Yes. I am astonished that you do not already know that.
On 9-11, the combined maximal efforts of civilian and military aviation were unable to locate four airliners because their transponders were turned off. This occurred near the New York and DC metropolitan areas, some of the most carefully controlled air space in the world.
Without a transponder, an aircraft is just a raw radar return among, potentially, hundreds or thousands of other returns from civilian and military aircraft, weather, birds, balloons etc. Add to that glitches, ghosts and anomalies in busy air space and it is not surprising that a large aircraft without a transponder can hide in plain sight.
The black boxes are fine. ACARS/ADS-B are usually helpful, just not in this case, so far as we know.
There is already a perfectly capable technology in place: the 406 MHz ELT. If it turns out the the (probably two) ELTs did not transmit, we need to think about why.
Things can go bad quickly on a commercial jet. No one has time to manually activate the ELT before a sudden impact.
At least one of the ELTs is required to activate automatically in case of an impact. A hard landing is enough.
So why did at least one of the ELTs not activate? here are some possibilities:
1) It did, and we don't know about it. The media is so ignorant about the details of technological systems that they don't know the questions to ask, cannot understand the relevance of technical details, and would not understand the answers in any case. Welcome to the idiocracy.
2) An ELT activated, but was not picked up. Very unlikely. If an ELT activated aboard MH370, the satellites would almost certainly have received the signal and passed it on.
3) The aircraft hit the water intact, and the ELTs were destroyed before they could activate.
We can't do anything about the stupidity of the media except to educate ourselves, stop consuming media garbage, and hope that, eventually, the human condition will improve.
If option (3) is correct, then we can also do nothing. Any force sufficient to interfere with the safe operation of the aircraft by competent pilots should also have been sufficient to activate an ELT.
If the ELT did not activate, it means that the aircraft was flyable. We cannot adjust the sensitivity of the ELTs to activate on flyable aircraft, because the rate of false activations would be unacceptable.
Apparently, we also cannot eliminate the impact of flyable aircraft with terrain by pilot training; quite the contrary--the phenomenon seems to be increasing.
Improved autopilots are also not the answer. Of necessity, an autopilot must relinquish control to human pilots in many circumstances where anomalous data is received. This is the circumstance in which it is most likely that the human pilot, taking control of a partially disabled aircraft, often at night and over water, will crash a flyable aircraft into terrain. There has been a growing series of such accidents.
So, no, we do not need to rethink "black boxes". They do their job very well. We also do not need to rethink the ELT--it is a very reliable technology except when people crash a flyable aircraft.
We may want to continue to upgrade the packet data rate between the aircraft and its base, but that is already the plan.
We also cannot upgrade the autopilot, because we cannot yet create artificial intelligence that can deal with a chaotic system like a partially disabled aircraft.
We may want to think about giving pilots better ways of seeing an overview of their situation. Mandatory AOA indicators and external-view situation indicators would be a great start.
Probably also rethinking reflexive media coverage of aviation would be good. Our need to know immediately does not trump the well-thought-out engineering of commercial airliners, and pandering to our self-absorbed search for meaning and quick fixes, particularly when none is available, is likely degrade, rather than improve, the human condition.
The numbers only become science-fictiony large if you want to go fast. Why not go slowly?
The only reason humanity is obsessed with speed is because of our short life spans, but that is a solvable problem.
All we have to do is to eliminate aging and it's associated diseases, and then we can take our time going to the stars.
The most difficult part may be accepting limits upon our appetites, so that we are not driven to consume everything and we can live sustainably. This is an issue aboard a starship, where we will have to take a chill pill on consumption of resources, just as it is an issue on starship Earth.
Complex dynamics 101: life is a complex dynamical system. If the math of chaos is wrong, the processes underlying life would not operate as they do. Life would not exist as we observe it.
Also, your iPad would not work. As I said, QED. This is not controversial.
A ridiculous measure, because it depends upon the definition of "correct", which is an arbitrary reduction of continuous data to a single axis, and because the scoring is conducted by those who have a vested interest in the outcome, and that's just for starters.
How about applying some statistics, like the probability that a correct forecast (whatever that is) could be accounted for by chance, given the population of forecasts and conditions in which it takes place? P-values have their limitations, but that's no reason to discard them entirely.
I'm sorry, what part of complex dynamics did you not understand?
It doesn't matter how slowly things change. It doesn't matter how big the inputs are. Complex dynamics teaches us that scale does not matter; very small inputs can and do end up being more important than very large inputs.
I'll say it again: scale does not matter.
No, they cannot tell if a season is going bad well ahead of time. It is a fallacy to think that they can. They can tell that a season is going bad exactly at the moment the season starts to go bad.
Why is it that every time I raise the issue of the unknowable future of chaotic systems that people down-vote me? Is it so hard for you to accept? Check the math and the science: it is sound. I am sorry you do not like it, but the mathematics of chaos is not some fringe idea. It underlies everything. I'm astonished that so few people have noticed this.
Your lovely neighbours cannot be correct except by chance; if there was any validity to their predictions, it would imply not just that they knew the future of the weather, but that the future of the weather was knowable, which it certainly is not. Your tendency to see their predictions as accurate is likely a conflation of your confirmation bias and your choice-supportive bias.
Humans naturally search for meaning in chaos. That is all that their observations of caterpillars and trees and birds amounts to. They are trying to attach significance to a chaotic universe in order to reassure themselves that their place in the world makes sense. It does not. This is mathematically verifiable.
If the birds and the caterpillars and the apple trees could know the future of chaotic systems, it would imply that we live in a deterministic universe where birds and caterpillars and apple trees could not exist. QED.
That is because the weather is a chaotic system. It is governed by the mathematics of complex dynamics.
Predictions diminish in accuracy with increasing time because the number of inputs rapidly approaches infinity, and each one of them can turn out to be determinative of the overall behaviour of the system.
It should be no surprise to any scientifically literate person that a weather forecast issued in October has no validity by January. Any resemblance to reality is purely accounted for by chance.
This is not amenable to the Mr. Fix-It mentality that inevitably shows up in these discussions. There is good reason to believe that weather prediction will never improve, no matter what the scientific and technological developments, because the future of a chaotic system is mathematically intractable and genuinely unknowable.
The same argument applies to climate science. I'm sorry to bring you the very bad news that we live in a chaotic universe, not a deterministic one. Get over it. Wear a helmet.
Edit: The mysterious part is that the scientists at the so-called Climate Prediction Center would issue a 3-month forecast. What part of complex dynamics did they not understand? Sometimes an expert is just a guy with slides.
Many problems must be solved before they can exist.
(1) Only suitable material for the cable is, at the moment, unobtanium.
(2) Cable must be moved continuously to dodge debris and satellites whose orbits cross the equator (all of them except those in geosynchronous orbit).
(3) The cable, elevator module and any cargo or people must pass through the Van Allen belts, which will degrade them. People don't respond well to degradation by radiation.
This is what happens when police officers get confused about their job. Their job is to serve and protect, but sometimes they think their job is to pound down the nails.
This is idiotica: a ridiculous attempt at a tie-in between pseudoscience and a topical event. it is a waste of time and effort for the reader, the writer, and the researcher.
Climate science is bullshit because it is not science; it is an observational discipline that cloaks itself in the language of science. Calling it science is simply an expression of our vastly inflated impression of ourselves.
Oh, we are severely fucking up this planet, don't get me wrong, we just don't have the tools to prove it scientifically yet. Pretending that we do is just going to make things worse.
The only purposes that this article can serve are to raise the profile of the researcher for tenure-track consideration, and to make money for the newspaper that is shilling for the consumerism that is causing the environmental problem in the first place.
If you are concerned about the planet, don't waste your time with this article. Instead, here's a list of things you can do that would actually make a difference:
(1) Stop having children.
(2) Promote mandatory population control.
(3) Stop driving your gas-powered car.
(4) Stop eating in restaurants.
(5) Stop buying stuff in disposable plastic containers.
(6) Stop spending so much money, you fucking assholes--you are driving the machine that is tearing up the Earth.
The problem with your reasoning is that you neglect the fact, as do almost all humans in technological societies, that easily 90% of the energy we consume is wasted. You are not to blame; when you have no firsthand experience of a thing, it is normal for one to be oblivious to its existence.
I have lived for many years within the energy budget provided by photovoltaics and the wind. It is possible to live well under such circumstances, and to be as technological as a city dweller, but first you have to eliminate the waste.
Take, for example, your houses and apartment buildings. They are so poorly constructed that the planet would be considerably better off, despite the waste, if we tore down every single last one of them and rebuilt them for longevity and energy efficiency.
A few buildings (maybe three in a city of 5 million people) are constructed well. They use (at the moment) ICF techniques and they are so well insulated that, even in the coldest days of January, the heating system can fail completely for over three days BEFORE ANYONE NOTICES that it is broken. They can use geothermal heating exclusively both winter and summer and provide complete comfort for 10% of the normal cost.
But you do not build your stuctures like this because energy efficiency is not a priority; money is the priority. The scumbag builders build shit buildings to maximize their profits; the scumbag realtors sell units to the ignorant masses for a fortune, and nothing changes.
What is wrong with humanity is that we are just too fucking stupid and far too much in love with ourselves to do the reasonable thing. We are crazy for money and it has become the arbiter of all success. Instead of killing off 90% of the species, we could begin by simply eliminating the 90% of our activity that is wilfully wasted and continue to live well, so long as the reduction in resource usage was not simply an excuse to increase our already ridiculous numbers.
So that is my alternative: stop being monsters. Otherwise I cast my vote for us all to die of a virus incubated in the backstreets of Shenzhen, and good riddance.
December 2013, North Atlantic Ocean between Florida, Bermuda, and the Eastern Caribbean: nearly devoid of sea birds and fish; plastic garbage common.
January 2014, Coastal Everglades of Florida: silent. No birdsong. None.
February 2014, Florida Bay and the Keys: enough lobster pots that you could walk from Cape Sable to Key West without getting your shoes wet. This is absolutely not a sustainable fishery--this is an unmitigated rape of the planet for the almighty dollar, even inside the supposedly protected waters of the marine sanctuary.
If you want to build a functioning starship along the lines of Icarus by the year 2100, there is a lot of basic science that has to be done. It is very difficult to predict the course of basic science, because you don't know what you don't know, and it is therefore hard to anticipate how far away the frontiers might be.
The main problem with Icarus is that it aims to create a ship that can do the trip on the scale of a human lifetime. With space travel, the amount of energy required, and therefore the difficulty of the project, is related almost exclusively to how fast you want to get there, the delta-v, if you will.
Therefore, it is unreasonable for Icarus to set a timetable.
If you really want to set a timetable, there is an easier way: stop worrying about how long it takes. Concentrate all of your effort into curing death, and then build a starship with a solar-sail, or some other sort of environmentally-friendly, but slow, technology.
The advantages to this approach are many: easier to get funding, direct economic payoff, no difficulty convincing people that your effort is worthwhile, and, oh yes, you get to cure death.
Then, while you are aboard your starship, you can spend the hundreds of years (say) that it takes you to get to Alpha Centauri further advancing science. If you are adequately equipped, as a nuclear-pulse propulsion vessel would likely be, you can invent better propulsion technology as you go along.
In a sense, the problem of human senescence and its attendant illnesses and the problem of interstellar travel are one and the same. If someone asked me to solve the latter as quickly as possible, I would begin by solving the former.
Most notional implementations of the Bussard Ramjet depend upon some sort of heretofore undiscovered force field rather than a physical structure to collect hydrogen, because size matters.
Naturally, a very large force field ramjet will deplete interstellar hydrogen along the main routes between stars, leading to a situation known as "peak hydrogen", and possibly prompting the invasion of developing hydrogen-rich planets on some sort of flimsy pretext.
Most scientists working on imaginary spacecraft projects therefore eschew the Bussard, correctly anticipating the moment when, shortly after the leader gives a speech on the deck of a starship in front of a huge "Hydrogen Accomplished" banner, the price of hydrogen rises to over $5 a gallon and starships are all left to rust in the front yard.
Q: Why did you choose fusion based propulsion for Project Icarus?
A: Well, we thought about it and we realized that the only appropriate power source for an imaginary starship was a likewise imaginary one. And while there are certainly many options in the field of imaginary power generation, we rejected some of the main contenders for a variety of reasons.
"Maxwell's Demons" would have alienated both the new-agey spiritual sci-fi crowd and also the fundamentalists because it sounds medieval and just evil at the same time.
"Dilithium crystals" was taken. The zero-point people are bunch of wack jobs and we certainly didn't want to be tarred with that brush. "Fairy wings" just sounds too wussy for our tastes.
So, you see, there aren't all that many choices of power left for an imaginary starship. Fusion sounds just about right, especially if you say is slowly, with gravitas, like "fuuuuuuusion".
"Major Tracy Bunko — then posted at the Pentagon's Air Force press desk"
Now who can we get to really blow some smoke on these classified projects? Well, there's Major Bunko, sir. They say he can really sling some major... uh... bunko.