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)

I just don't see it. Batteries are heavy and they don't get lighter while you're flying. An electric jet would be too heavy to land, or it wouldn't be able to go very far.

Anybody that has a full time job could never do this because 4-6 days each way means your PTO for the year is half-almost completely gone from just commute

It would only disrupt the leisure habits of the top 15% of people in the US, most Americans would be unaffected. You ever wonder why it's the top 10% globally (only top 15% of US is in global top 10%) that contribute over 50% of all carbon emissions? It's because normal people aren't using their paid time off to spend the weekend in Europe or Dubai. The world worked just fine before the commercial jetliner enabled New York to London in 7 hours and for a majority of people it still is that pre jetliner world.

Vast majority of Americans regularly don't go more than a few hundred miles to vacation, if they take vacations at all and not being able to spend the weekend overseas is a non-issue. For those that do travel abroad for vacation, it's somewhere still in America like Mexico.

The majority of people in North America aren't spending weekends in Europe. For example, each year there around 30 million tourist arrivals from the US to Europe and based on the statistics of what percentage of Americans travel abroad at all, many of those are the same individuals traveling to Europe multiple times each year. For many Americans if they do travel overseas it tends to be something done after retirement, if they do it at all. Around 27% of American adults have never traveled abroad in their lives and another 19% only do so once. (Pew Research). This includes traveling to Canada or Mexico not just traveling overseas. I can't find any exact numbers but a sizeable percentage have to be because they joined the US military and it's on the governments dime. It's literally the top 11% that are regularly traveling abroad.

If you mean business travelers, just like wealthy assholes who need to regularly vacation in Europe, they can also stop making weekly/monthly commutes between the western and eastern hemispheres.

Maybe a bit more than the average person, but not by that much. I don't pilot, planes are expensive. I do spend the majority, or close to it, of my waking hours near an airport, but thats in a building and its mostly jets taking off there.

Unfortunately, I can not. But fortunately there are various bears that probably can!