Timeline for Looking for quote about the absurdity of people driving cars
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
17 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 5, 2017 at 5:04 | comment | added | Mike Scott | @Malandy They work right these days. Cars are very much more reliable than they used to be. I drive cars that are over a decade old with many tens of thousands of miles on them, and I've not had a breakdown in decades. | |
| Jul 4, 2017 at 21:46 | comment | added | dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten | @AnthonyX '"constant series of tiny explosions" may be more thermodynamically efficient than a continuous alternative' It's not. Not by a long way. Where we use heat engines to generate large amounts of power in one place (steam and gas turbines, mostly) they run in cycles that vaguely approximate ideal cycles and the big ones come reasonably close to their ideal efficiency. Both the Diesel and Otto cycles are far from ideal and actual engines run even less efficiently than that. Their sole redeeming quality is that they are compact: very high power density (by mass or by volume). | |
| Jul 4, 2017 at 13:02 | comment | added | Anthony X | Star Trek:"Space Seed" (1967): "Bulky, solid... I think they used to call them 'transistor' units" - Scotty, reporting his observations upon boarding the Botany Bay. The silicon chips at the heart of our modern computers and cell phones and integrated into more and more of the products we use every day are still fundamentally "transistor units". Scotty's line was intended to reinforce the idea that despite being at the cutting edge of technology for its day, the Botany Bay had become an obsolete relic. Heinlein was doing likewise, but taking some license and injecting his own point of view. | |
| Jul 4, 2017 at 9:56 | comment | added | Whelkaholism | IMO, all the ABS, power steering, sort-of-auto-controls and even hybrid engines in modern cars fit firmly into Heinlein's second stage of a group of gadgets added to overcome the original design limitations. Fully electric cars like the Tesla are getting there, but they are not exactly common. | |
| Jul 4, 2017 at 5:42 | comment | added | Sumyrda - remember Monica | @AnthonyX Since driving an electric car for the sake of environment protection is kind of pointless if you buy your electricity from nuclear, gas, or coal power plants, I suspect most people who own an electric car and charge it at home do so with renewable energy (wind, solar, water) - at least that's true for all the electric car owners I know, which I'll admit is a rather small sample size. | |
| Jul 3, 2017 at 23:21 | comment | added | Anthony X | @Ray Let's not be too quick to judge. Have to research this, but Heinlein may not have had his facts straight regarding the relative efficiency of discrete vs continuous combustion. Depending on how its done, the "constant series of tiny explosions" may be more thermodynamically efficient than a continuous alternative. Let's not lose sight of the fact that the point of Heinlein's writing was to establish the perspective of his future-world character as looking back upon a much more technologically primitive past, and may have taken more than a little prosaic license in the process. | |
| Jul 3, 2017 at 23:16 | comment | added | Lightness Races in Orbit | "The shaft at long last caused the wheels to turn and thereby propelled this pile of junk over the countryside." lol "mechanical jokes" LOL! | |
| Jul 3, 2017 at 22:46 | comment | added | Ray | @AnthonyX I was mainly referring to the "exothermic chemical reaction, a reaction which was started and stopped every split second" bit. Yes, there's still a heat engine somewhere, but you're no longer powering it by a constant series of tiny explosions inside your engine, which is probably the most absurd part of the entire mechanism. | |
| Jul 3, 2017 at 22:31 | comment | added | Anthony X | @Ray Electric cars don't eliminate the heat engine issue. They just move it. Electric cars have to charge their batteries from somewhere, and that somewhere is still overwhelmingly powered by heat engines. Be they coal, oil, or gas fueled generating stations, even nuclear, it's still the same. Make some heat, make gas expand (or boil water), use that to push on something and throw the waste heat away. Overall efficiency will vary, but an improvement at the power plant is probably lost in power distribution and battery/motor inefficiencies. | |
| Jul 3, 2017 at 22:26 | comment | added | Anthony X | @Malandy Heinlein describes steering and braking as unassisted. Not strictly true even back in the day, although power assisted steering and braking were either luxury features or optional equipment - likely not common on the overwhelming majority of vehicles as they are today, and ABS wasn't even heard of on cars back then (although appearing on aircraft). Although far from ubiquitous, stability control, lane keeping assistance, semi-automatic parking, adaptive cruise control, and GPS are all modern advances and automation in what is still a car. | |
| Jul 3, 2017 at 22:13 | comment | added | Ray | @Malandy Drive by wire systems would be the big one. Although the wheel and pedals are still operated the same way, they aren't mechanically connected to the axle, so muscle power isn't being used anymore. That's the improvement that's already in regular use. But electric cars are on the market, which eliminates the heat engine issue, and self-driving cars are under active development. That last one's particularly useful, since while we may have improved cars a lot, the drivers still have all the flaws he mentions. | |
| Jul 3, 2017 at 20:54 | comment | added | Jules | Interestingly OP thought what he was looking for is a Douglas Adams / HGTTG quote, and the second sentence of this quote is somewhat reminiscent of one particularly memorable Adams quote, which may potential be the source of confusion... | |
| Jul 3, 2017 at 19:57 | comment | added | Organic Marble | I guess much of this wouldn't apply to a Tesla - no internal combustion engine and there is some autocontrol. | |
| Jul 3, 2017 at 19:45 | comment | added | Malady | @AnthonyX - What about cars has improved from 1952 to render Heinlein's rant irrelevant? Although, I suspect my answer would be easily found at Wikipedia? | |
| Jul 3, 2017 at 18:41 | comment | added | Anthony X | Bearing in mind that in 1952 (date of publication and therefore latest time to which his writing could be informed), cars were rather primitive as compared to what is on the market today. While some aspects of automotive technology have remained essentially unchanged from then, he seems to imply that they would undergo no further improvement before being replaced by some other sort of transportation device (flying machines, perhaps). | |
| Jul 3, 2017 at 16:34 | history | edited | Organic Marble | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
deleted 5 characters in body
|
| Jul 3, 2017 at 13:49 | history | answered | Organic Marble | CC BY-SA 3.0 |