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How will we plan our vacations of the future? Long-distance travel is uncomfortable, stressful, expensive, and slow. In the future, you might find yourself traveling in a beefed-up aircraft, a super high-speed hyperloop, or maybe you'll just visit a virtual environment! How does the Bronze Age sound?
If you could visit any place on Earth at any time in history, where and when would that be? Let us know in the comments!
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[TRANSCRIPT]:
In the future you can travel half-way across the world without leaving your house.
Long-distance travel is uncomfortable, it's stressful, it's mega-expensive, it's a fuel sink with an ugly carbon footprint, plus you never seem to get where you want to go as fast as you would like. I mean visiting something like the Galapagos Islands or the Giza Necropolis can be one of the most important and life-changing experiences you can have. But getting there is about as much fun as undergoing a dental procedure in the 1400s...by a barber!
So, until someone invents teleportation are we pretty much stuck? Well lets look at air travel. Aerospace engineers are looking at lots of weird ways to improve fuel efficiency in air travel over the next few decades. So you may soon find yourself in a boxed-wing, blended-wing, or even a stealth inspired B2-style flying-wing aircraft All of these are designed to beef up the average plane's lift-to-drag coefficient, and improve fuel economy. And some companies are, get this, designing hybrid aircraft. That's right, they're actually looking at combustion turbines combined with electric motors.
Meanwhile, on the ground, we have speed to worry about. Now we've already got trains that levitate above their tracks using magnetic levitation that can attain speeds of over 300 miles per hour. But future ground travelers might actually get to travel in something that SpaceX founder Elon Musk calls the "Hyperloop" which is a speculative system that Musk himself describes as a cross between a Concorde Jet, a rail gun, and an air hockey table. Charming.
No, it's actually really cool. Imagine a tube that stretches across the country. Inside this tube you have an area of low air pressure cutting down on air resistance and a linear array of motors shoots passenger capsules through this tube on air bearings. Think of skis made out of pressurized gas, and if we line this entire tube on the top with solar panels, you might actually be able to generate more energy than you needed to operate it. You've got an energy surplus.
So, how fast could you go inside the Hyperloop? Well, if the Hyperloop lives up to the hype, it'll travel at over 760 miles per hour, which is faster than the cruising speed of most commercial aircraft. But who says an immersive foreign experience has to involve a vehicle in the first place? Maybe the future of travel will just involve a lot less...travel.
I'm talking virtual environments. Now, let's get this out of the way. Virtual environments are never going to replace actually going to another location. But, what it can do is allow us to explore places that might be difficult or even impossible for us to get to ourselves.
And not just where, but also when! Take Marcus Abbott's Virtual Prehistoric Worlds project, which is designed to create navigable, 3D model of a wetland in East Anglia...as it would have appeared during the Bronze Age!
Using 3D digital surveys and reconstructing archeological sites means that we can explore places that humans haven't seen in thousands of years. Or imagine pairing that data that you've collected with the real world around you. I'm talking about augmented reality, where we pair the digital world with the physical world in a seamless integration. Imagine walking around Rome, and you look at the ruins of the Colosseum, and through a display that has smart technology in it, it recreates itself into the glory days of Ancient Rome.
I think as long as we keep in mind what Proust said, which is travel's not really about seeing new landscape, but seeing with new eyes.
