I'm super jealous now, and thoroughly appreciate your first-person perspective.
I think my entry isn't clear about this, but I would love to ride an airship. Similarly, I have designs on a few scenic railway journeys and would love to someday ride on a tallship, and go to classic car shows at every chance. I am pro-airship.
I am also sad I never got to ride the Concorde.
However I get fairly annoyed with retrofuturists, not because I think history is necessarily a constant advance (sometimes things are abandoned that are intensely useful, such as cursive handwriting), but because their counterfactuals tend to play down the problems with old technology (assuming we would have solved them, or that they weren't real problems) and shrug off the strengths of current technology (assuming they were inevitable and would also have accrued to the other system). Cheap, fast, reliable air travel by plane (for both people and freight) is nothing to shake a stick at.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2014-05-26 07:12 pm (UTC)I think my entry isn't clear about this, but I would love to ride an airship. Similarly, I have designs on a few scenic railway journeys and would love to someday ride on a tallship, and go to classic car shows at every chance. I am pro-airship.
I am also sad I never got to ride the Concorde.
However I get fairly annoyed with retrofuturists, not because I think history is necessarily a constant advance (sometimes things are abandoned that are intensely useful, such as cursive handwriting), but because their counterfactuals tend to play down the problems with old technology (assuming we would have solved them, or that they weren't real problems) and shrug off the strengths of current technology (assuming they were inevitable and would also have accrued to the other system). Cheap, fast, reliable air travel by plane (for both people and freight) is nothing to shake a stick at.