The skies of Oklahoma City roared for six months in 1964 as military aircraft intentionally rattled the population below with a daily barrage of thunderous sonic booms. It was a controversial test — the consequences of which have lingered to this day.
Two approaches in the works could revolutionize air travel by making future supersonic passenger planes compliant with the FAA’s new noise rules: Colorado-based company Boom Supersonic, which is specifically mentioned in the FAA proposal, plans to use physics to prevent sonic booms from ever reaching the ground, regardless of plane design. NASA, on the other hand, is flying an experimental plane called X-59 that is specifically designed to reduce the intensity of the boom.
This should be considered terrorism against the climate. There’s absolutely no need for this technology beyond convenience for the rich and privileged.
There are legitimate materials science, atmospheric sound propagation physics, and climate science modeling questions that are being answered by these tests. I believe it extremely short sighted to think the application of this technology and enhanced fluid dynamics to be limited to “rich people fuck the planet faster”.
I’m not saying that it is never fair to criticize a scientific endeavor, but enhancing our understanding of quickly transporting things through a dense atmosphere is not a bad thing.
I don’t really see how this could be used for anything else but even then it’s hard to see how the benefits would outweigh the harms of enabling climate arson.
Would it still be terrorism if the technologies being developed makes subsonic travel more efficient?
More efficient than standard air travel? I seriously doubt that’s possible but I guess it would be less bad then.