Parallel Revolutions

How much progress have human beings made since the 1960s? There has been progress in food production, known as the Green Revolution. There has been medical progress and advancement in scientific knowledge. But let's consider two revolutions that mean the most to the daily lives of people around the world. Since the inventions of the steam engine and the telegraph, we have been witnesses to both the transportation and the communications revolutions.

But let's just review from the 1960s onward. Cars have improved since then. They break down less. They do not need tuneups. Electronic ignition is superior to the old carburetors. The computer consoles in engines are better than distributors. Cars are more fuel-efficient today. Jet aircraft have gotten bigger.

However since the sixties, the transportation revolution has been completely outpaced by the communications revolution. These improvements to cars are good but they have been relatively minor improvements. You still get into a car and drive or into an airplane and fly just like you used to then. In fact, we landed men on the moon in the sixties and are not doing anything like that now.

In comparison, consider the communications revolution. In the sixties, there was only mainframe computers, the PC had not even been invented yet. There was only solid block text, a graphical user interface like windows was unimaginable. The idea of the internet was only just conceived in 1969.

Who could imagine everyone from five year olds on up with their own computer with a graphical user interface sending emails all over the world, looking up everything they could ever want to know on Google or Yahoo and sending instant messages to anyone they knew?

In the sixties, the idea of never getting lost due to a GPS system using satellites and carrying a cell phone everywhere you go seemed like futuristic science fiction not to mention the replacement of copper wires with fiber optics to carry millions of phone calls at once. The progress in processing speed has been so phenomenal that if you could time-transport a $15 scientific calculator from today back to the 1950s, it would be worth untold millions of dollars.

Since the sixties, the communications revolution has delivered on it's potential while the transportation revolution is still stuck in just about the same place with only minor improvements. The basic propulsion systems used then are the same ones we use today. This has caused global warming as well as getting us dependent on the oil in the Middle East. The two revolutions are like the proverbial turtle and the hare but in this case, the hare is not sleeping so that the turtle can catch up. The communcations revolutions has gone through leap after leap while the transportation revolution has been limited to minor improvements.

The next step in the transportation revolution is obvious, a completely new propulsion system for cars and aircraft that does not use fossil fuels. Gasoline is only a step above coal as a fuel. Gasoline in the transportation revolution is more primitive than DOS in the computer and communications revolution. I do not hesitate to write that if we put anything like the same creativity into the transportation as we do into the communications revolution, everything would be running on sunshine by now, and in fact would have been doing so for quite some time.

Why are we unable to make anything but relatively minor improvements in the transportation revolution? The primary reason is that the primary nodes of the communications revolution are much smaller and less expensive. Phones and computers as opposed to cars and jet airplanes. Trying out new systems and products thus costs much less. In the communications revolution, an average college student might come up with a revolutionary ides, drop out of college to pursue it and be a billionaire by age 30. That is very unlikely to happen in the transportation revolution. It is virtually impossible for an ordinary person to put their creativity into the design of cars and aircraft in the same way as in computers and other communications devices.

Transportation progress hit a plateau in the sixties that it has never broken out of. We cannot put the same creativity into it as we can into communications because the required investment is so much more. It is both unfair and unrealistic to demand that automakers come up with a totally different propulsion system. Even if thay did, they would each come up with a different standard.

This is a project that is beyond the capacity of any automaker. The required investment would be too vast and the certainty of profit in the foreseeable future too low. What if the government decided to develop solar energy technology in the same way that it developed the internet and then turned the technology over to the private sector? What kind of world would we live in today if it had done that upon the Arab Oil Embargo in 1973?