Quantum Evolution and a Hiatus to Spaceflight

The appearance of the quantum activity in telecommuting and all other human industries is destined to have profound effect on transportation, and likely to result in a diminishing importance to spaceflight beyond Earth orbit.

Certain studies of the prospects for space flight indicate that a distinctly nonzero chance exists that human beings will never attain space flight to the stars at all, or that millions of years may pass before they do. It may not be human beings as we know ourselves who reach the stars.. Spaceflight to the stars, searching for the Goldilocks planets, may be vital in the more distant future if Earth ever becomes uninhabitable for any reason, but that might not occur for millions of years. During that time the inhabitants of Earth will always be conscious of the possibility of flight to the stars, and will be evolving themselves and their designs and systems toward that goal, but it may not be attained until life on Earth is very different from what it is today.

Meanwhile, much is already changing change here on Earth.

The transportation glut is partly motivated even now by vestiges of the Cold War fear that nuclear war would require constant, large scale and hurried transportation of weapons across the country; that vestiges of the heavily inflated imaginary world projecting invasion of the Earth by space monsters, combined with sheer profit motive, drive the construction of roads and highways and the rampant production and sales of motor vehicles.

Meanwhile, the historical discoveries of the gravitational constant, speed of light, electronic charge, electron and proton masses and the nature and magnitude of the quantum are drawing human beings inexorably toward more meticulous, increasingly complete accounting of these things in all we do.

The result is that the transportation glut will collapse to sufficiency; to production on a far more carefully measured scale, and a return of sensibility in the magnitude of constructions of every kind. Human beings will never be daunted by very large constructions in the future, yet neither will they find the profit in gargantuan constructions is so inevitable that immense size is always the best possible solution.

These are among the reasons arts and crafts and other cottage industries are enjoying what appears at first to be merely extremely popular yet frivolous small economic factors. The need to design manufactures of wares and constructions in far more complete detail is intrinsic to life. It is why naturally evolved organisms have such fantastic variety of forms and details. The problem was not that life was making itself detailed; it was that wild organisms never had measurable and accountable understanding of the physical principles intrinsic to their own living forms. Now, human beings do. They care why their children have the forms, size and color that they are born with. They don't want missing factors in understanding why procreation leads form in the directions it does.

As human beings find increasingly widespread agreement on forms, they understand the material world in increasing detail as well. We are no longer content to allow trucks and other transportation equipment to turn cities into a deafening hell of noise pollution or poisonous gases or implacable danger. We are no longer willing to allow architectural structures to waste energy heating and cooling themselves with artificial machines when natural processes already heat and cool the very same structures.

Redefining the nature and meaning of transportation through optimizing every quantum of activity involved in the transportation will busy civilization for thousands of years, yet it is already drawing a close to the time of careless, brutish design. Nobody knows how to project developments in transportation and communication, yet already telecommuting is having profound, signal effect on the transportation industries. New developments in communications, telecommuting, relationships, organization and society literally do come, quantum by quantum, as the feel of quantized action becomes commonplace. That will not cease, ever.