a sceptic you have some eminent bedfellows though. I think we're going to have to agree to differ on this (I certainly am
) but I'll leave you with four quotes from fellow sceptics:
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" - Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
"Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night" - Daryl Zanuck, executive at 20th Century Fox, 1946
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home" - Ken Olsen, founder of DEC, 1977
"Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the internet's continuing exponential growth. But I predict the internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse" - Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com, 1995.
Cheers, VB
More to the point we have regularly been landing passenger aircraft autonomously under circumstances where it would be just too unsafe for a human pilot to do it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland. The capability's been around for decades. Autoland is not perfect yet. One major problem is that the safety standards for it are set so high that the number of autolands per hour is limited - when fog descended on Heathrow in Dec 2006 airlines were so used to relying on autoland that they all turned up only to find the landing capacity had been halved, but in a sense that's testimony to its everyday acceptability.
As for your assertions about life expectancy, maintenance costs, repair costs etc I'm afraid the onward march of progress simply refutes them. Mrs VB was a telecoms engineer with Vodafone for 25 years. When she began there the phones were large, expensive and unreliable. They handled voice only. Look where we are now. When I was a student in the early 80's telex was sometimes easier than e-mail and I was still driving an (admittedly old) car which had a choke and a starting handle. Look where we are now. The first domestic VHS recorder was huge and expensive. Look where we were fifteen years ago when you could buy one for £19.99 in Comet.
As a sceptic you have some eminent bedfellows though. I think we're going to have to agree to differ on this (I certainly am
) but I'll leave you with four quotes from fellow sceptics:"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" - Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
"Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night" - Daryl Zanuck, executive at 20th Century Fox, 1946
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home" - Ken Olsen, founder of DEC, 1977
"Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the internet's continuing exponential growth. But I predict the internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse" - Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com, 1995.
Cheers, VB
Ampregen Ltd http://www.ampregen.com
