Engineering Twilight, Part Two

Today I come to the subject I had in mind when I concocted this title, and ironically the tangent it spawned was more coherent and supportable than what will follow here, mais c'est la guerre.

No, the plan was something that I've been thinking about for a while, and it has to do with our decreasing vision if not our absolute decline in ability to do certain things. I was watching something on the Military Channel about the SR-71 which had video of the production process. They had to make the plane out of titanium, so Lockheed developed techniques to cast and forge the stuff. The connection here is that while watching this I said "That represents the peak of American engineering".

It was a plane, and although it was really fast, it was no Three Gorges Dam or (more contemporaneous to it) Apollo Project, so I don't mean the most sophisticated or biggest thing built by man. What it meant to me, and I could be completely wrong, was that we have lost the sort of industrial "muscle" that would allow a single company to build something as outrageous as a plane that is 90% titanium and goes Mach 3.2+ at 85,000ft (or 3.5 at over 100,000ft, depending on your source).

Of course this would never have happened at any other time or place in history than in a still-prosperous U.S.A. in the throes of an ideological struggle for the political and economic soul of the world. The Cold War isn't seen like that any more, but that was what it was and Reagan finally won it by bankrupting the U.S.S.R. Since then the West has lacked that sort of far-horizon existential threat. The war against Islam is much older, but the threat is a lot less definable than that of the 1st Guards Tank Red Banner Army facing you over the IGB (Inner German Border).

The America that built the SR-71 is gone, and not looking likely to come back. I don't disagree with the decision to can the F-22, for example, but its' demise (or scaling back) is an early symptom of the U.S.A.'s own "Recessional":

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

There are a lot of things we can do today that couldn't be done 40-50 years ago, so we're not looking at a Dark Age just yet. A lot of the "fire" has gone out though, as current achievements are at a much smaller scale than in the 1950s and 60s. When you're working on
nanotech that's a good thing, but North America has dropped out of the race for a lot of things that we used to lead. Canada peaked in the 50s with the Avro Arrow, but our loss was the Yanks' gain as our people went to the Apollo program and elsewhere.

Science fiction has worked a great deal with the idea of a future when few people are needed to keep things running, and it is one possibility that the global population will peak and recede as everyone goes "post-industrial". The chickens of the cradle-to-grave Social Security state are beginning to roost as it becomes obvious to people other than Actuaries that we can't maintain the society we have designed for ourselves. That means different things to different people, but to me we need an economy which actually produces things as a foundation for its wealth, and we need it basically now.

Back to industry and engineering. As much as I don't hold with the (increasingly discredited and shrill) AGW models, we do need to wean ourselves off of oil. With good scrubbing technology we can keep using coal and certainly natural gas, but the key to all of these electric cars is, well electricity. "Clean" coal, hydro, natural gas and nuclear power plants will give us that, but to generate the added energy that recharging all of those batteries will require a lot more juice than we have available presently. Engineering advances remain to be made in all of these areas; simple, efficient nuke plants, efficient solar cells, and the holy grail of clean low-impact power generation, orbital solar power.

I'm a well-known cynic, but I know what we have done, so I know we could do that sort of thing again. The sort of drive and sense of purpose that built SR-71s could be turned loose on the engineering requirements of launching the solar platforms and building the receiving stations.

We are victims of our own success and the resultant lowered expectations. I have no idea where our tech will top out, but it shouldn't happen in my lifetime, and I want that cheap clean energy as much as the most ardent Green. You might be able to live as a "naked savage" on tropical beaches, but in this climate it takes energy just to survive 2/3 of the year. That's my pet hypothesis why Europe was first to develop advanced tech, though the Chinese had a head start and certainly could have come out ahead.

It starts in the homes and the schools of the nation. Kids should feel that they have a contribution to make, and the schools should identify strengths and guide those children to what they are proficient in. It wouldn't work for everyone, but there would be more plumbers, electricians, technicians, engineers, chemists, etc., and a lot fewer Art History majors. This is drifting into "Credentialism", another sign of our decline, but one which can be reined under control and even directed to the good of individuals and society.

Sustainable progress is the key to survival. Cheap clean energy is the key to wealth within that model, and keeping our R&D where it needs to be to get that requires us to put our industry back in business. Canada's not as far down the road of de-industrializing as the Americans are, but they have still far more industry than we've ever had, so we've not far to fall to hit our bottom.