technology

Yes nuclear passenger (and cargo) ships

Another thing depicted in Ministry for the Future, in addition to airships, is hybrid solar-electric/sailing ocean liners. (In this excerpt, Mary is the head of the titular UN Ministry for the Future, which is why she has bodyguards)

These changes included going back to sail. Turned out it was a really good clean tech. The current favored model for new ships looked somewhat like the big five-masted sailing ships that had briefly existed before steamships took over the seas. The new versions had sails made of photovoltaic fabrics that captured both wind and light, and the solar-generated electricity created by them transferred down the masts to motors that turned propellers. Clipper ships were back, in other words, and bigger and faster than ever.

Mary took a train to Lisbon and got on one of these new ships. The sails were not in the square-rigged style of the tall ships of yore, but rather schooner-rigged, each of the six masts supporting one big squarish sail that unfurled from out of its mast, with another triangular sail above that. There was also a set of jibs at the bow. The ship carrying Mary, the Cutting Snark, was 250 feet long, and when it got going fast enough and the ocean was calm, a set of hydrofoils deployed from its sides, and the ship then lifted up out of the water a bit, and hydrofoiled along at even greater speed.

They sailed southwest far enough to catch the trades south of the horse latitudes, and in that age-old pattern came to the Americas by way of the Antilles and then up the great chain of islands to Florida. The passage took eight days.

The whole experience struck Mary as marvelous. She had thought she would get seasick: she didn’t. She had a cabin of her own, tiny, shipshape, with a comfortable bed. Every morning she woke at dawn and got breakfast and coffee in the galley, then took her coffee out to a deck chair in the shade and worked on her screen. Sometimes she talked to colleagues elsewhere in the world, sometimes she typed. When she talked to people on screen they sometimes saw the wind scatter her hair, and were surprised to learn she wasn’t in her office in Zurich. Other than that it was a work morning like any other, taking breaks to walk around the main deck a few times and look at the blue sea. She stopped work for birds planing by, and dolphins leaping to keep up. The other passengers aboard had their own work and friends, and left her alone, although if she sat at one of the big round tables to eat, there were always people happy to talk. Her bodyguards left her alone. They too were enjoying the passage. If she wanted she could eat at a small table and read. She would look up and observe the faces talking around her for a minute or two, then go back to her book. Back out on deck. The air was salty and cool, the clouds tall and articulated, the sunsets big and gorgeous. The stars at night, fat and numerous— the salty air more than compensated for by the truly dark skies. Then the new moon fattened, night by night, until it threw a bouncing silver path out to the twilight horizon, sky over water, indigo on cobalt, split by a silver road.

It was beautiful! And she was getting her work done. So— where had this obsession with speed come from, why had everyone caved to it so completely?

Because people did what everyone else did. Because first no one could fly, then everyone could fly, if they could afford it; and flying was sublime. But also now a crowded bus ride, a hassle. And now, on most of the planes Mary flew on, people closed their window shutters and flew as if in a subway car, never looking down at all. Incurious about the planet floating ten kilometers below.

I think he's somewhat right about this 'doing what everyone else did' thing but also there's an element of the Protestant work ethic demanding maximum speed and efficiency in all things (efficiency in the business sense, not the climate sense)