Ever Faster

A LMOST unnoticed, an old phenomenon is recurring that always marks human progressan increase in speed. Manned and robotic vehicles, by air, rail and space, are all getting faster. The new large passenger jets from Boeing and Airbus will fly at about 10 per cent faster than their predecessors. Both the Boeing 7478 and the giant Airbus 380 will have maximum cruising speeds of about 670 mph. This, incidentally, is an interesting number, being almost exactly one millionth of the speed of light. Meanwhile the New Horizons spacecraft on its way to Pluto has started its journey at an almost unprecedented 10 miles per second, or 36,000 mph. It recently got an extra acceleration to 52,000 mph as it swung by Jupiter, enabling it to reach the Pluto system in 2015, a journey four years shorter than it would otherwise have been.
It is arguable that the history of human progress is the story of the achievements of new speed records. Each new record marked a new level of technology. For tens of thousands of years our ancestors could travel no faster than by running. Then, about 5,000 years ago, came what the French naturalist Comte de Buffon called the "proudest conquest of man", the mastery of the horse with stag antlers as the earliest reins. In the 20th century, with the coming of cars, trains, aircraft and rockets, the increase in maximum speeds changed from being gradual to what statisticians call ``exponential'', an upward curve that continuously accelerates and shows no signs of slowing. If the curve continues at this rate, and it's a big if, then our fastest vehicles will have reached five per cent of the speed of light, about 33 million mph, by half way through the next century. I say "if" because, as the economist Sir Alec Cairncross warned in a famous poem: A trend is a trend is a trend. But the question is: will it bend? Will it alter its course, through some unforeseen force, And come to a premature end? If the curve does "bend", it is more likely to be from human obstinacy than from any technological reason. Nearly every increase in speed has been opposed by people who believe that to move up a level was, if not impossible, dangerous and somehow impious. This "If God had meant us to fly He would have given us wings" syndrome or its equivalent dates back at least to the Old Testament with its prejudice against horses and chariots in favour of slower asses and donkeys. King Solomon was accused of sin for keeping hundreds of horse stalls in his palace at Meggido, and Joshua, instead of making use of the horses and chariots he captured from the Canaanites, had the former hamstrung and the latter burned. In more recent times, Nelson was overruled when he urged the Admiralty to adopt steamships. An English landowner hired gunmen to shoot trespassing railway surveyors. And we recall the hysterical but vain environmentalist campaign against Concorde. Perhaps the possibility of reaching five per cent of the speed of light by 2150 is no more fantastic than today's speeds would have seemed to people living 150 years ago.