DB: Around the World in Under Eighty Days

It's been a hundred years since the great Jules Verne novel, and that target still lies on the frontier between commonplace travel and real adventure. I cannot help wondering how much it might be reduced in a different world, and what the cost might be.

Let's start with ocean travel. In Verne's time the very fastest ships could manage 15 knots. That's barely changed since. Fast packets are almost all engine and fuel space, and very uncomfortable for passengers. Speed is limited ultimately by the waterline length. To be much faster the ship needs to be much bigger, commercially unviable and in need of government subsidy. There is only one reason for that: this world would be one without the Troopship Treaty. Would that inevitably mean the sort of large-scale intercontinental wars that we have thankfully avoided for the last century?

Some have suggested flying boats that lift themselves out of the water in so-called 'ground effect flight.' Though these are useful in some very flat places, such as the interior of Australia, I doubt if they could be scaled up to cross oceans where they might encounter waves twenty or thirty feet high.

Phileas Fogg had his balloon, and we have dirigibles. They are very useful for getting awkward loads to inaccessible places, and with the most efficient engines and a following wind, one might cross the Atlantic in a day or two. But that is really the stuff of thrillers. To do so safely, comfortably and regularly with a paying load, it would need to be of such a size as to be on the limits of what ground crew could handle.

Or perhaps, stretching the bounds of fantasy, you could strap yourself into a Goddard rocket and blast yourself to the other side in a matter of hours. After all, such devices have already delivered several hundred moonlets into Earth orbit, and even some around the moon itself. But a single human passenger, together with whatever they would need to stay alive, would weigh at least a hundred times more than the heaviest moonlet yet launched, so such a flight would be prohibitively expensive. Some day, perhaps, there will be a good reason for people to go into orbit or near orbit, but I have no idea what it might be. The communications system that the moonlets have made possible - so much faster, richer, and more reliable than the old telegraph cables, has opened up so many other possibilities that we never dreamt of a hundred years ago.

But how different would it have been if instead we had concentrated on moving ourselves and our goods faster?
Perhaps we might have decided that it was safe for motor vehicles to run on public roads at far greater than bicycle speeds, instead of confining them to rail?

Would that mean that there were fewer motor cars, because for safety they would have to be heavier, larger and more expensive, with much more driving training required? I suppose status would be conveyed by a powerful and high-speed car rather than a well-turned-out horse-drawn carriage.

Would there have to be a separate high-speed road network? I don’t see how that could be. Where would it go, when all the best routes are taken by existing road and rail? There might be some advantages: cheaper to build than rail - though needing more space for multiple lanes? Easier to maintain? I doubt it. Modern autonomous rail wagons have many of the charactistics a heavy, high-speed road truck would need: pneumatic tyres for braking and accelleration, with steel reserved for guidance and free running. What they do not have or need is the constant vigilance of a driver. Imagine a road network with the same travelling speed as rail, but each truck having to be controlled independently by its own dedicated driver!
Some might say the individual truck would arrive quicker because it can go directly to its destination, with no stops or deviations along the way. That may be so, but there are possibly some drawbacks too.

The question is - how much might the extra speed justify the expense? As the old saying goes - fast creatures live in barren lands. Speed between two points is most desireable when there is nothing of interest in between. The faster a network, the fewer places it can serve.

But speed for personal travel is enticing, and it is catered for in the more out-of the-way places by the ground effect machines I mentioned before, as well as the flying cars - the autogyros and sailwings that even a child can master. That is where the modern Phileas Fogg finds adventure.
 
Top