PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

Ten Years Later
9. REACHING THE CEILING EVERYWHERE
The small circles in Figure 9.1 show a small deviation
from the predicted trajectories in recent years. This deviation
was discussed in Chapter Seven and has to do with the
fact that traveling by air grew less rapidly than expected probably
because aviation technology has not yet adapted to a more hydrogen-rich
fuel course (natural gas or hydrogen). The
takeover point, that is, the time when more passenger-miles
will be covered in the air than on the ground must consequently
be pushed back by ten or twenty years.
Air travel has undoubtedly a bright future. A graph of the tonkilometers
carried every year worldwide shows that air traffic is heading
for a point of saturation toward the middle of the twenty-first century.
The S-curve which best fits the data has a ceiling at 580 billion tonkilometers
per year which makes that niche barely over 50 percent penetrated
by the turn of the century. (Appendix C, Figure 9.1). The
agreement between data and curve turns out to be remarkable, considering
that there have been at least two sharp fuel price increases during
this period, one in 1974 and another in 1981. One may have expected
that the diffusion of air traffic was impacted by the price of fuel on
which it depends so directly. Not at all! The system seems to compensate
internally for such events so as not to deviate from its natural
course.
Ten Years Later
The little circles in Appendix C Figure 9.1 show excellent
agreement between recent data and the trend predicted in 1989.
This considerably enhances our confidence in the prediction.
But air traffic constitutes a rare exception to keep growing as we are
heading into the twenty-first century. A multitude of growth curves,
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