It's reflective of the gradual dawning that while technology is amazing and exciting and can help people, under current systems it's more likely to be used to benefit the thousand or so richest people in the world and fuck everyone else over. Could we make supersonic jets more quiet and less disruptive? Yeah, probably. But why would a single cent be spent on that? The people flying in them don't give a single shit. They would only get quieter as a side effect of an improvement that somehow increases return.

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vlovich123 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Because it’s not up to them. Look at Tesla: started with an overpriced roadster to sell to rich people and ended up with a budget electric car.

Starting with the high end where there’s demand and revenues to justify R&D generally eventually filters out to enrich everyone because that’s fundamentally a larger market to go after. There’s a million problems these supersonic aircraft will have to solve so even if supersonic travel never becomes affordable, other inventions still move things forward. Case in point: the space race and race to the moon - so many technology booms in the 60s-90s because of fundamental R&D done in service of tech that had nothing to do with daily life.

	▲	vlovich123 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Here’s an example of a life saving application you could imagine being enabled: there’s a huge problem with getting organ donors’ organs to meet supply where demand is (why there’s state level registries instead of a national one). If there’s constantly these jets buzzing about, you could imagine regulations that require them to aid emergency personnel transporting organs when such transports come up - it’s not like you’re transporting anything big / you don’t actually need to transport people - just make sure every flight can appropriately have it attached and then you toss it on when it needs to go somewhere better than is available in the local vicinity (and heavy fines and pilots losing licenses if they detour from their declared destination).