PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

9. REACHING THE CEILING EVERYWHERE
There are two other observations to be noted in Figure 9.5. One is
that all transport infrastructures follow similar trajectories to reach their
ceiling, even if these ceilings are widely different:
Infrastructure
Canals
Railways
Roads
Airways
Ceiling (total mileage)
4,000 miles
300,000 miles
3.4 million miles
3.2 million miles (estimated)
The second observation is that the 50 percent points in the growth of
each infrastructure are about fifty-six years apart, in resonance with the
cycle first mentioned in Chapter Eight. Each transportation system is
intimately linked to a primary energy source: canals to animal feed, railways
to coal, and cars to oil. The appearance of the new energy source
precedes the saturation phase of the current transportation system. It is
this line of thought that argues for hydrogen as the appropriate fuel for
airplane. Airplanes are using gas today as locomotives used wood in the
early decades of railroads (at least up to the 1870s), even though coal
was growing in importance as a primary energy source. The latest primary
energy source is nuclear, and that is what argues for the
development of a nuclear-hydrogen system to power the major part of
the airway cycle.
Thus, we see that new transport infrastructures are conceived during
recessions, with the emergence of new innovations and technologies,
but they grow slowly. Their maximum rate of growth—the halfway
point—occurs during (and contributes to) the economic growth of the
following cycle. Railways came into use in the late 1820s, and peak activity
in railway construction contributed to the recovery from the broad
recession of the 1880s. Paved roads began to be built in the 1880s and
contributed mainly to the economic recovery of the 1930s, a time when
air transport was being undertaken. The maximum rate in the buildup of
air transport will help the recovery from the economic low of the mid
1990s.
In extrapolating the same pattern, we can estimate that a future
means of transportation, labeled as Maglev in the figure, should be undertaken
around 1995, enter the market significantly around 2025, by
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