Why do we so desperately need to get anywhere in the world in 30 minutes? This would only ever be used for war or to satisfy the whimsy of billionaires and it is a fantasy to believe otherwise.
The capacity to expand a massive amount of fossil fuels to get anywhere in the world in 30 minutes sounds downright cataclysmic for the environment but also for a basic sense of one place feeling different than any other place. The entire world will turn into spacex rocket parking lots for billionaires rushing around laying waste to an irradiated landscape of identically repeating neofuedalist suburbs with no access to clean water.
Just because the rockets get more advanced doesn't mean it is progress....
The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically one of them not being worth all the bother. On Earth — when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass — the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm's way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another — particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.
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