Technology

I'm constantly amazed at the number of inventions that were first proposed during the 1940s or earlier. The flying wing which is the B-2 Bomber was proposed back then, but couldn't be built until we had sufficient computer power to deal with its stability problems. The SR-71 Blackbird spyplane was built in the era of sliderules and still holds the speed records that we know of. It is probably the most beautiful, elegant airplane ever built and the first real Stealth airplane.

Now there's this, about the "Blackstar" program, a two-stage space plane which would have been used as a spy plane which couldn't be spotted in time to hide from it.

I've seen programs about a plane called "Aurora," as well, using a pulsed jet engine, using a principle invented by Von Braun in the V-1 buzz-bomb during WWII. Photos of contrails looking like "doughnuts on a rope" have been taken and publicized.

These things are always denied, but I hope that some day we'll learn more about the wonderful projects that are still protected, even if they didn't get fully funded.

I'm not convinced yet that a space elevator is feasible, but I'm sure that NASA or the Military is working on it. Whatever we know about has to be obsolete. That's one of the reasons I find most environmentalism so repulsive. It's a denial of the imagination of mankind. It tells us to give up on the industrial revolution, and settle for the old days when people lived lives of quiet desperation. The longer I live, the less I admire Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. Cranks both. If we want to preserve green, it's going to be done with new technologies, and I don't mean those that take up huge amounts of surface area to harvest sunlight or wind power.

I believe in God for whom miracles are just sufficiently advanced technology. It may be that the only feasible fusion reactors are stars. Or that they are just easier to mass produce than the little Tokamaks we envision.