The Technology Paradigm

I love to go to the drag races and am always overwhelmed by the raw power of the Funny Cars – thousands of horsepower exploding from a stand-still, flying through a quarter-mile in just three seconds or so, at 350 MPH – how awesome is that!!!  But the most amazing thing to me was the similarity of the top-of-the-class technology to what I used to ogle over as a high-school kid 40 years ago!!!  The fiber-glass body clipped onto a welded-tube rail chassis, a nitro-methane burning super-charged V-8 engine, a clutch connected directly to a differential rear-end, enormously wide slick tires, etc.  Vast incremental improvements notwithstanding, they’re still living in a 50-year old paradigm.

For that matter, look at the auto industry as a whole: still burning gasoline at ONLY HOW MANY MILES PER GALLON?  The only reason we are not all riding (flying?) super-clean, super-efficient transportation is because of how it would affect the corporate annual profits to ditch the manufacturing and infrastructure investment (both financial and intellectual) in favor of pursuing and adopting radically new technology.  Oh, the science exists, and even if it didn’t, it could be developed easy enough given the will to accomplish it.

But change will never happen until someone comes along and steals the established industry’s lunch and their collective industrial momentum simply dissipates like the morning dew.  Like the Japanese cars came into America and took their customers away from them and forced them to build higher quality and higher efficiency automobiles than they intended to do.  Or like the Russians shooting Sputnik into space and shocking the American space program into developing the “humanly impossible” technology to put a man on the moon and bring him safely back again.  We’ll never go to Mars as long as the American space program desperately holds on to their past – it’ll take another paradigm shift to make it happen: perhaps in the form of one of those start-up space-tourism companies coming along and stealing NASA’s lunch.

But my point is that it’s sad that we can’t just see what needs to be done and go do it – rather than resist until we are absolutely compelled to do it.  Personally, I blame it on the collective and individual graft of corporate mentality – they’d rather increase their personal income than accept the moral obligation to use their resources to make the world a better place to live.