Jesus christ.
I often have this difficulty round here. People's opinions are not clear to me through their writings. When interrogated people get all defensive and also seem to think they can perfectly infer my position simply from the questions I ask.
I shan't bother, thanks.
Your interrogation came across to me as hostile strawmanning. I'll comment on the discourse step by step and maybe we can figure out where you or I went wrong.
Why? What obstacles do you see to this plan? I've yet to see a killer argument against it, other than "you'll never get rockets to airline safety levels" which is just an argument from incredulity.
Offshore landing platforms eliminates the sonic boom issue I know someone will bring up. Anything else?
Um, how about, it's a ridiculous waste of non-renewable resources designed to pander to a level of profligate vanity that makes ancient Egyptian pharaohs and Roman emperors seem like ascetics by comparison?
The quote immediately above was the post of mine you first responded to, which had Octavo's post quoted in it. I thought it was pretty clear that the "it" that I described as a "ridiculous waste" etc. was the same "it" that Octavo was talking about (which Octavo also referred to as "this plan"); that is, Elon Musk's proposal for rapid worldwide ground-to-ground passenger rocket transport, which was also the general topic of discussion at that point in the thread.
You're talking about air travel in general, right?
As I just explained, I was NOT talking about air travel in general and I thought that was pretty clear. No one was talking about air travel in general at that point.
If it actually wasn't clear to you which I was talking about, you could easily have phrased your own question clearly, "Are you talking about the Musk passenger rocket, or air travel in general?"
So by bringing it up in that way as a leading suggestion instead, I thought you were making a point something like, "well, air travel in general is pretty wasteful too, don't forget." And as it happens, I completely agree with that.
At the same time, I was pretty certain that (at least on a per-passenger basis, which is the basis I was using for comparison) air travel in general is not nearly as resource-intensive as worldwide ground-to-ground passenger rocket transport, and I wanted to make sure that fact remained in view if the discussion were going to turn to the resource costs of air travel in general.
To make sure that that was really the case, and that Musk hadn't come up with some engineering miracle that would make it not the case, whilst writing that post I looked up articles on the passenger rocket proposal to see what sort of rockets were proposed to be used and so forth, and compared the fuel consumption of typical rockets of that type with typical aircraft. Exact figures were hard to come by, but "at least a hundred times worse" (more fuel consumed per passenger mile) was a reasonable summary of my findings.
So I then responded:
Well, yes, but that's no reason to add a new air travel modality that's at least a hundred times worse.
The "that" referred to was (I thought, pretty clearly) the proposition that air travel in general is wasteful of resources. I wasn't sure, at this point, whether the point you were getting at was complete agreement with that proposition or not (and hence, pro-Musk-passenger-rocket or not) but my response, by design, addressed it either way.
Air travel, environmentally bad. Air travel by Musk passenger rocket, worse. Very clear, I thought.
You're deciding that 'now' is the right level of air travel?
On what basis?
And this was the record-scratch moment that seemed it could only be a challenge to my position via straw man. My position, I thought I had clearly laid out, is that
- Air travel 'now' is profligately wasteful of resources.
- Air travel by Musk passenger rocket would be far more so.
"Now is the right level of air travel" is a completely contradictory and therefore unfair characterization of that position. Your final question "on what basis?" was a demand that I defend that position I had never taken.
Again, if you were simply confused about my meaning, a question phrased as "Did you mean A, or B?" might have conveyed that better. (The demand to defend my position could wait until you
were clear on what my position was.)
Hence, the snarkiness of my response.
Good thing you included that final character there, the kind of hook shape with a dot under it, indicating an implied uncertainty. Because the words preceding it don't follow in any logically conceivable way from anything I've said.
If I suggested that a man who defecates on the lunchroom floor every Wednesday morning should not switch to doing it every day instead, would that constitute 'deciding' that once every Wednesday is the right level of defecating on the lunchroom floor?
That response, while snarky, also included an explanation by analogy of exactly why I considered your interpretation of my position ("'now' is the right level of air travel') incorrect and unfair.
Jesus christ.
I often have this difficulty round here. People's opinions are not clear to me through their writings. When interrogated people get all defensive and also seem to think they can perfectly infer my position simply from the questions I ask.
I shan't bother, thanks.
I'm sorry you often have that difficulty. I hope my explanations can help address it. And of course I welcome input from you and others into where I might have gone wrong with my own interpretations.
(Yeah, I know, they'll be on solid mechanical struts)
