(11-01-2013, 02:13 PM)kandrathe Wrote: Jordan Brandt, technology futurist at Autodesk has proposed using a carbon fiber weaving machine to make the tube, reducing it's weight, and reducing its cost by many billions.
This is starting to sound like a Ray Kurtzweil lecture. How many untested technologies can we lash together to make one super-project?
We'll probably learn some interesting things from trying this, and so it's probably worthwhile to explore. But anyone saying "oh, I can shave a few billion off this by doing something nobody has ever done before" is almost certainly dreaming. Or living in Silicon Valley for too long. Visionary, first-run projects are never cheap, and they're certainly never as cheap as their boosters' back-of-the-envelope calculations. Innovation creates neat things, but it doesn't tend to save money until it can be mass produced, and rolled out over a large scale.
-Jester
(11-01-2013, 06:35 AM)Lissa Wrote: One could probably compare him to Tesla on some of the ideas he comes up with and what can be done with them.
Nothing Elon Musk has done so far comes within a country mile of Tesla for sheer brilliance. He is taking on impressive, but well-known engineering challenges, and taking the next step forward with a combination of moxie and expertise. But it's not like we couldn't make an electric car, or send someone into space, or settle accounts electronically before Elon Musk. He's more Brunel than Tesla.
Tesla did entirely unique, ground-breaking primary and engineering research on electricity. (Also some crankish stuff, but genius is as genius does.) He didn't just make some shiny things, he had penetrating insight into the nature of the next generation of technology.
-Jester