问答题 The title of the talk is (11)____________. He wants to deal with (12) ____________and (13)____________first. In the future; (14) ____________can operate at almost two thousand miles per hour. We''ll have (15)____________, or hovercraft in the (16) ____________and (17)____________ class. The title of the talk is (11)____________. He wants to deal with (12) ____________and (13)____________first. In the future; (14) ____________can operate at almost two thousand miles per hour. We''ll have (15)____________, or hovercraft in the (16) ____________and (17)____________ class.
The title of my talk is ''Technology and the Future'', and it''s only fair to start with a couple of warnings. I have never been interested in the near future — only the more distant one. So if you take my predictions too seriously, you''ll go broke; but if your children don''t take them seriously enough, they''ll go broke. I''ll deal first with transportation and communication, because they are inextricably linked together and do more than anything else to shape society. For near-earth applications, both communication and transportation may now be approaching their practical limits and may reach them by the turn of the century. For terrestrial transportation, I don''t see any real need for much advance beyond the currently planned supersonic transports, operating at almost two thousand miles per hour. True, one could build pure rocket vehicles to go from pole to pole in about one hour, but I don''t think the public will enjoy fifteen minutes of high acceleration and fifteen minutes of high deceleration, separated by half an hour of complete weightlessness. Rather more practical, and of much more immediate importance, will be ground-effect vehicles, or hovercraft. I think we''ll have them in the thousand-ton and ten-thousand ton class by the end of the century. The political effect of such vehicles may be enormous, as they can go over land and sea and can cross most reasonable obstacles as if they aren''t there. You could have the great ''ports'' of the world at the centre of the continents, if you wanted to. That private hovercraft will ever be popular, I rather doubt. They are noisy and have poor efficiency and poor control. (You can''t put on the brakes in a hurry if you''re riding on a bubble of air. ) However, they are splendid for opening up terrain where conventional vehicles cannot travel — such as shallow rivers, swamps, ice fields, coral reefs at low tide, and similar types of fascinating and now inaccessible wilderness. I hope to see the automatic car before I die. Personally, I refuse to drive a car — I won''t have anything to do with any kind of transport in which I can''t read. I can see a time when it''s illegal for a human being to drive a car on a main highway. More seriously, we''ll certainly have to get rid of the petrol engine, and everybody is now waking up to the urgent necessity of this. Apart from the facts of air pollution, we have much more important uses for petroleum than burning it. To make non-petrol cars and other vehicles practical, we need some new power source. Fuel cells are already here, but they are only a marginal improvement. I don''t know how we''re going to do it, but we want something at least a hundred times lighter and more compact than present batteries.