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PaperclipPerfector  19hr ago (text post)   3151 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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Reading an article on why Britain should settle Antarctica from Palladium got me thinking: are there any major, visionary projects happening at the moment that have a plausible chance of success?

I'm still hopeful for SpaceX to at least make operations on the moon more feasible, though I'm skeptical of making a real go at Mars colonization, especially as Elon's star has fallen so far recently.

China seems a likely contender, but I don't know what they have going on. I know that AGI is the thing on everyone's mind, but I'm thinking more about a physical, non-software based major visionary project that's happening in the physical world.

To quote some from the article:

These apparently radical measures will look less radical by the year, but would nevertheless represent a dramatic break from the Westminster status quo. Declining nations can resort to many sensible technocratic reforms that are easy to explain, but they find it hard to come up with compelling political or bureaucratic motives for those reforms. That can only be done with national visions—visions that are not only suited to the capabilities a country could realistically develop, but also a congruent continuation of its history, or at least the best of its history. We can see that these two conditions have been fulfilled with nearly every successful national founding or refounding. Britain’s overlooked Antarctic legacy, and the vast frozen territory it still retains, then, offer us the opportunity for such a vision.

If such a project is pursued with enough vigor, it will make Britain’s claim to Antarctica inarguable. It is easy to draw peremptory lines on an empty map, but it is much harder and more admirable to people that map and to rescue its land from barrenness. For a stagnant or declining nation, it is easy to find this or that technocratic intervention that can solve this or that economic, social, or political issue. What is more difficult is finding a vision that gives the nation reason to carry out such reforms. These visions must be inspiring, but they must also be within reach. Most importantly, they must match the legacy and history of the country.

This is culture war because, well, the decline of nations is extremely political, and from my view the Trumpian Right, for all it's many and varied flaws, is the only party at least nominally pursuing a future vision of greatness, instead of simply ignoring or managing a decline.

Also, this is a very sassy quote from the article I loved:

This unworldly modern Britain is hardly the “perfidious Albion” depicted in the propaganda of its 19th century geopolitical rivals. Not wholly unflatteringly, contemporary Russian state media still portrays the country as the shadowy orchestrator of coups and death squads. A truer depiction, though, is that of the “cash-poor, asset-rich elderly woman who has somehow inherited a portfolio of scattered, high-value properties she doesn’t know what to do with.”

Boom is reasonably likely (2:1 odds) to get commercialized supersonic passenger transport by 2040. I think that will seem like a mere evolutionary change (plane go faster) but, if it succeeds and scales, will be transformative.

Given that Concorde was not close to being transformative, I think Boom would need to be 10x better than Concorde to be transformative with >50% probability, and they seem to be going for 2x.

Concorde wasn't transformative because it never scaled.

My claim is that merely achieving "equal to Concorde but consistently adds at least a handful of new routes every year" is transformative, even if it's not any better or cheaper. And they are already notionally aiming for $7000 tickets, which is 1/2 the inflation-adjusted price of Concorde.

Or maybe the other way around: Concorde wasn't transformative because they only built 14 of them and only served 3 airports, which was downstream of the fact that the thing could barely fly and bled[1] money.

And they are already notionally aiming for $7000 tickets, which is 1/2 the inflation-adjusted price of Concorde.

That is what I mean by a 2x improvement. Slightly less than half the inflation-adjusted price, for a marginally worse product (Mach 1.7 vs Mach 2.0). Still a niche product for rich people - the marketing spin is that the fare is competitive with business class, but airlines don't sell many full-fare business class tickets at the moment* - the average fare actually paid needs to go up a lot relative to subsonic business class for the economics to work out.

* As well as the usual discounted fares, the big volume business travel customers (mostly banks and consultancies) all have negotiated rebate schemes which means that the revenue to the airline is less than the face value of the ticket.

Sure. So 1/2 the price of Concorde but connects all the major cities of the world at Mach 1.7 instead of the 0.85 of a 777?

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