Coming to the meridian at this time of a winter evening is the immensely long constellation of the river Eridanus.
See the end note about enlarging illustrations.
It appears like this in our Map of the Starry Sky.
– though that’s just the northern third of it, beside which sits Rana, the Frog.
I’ve talked before about Eridanus, its possible connection with Sumerian cosmology and the ancient city Eridu. What I didn’t mention was that in the Cargo cults of Melanesia it was not a river but a railway.
Just kidding, of course, in order to segway into my Home Planet Department. Here’s a possibly hare-brained contribution to the debate about its environmental problems.
I’ve often thought that a benign form of transport in the future might be moving walkways. You see them in airports, though they’re also used in other places.
Couldn’t a moving walkway from one town to another replace an army of cars? You would step onto it with a suitcase of what you need to take with you.
During one of the many train journeys I’ve had to take recently, it further occurred to me that a number of moving walkways of increasing speed, parallel to each other and to a train track, could allow you to board a moving train. The last walkway would be attached to the side of the train, and you would step in through a door.
According to current common knowledge, that is, an internet search, a normal speed of walking is about 5 kilometers per hour; that’s 3.1 miles an hour. And the speed if a moving walkway is 1.4 miles an hour. That means, presumably, that when you step onto it and keep walking you’re going 1.4 miles an hour faster.
I’m not sure whether, at each move from a walkway to the next, to add a factor or to multiply by a factor. If the latter, I figure it would take nine transitions to reach 60 miles an hour; if the former, it might take a lot more. But it’s the nature of technologies to keep building on themselves. The bicycle is much more efficient than its first incarnations.
Supposing there’s anything in this, and a strap of parallel walkways could reach the speed of a train, then that train doesn’t need to stop at stations. This was what made the idea occur to me. Some trains stop at Overton and Grately, others don’t, and still smaller places in between have to be envious of even Overton and Grately. You could board the train from the nearest point to wherever you live. Maybe from a field.
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Thank you, Guy – I enjoyed your ruminations on this travel concept.
A similar system, which I remember vividly from childhood reading, is described in Asimov’s Caves of Steel…a nice summary is here: https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/5-sci-fi-inventions-i-cant-wait-to-see-in-the-real-world-2062174b0cb2
In fact, I just found, in Wikipedia, an image of the cover of Galaxy Magazine in which Caves of Steel was serialized, and the image includes the cover artist’s conception of the parallel walkways! see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov#Science_fiction. This issue was published in 1953, so after Heinlein’s story and long after Mitchell’s.
Thinking about your idea of walk ways got me back to remembering my trip to Hong Kong about 5 years ago.the city (semi)state has a very unusual form of public transport,the mid level escalators.these must run over 1.5 km from the business centre about 3/4 of the way up Victoria peak.there are 2 parallel escalators and run in one direction only generally going up the hill to the area known as the mid levels but in the morning when people are going to work they run for a few hours down, I’d guess that anyone who wants to go up during this time would have a very steep walk….very!
Hello Guy,
The idea of successively faster, parallel walkways put me in mind of the humorous short story “The Tachypomp” by Edward Page Mitchell, first published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1873 and subsequently compiled in the marvelous anthology “Fantasia Mathematica” edited by Cilfton Fadiman in 1958 (still in print; Simon and Shuster).
In the story, one train after the next was to be mounted on tracks laid on the top of the one below. If enough such trains were mounted, one on top of the next, the speed of light might be approached … and exceeded (mind, this was 1873)!
I spent much of my youth in South Africa so have fond memories of achanar the head star of eridanus.its a strange constellation with a tiny bit in the northern hemisphere stretching right down to the south polar regions.at about 58 degrees south I reckon that you’d have to be somewhere around 33 degrees north before achanar even hit the southern horizon.
This weekend I drove to a remote location in eastern North Carolina with my telescope and camera equipment to experience the extremely dark skies on this “nearly no Moon” weekend. In a very dark sky, it’s amazing how well Eridanus stands out. Even though most of its stars are pretty dim, it’s easy to trace out the entire river from Rigel all the way to the horizon (at 35 deg N, I couldn’t see Achernar, of course, but Acamar is visible). The river is marked by little groups of stars in distinctive patterns, linked together by curving chains of stars that seem almost obvious in their relationship to each other.
A train moving at a constant speed would be much more energy-efficient than a train that needs to slow down and stop at a station, accelerate up to speed on the next run, slow down and stop for the next station, etc. Passengers would need to be more assertively prompted to get ready to get off the train at their stop, because they wouldn’t feel the train slowing down. Cooks and dishwashers in the dining car would have an easier job.
I am reminded of the short story by Robert A. Heinlein, “The Roads Must Roll”…
I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, but Robert Heinlein explored the idea of a network of moving walkways for basic transportation in his 1940 story “The Roads Must Roll”.
Ahh, yes.
Also a radio broadcast, on “Dimension X” maybe? Just don’t be on them when they stop!