Japan has the problem of declining birth rate and immigrants not welcome. They are likely to be leaders in various non-human technologies. Robots and all sorts of automation.
And they love gadgets. A great place to try something new. Well ahead in bullet train technology. Strong in electronics. Famous for their focus on quality.
…and their willingness to invest in infrastructure that pays off over long time horizons.
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Just what I was thinking: the cost of xenophobia.
Steve
I’m eagerly awaiting a Japanese elder care robot for buy or lease.
intercst
I’m trying to figure out why that would b e more efficient than a pair of railroad tracks and a cart system shuttling back and forth. The carts wouldn’t require drivers - or attention of any kind really - Amazon’s warehouse robots or the Atlanta Airport train show you can run these things by robot.
I would think constructing a miles-long conveyor belt, constantly moving, would be hugely expensive and hard to maintain, especially for a system which has to run in both directions, presumably at all times. A rail system, I would think, would cost less to build in the first place and wouldn’t necessarily need a double line all the way either. Funiculars run on one track with the occasional double where the cars pass each other.
Or maybe get crazy and use these “one rail” vehicles which balance themselves and pass on a single double-rail infrastructure.
We already have self driving locomotives. Railroads are probably best way to do self driving or remote driving–especially if you can keep foreign objects, people, and autos etc off the tracks.
Mile long conveyors may sound easy but you are talking about lots of moving parts to maintain. Railroad is a better choice.
Ever see a conveyor in a mine? They get pretty long. That was one of the markets for the fluid drives that the division of American Standard, where my dad worked, built. Couldn’t just slip a clutch to get the thing moving, as there was so much stretch and inertia in the things you would burn out the clutch before the belt got going. Use a fluid drive, and you regulate the torque transmitted by regulating the amount of fluid in the drive, so you can creep the torque up to get the belt moving without stretching or burning up anything.
The longest conveyor belt is that of the Bou Craa phosphate mine in Western Sahara (1973, 98 km in 11 sections). The longest single-span conveyor belt is at the Boddington bauxite mine in Western Australia (31 km).
Bob already envisioned and wrote about it back in the 1940s:
{ In “The Roads Must Roll” Heinlein envisions giant moving walkways, called Roadways or Roadcities, that carry people over vast distances at high speed. Just picture an airport slideway scaled up to take people throughout cities, between cities, and even across the country. }
ralph
OK going back to the original story: there’s an illustration, an “official” one released by the Governor bent agency that’s funding this experiment. Obviously the illustration is speculative, but I note that there are “carts with wheels” and what appear to be “tracks”. There are also plastic bubbles over the entire length, which would be a maintenance nightmare (cracks, sun degradation, dirt, replacement, etc.) if the plan really is to use “carts with wheels”.
As a sidebar I will note that Chicago had an underground rail system between the major buildings in the downtown Loop area. At one time it shuttled coal for heating, US mail for distribution, and other things as were commissioned by the owners of the railroad. It was actually a “mini-railroad” with dwarf tunnels and mini-cars. When it became impractical it was repurposes to carry telephone lines, electric lines, and later cable and data lines under the city, and served that purpose right up until a pile-driver sank a pile next to it in a section under the Chicago River, it collapsed and flooded the entire downtown area basements of nearly every big building there. Billion dollars in damage.
Anyway, a moving conveyor belt x miles long seems a fraught idea, even if it would be really useful. Better to just put cargo containers on platforms and roll them into the city, or, as is sometimes known: a railroad.
I was seven years old enjoying that wide eyed loco short story, and started talking about it to my Dad. His hysterical laughter and questions started my comprehension of thermodynamics, work, and energy.
Heinlein was staggeringly inventive, mostly knowingly got basic science wrong but did not care, while always brilliant in riffing on tech. I believe that one of his most insane novellas has, so far as I can find, utterly vanished (or perhaps a different author under his influence?). Why?
Well, it went too far perhaps even for Heinlein. It began with a successful combined Japanese/Chinese army invasion and takeover of the USA, and starred a resistance led by pseudo wizard/priests emerging from a secret laboratory high in the Rocky Mountains, wielding super high tech “staffs” (ever watchful, he undoubtedly stole that trope from Tolkien’s LOTR wizards), and leading a rag tag mix of religious believing fanatics and in-the-know hard core cynics. Besides his typical religious sarcasm, the story overflowed with gleefully wild wide eyed racism: orientals enslaving and eating white people and white people using genetic signatured weapons that killed only orientals. In one scene a black cook employed as a chef by a Japanese local potentate comments on how the “best eatin’ of all” are white boy slaves castrated at age 12, slaughtered at age 17 when they are tender and not tough like slave men, and fully flavorful while not all greasy like the women.
Yikes. Wonderful. Horrible.
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