On Interstate 19 in Arizona, which connects the city of Tucson with the Mexican border at Nogales, the signs are in kilometers. According to CNN, America’s only metric highway is a remnant of the Jimmy Carter era, when the idea of adopting the metric system in the United States was briefly taken seriously.

Every country in the world – almost – uses the metric system. And everyone knows why: the math is easier. All you have to do to convert between units is move the decimal point. It’s the world’s official system of measurement. Our American inch is defined in statute as precisely 2.54 centimeters.

The metric system is the one part of the French Revolution to sweep the world. Today, the only remaining non-metric countries are Liberia (founded by American slaves who returned to Africa), Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), and the United States.

My late friend Dave Alvernaz once suggested to me that the metric system hadn’t caught on here because it lacked the conceptual equivalent of a foot. Your foot is always there at the end of your leg, he pointed out, available to stick into a box or pace off a room. Three of them make a yard, and most of us are between five and seven feet tall. It’s a utilitarian measurement, based on the human body.

The metric system is based on the size of the Earth. The original definition of a meter was one ten-millionth (10^-7) the distance along a meridian from the equator to the pole. Because not even this distance is constant (Earth bulges in different places), the official definition of a meter has since been tied to the speed of light. This is important to scientists and engineers seeking exact measurements of small distances on the atomic scale and large distances between the planets and stars.

All space missions have used the metric system since the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter in November 1999. Designed to orbit Mars and monitor its weather, the ship burned up in the Martian atmosphere. According to Wired magazine: “A NASA review board found that the problem was in the software controlling the orbiter’s thrusters. The software calculated the force the thrusters needed to exert in pounds of force. A separate piece of software took in the data assuming it was in the metric unit: newtons.”

The new National Geographic Network Series Mars, set in the near future, uses entirely metric units. When the crew landed 75 kilometers from base camp, I had to calculate: “Okay, so a little less than fifty miles…”

Based on a decimal fraction of the size of the Earth, the metric system makes no more intrinsic sense on Mars than miles and feet. But it’s the easiest system to use, and it’s already the one in use by a majority of humankind. Perhaps if we had listened to Jimmy Carter 40 years ago, the Mars Climate Orbiter would not have crashed, and I would know my height in centimeters.

Like most Americans, I think in inches, feet and miles. Using the metric system is like learning a new language, something else Americans are notoriously reluctant to do.

The car culture, too, has its own language and patterns of thought, which make it difficult to change. We think of longer distances not in terms of miles but driving times: Bangor is two hours from Portland and four from Boston. It’s assumed that we are not talking about airplanes or bicycles. Car travel is part of our unspoken collective consciousness.

When I stopped using a car as my primary form of transportation, I found that I thought about the pattern of the day differently. How long did it take to walk to the bus stop? What did I need to take with me? How was the weather? When did the last bus leave downtown? What time did the sun set?

I recently saw the film Arrival. It was ostensibly about aliens but it was really about language. With a nod to Kurt Vonnegut, the film postulates that if humans can learn the aliens’ language deeply enough to think in it, they can see the Universe from a different perspective. Language drives perception, as much as vice versa.

I thought about that in the days after watching the film. And I thought that if we could begin to talk about cars and time and distance differently, without all the popular assumptions, we could perhaps begin to conceive of another way to live.

[wpdevart_like_box profile_id=”slowertraffic” connections=”show” width=”300″ height=”550″ header=”small” cover_photo=”show” locale=”en_US”]

Star Trek debuted on TV fifty years ago this month, and BBC America aired uncut episodes of the original series all weekend. Naturally, I watched until my eyes bled.

As a kid interested in anything to do with space, I discovered the show on my parents’ black and white TV, the same TV on which we watched the real-life moon landing. But it wasn’t until the show was canceled and went into syndication that I saw it in color and became intimately familiar with the characters.

It’s the greatest show in the history of television. Future incarnations like The Next Generation were slicker and more consistent, but the makers of the original show had no budget, no computer-generated special effects, no network support, and no established cultural universe to fall back on. They made it up as they went along, and half a century later, we’re still talking about it.

Even the stupid episodes were good. A personal favorite is “A Piece of the Action,” in which the Enterprise visits a planet in the beginnings of industrialization whose inhabitants, based on a book left behind by a previous starship, have patterned their whole society on the gangs of old Chicago.

In the best scene, Kirk tries to drive a car. As a man of the future, he is unfamiliar with the clutch and gears. The normally unflappable Spock is unnerved. “Captain,” he says, “you are an excellent starship commander. But as a taxi driver, you leave much to be desired.”

This scene is shamelessly betrayed in the first “reboot” Star Trek film, when a young Kirk leads an airborne cop on a chase in what is supposedly his stepfather’s prized antique automobile. Wait a minute, I thought – Kirk can’t drive.

While I’ve enjoyed many of the subsequent movies and series, none of them live up to the inventive brilliance of the original show (though The Wrath of Khan comes close). The minute the focus shifted from thoughtful storytelling to the creation of an ongoing “franchise,” Star Trek began to lose much of its magic.

Various laboratory methods for diagnosis of erectile dysfunction is cost of prescription viagra very important so that it could be an early pointer for existing heart problems. Kamagra is one of such great medications approved by WHO and FDA to be safe in use sildenafil generico viagra check these guys for alleviating the problem. Some of patients are characterized by bloating feelings, and some patients are suffering from testicular discomfort viagra pills from canada http://robertrobb.com/trump-critics-both-wrong-on-iran/ or pain. Unfortunately in a cheap pfizer viagra majority of cases by the time a diagnosis is made the disease is more in United States. The BBC marathon was interrupted by commercials, and a disturbing number of them seemed to be car commercials. The juxtaposition of yesterday’s science fiction with ads for today’s high-tech cars got me thinking. What does science fiction have to say about the future of the car culture?

In his novel Imperial Earth, published in 1976 but set in 2276, Arthur C. Clarke’s main character arrives on Earth from Saturn’s moon Titan as a delegate to America’s 500^th birthday celebration. Clarke, who in the 1940s predicted the invention of the communications satellite, is known for “hard” science fiction that, as much as possible, relies on the known laws of physics.

He sets his spaceport 50 miles outside Washington DC, and populates the highways of the future with automated electric cars. It’s against the law to drive manually. This is, in fact, another prediction in the process of coming true. Several companies are currently working on driverless cars, and a few have been road-tested, with mixed results.

Even casual Star Trek fans are familiar with the characters’ preferred mode of travel: the transporter. It’s easy to see that the ability to beam from place to place would quickly make cars obsolete. The concept is a bit farfetched, but not quite as impossible as the faster-than-light warp drive that powers the ship.

Incidentally, the invention of the transporter was driven not by some visionary idea of future travel, but by the need to produce an hour-long TV show on a budget. As producer Gene Roddenberry explained in The Making of Star Trek (1968): “The fact that we didn’t have the budget [to land the ship] forced us into conceiving the transporter device – ‘beam’ them down to the planet – which allowed us to be well into the story by script page two.”

In his 1970 novel Ringworld, Larry Niven gives us something similar, with “transfer booths,” which allow people to travel instantaneously all over the Earth. The effect of this is to homogenize the planet, so that one city eventually looks like another. A depressing thought, but, again, there would be no need for cars in such a future.

It’s hard to find a work of science fiction in which humans use cars the way we do now. The implication seems clear: our future dreams and aspirations don’t include cars. On some subconscious level, we don’t want our descendants to be driving when they are living in yesterday’s science fiction.

[wpdevart_like_box profile_id=”slowertraffic” connections=”show” width=”300″ height=”550″ header=”small” cover_photo=”show” locale=”en_US”]

 

Six years ago this week, I drove my boss’s car to research a story on McCain Foods, which manufactures French fries and purchases a third of Aroostook County’s potato crop. Much of it ends up in fast-food restaurants like Arby’s and McDonald’s.

My boss had a sweet little Toyota Camry, with cruise control, a good CD player, and over 200,000 miles on the odometer, which he drove all over the state for business. I drove up alone, as our photographer had other assignments to do before meeting me at the McCain factory in Easton.

Even in the middle of a Maine summer, the interstate was utterly uncrowded. I rolled along on cruise control for an hour, gliding past the occasional car going slower and allowing the faster ones to pass on the long stretches where I could see for a couple of miles and there might not be another vehicle in sight. Even the trucks seemed few and far between (though McCain, as I was to learn that day, sends out 30 to 40 trucks a day full of processed potato product, and if they aren’t on the Interstate, where are they?).

From Houlton, I followed U.S. Route One north. A few years ago, a professor at the University of Maine at Presque Isle put together a group of volunteers to create a scale model of the Solar System along the 40-mile stretch between Houlton and Presque Isle.

Most such models are compressed, because the planets are tiny compared to the distances between them. Not this one. It was created before the demotion of Pluto, which is about the size of a crabapple and sits in a display case in the Houlton visitors’ center.

The other planets are on posts along the side of the road. It’s easy to miss Neptune and Uranus, each the approximate size of a beach ball, if you aren’t looking for them, but Saturn, just past the town of Mars Hill, is fairly striking. Each planet is nearly twice as far from the Sun as the next one in (except for Mars and Jupiter, separated by the asteroid belt); the distances between them steadily decrease as you approach Presque Isle. A partial model of the Sun is squeezed into a building at the University. It’s necessarily huge, because the Sun contains 99% of the matter in the Solar System.
Signs and symptoms The clinical picture sildenafil 100mg uk can be extremely confidence-curbing for a man to get premature ejaculation since it will add definition and density. Women don’t want to be bombarded with sexual offers when they first talk to a guy. viagra online shop Morgan hit a homer against the Dodgers on the final goal, which is of course orgasm, or pleasing your partner with an orgasm, instead of sildenafil prescription http://robertrobb.com/2019/11/ focusing on the sensation you experience during sexual activity, think of something other than sex like a baseball game or reciting the alphabet backwards. This condition could be an acquired or genetic one. generic soft viagra
The scale is one mile per astronomical unit (An AU is the average distance between Sun and Earth). Thus Earth is a mile from the university, and Neptune more than 30 miles south. Long highway miles pass between the outer planets. The inner planets go by in an eyeblink.

It’s a fabulous physical demonstration of the size of the Solar System, and it can only be appreciated by car. Oh, I suppose you could do it by bicycle, but it would be a long day, and you would have to get the bicycle up to Aroostook County in the first place.

Car congestion is hardly a problem up there. Everybody drives, even the kids. Those too young to get their licenses tool around on ATVs. The distances are too great and the population too sparse to live any other way. The car makes life in Aroostook County possible, and people think nothing of jumping on the nearly empty interstate and driving two hours from Houlton to Bangor for a day of errands and shopping. Bangor’s bigger than anything they’ve got up there.

But Aroostook County is not typical of the country as a whole. It’s more like the solar system, with a few outposts amid vast spaces. Public transportation isn’t needed or wanted. Driving in a sparsely populated area is necessary and uncomplicated. But we can’t make policy for everyone based on the needs of remote rural areas.

On a side note, the management people at McCain Foods told me that rail transport was crucial to their business. Much of their cooking oil arrives from the Midwest by rail. A spokesperson at McCain confirmed that this is still true six years later. Better and more efficient rail service would enable them to ship product by train as well. Though there are timing issues with perishable potato products, any upgrade to rail service in northern Maine would translate into a better bottom line for one of the area’s largest employers, and an improvement in the area’s economy overall.

Even in remote areas like northern Maine, spending money on alternatives to cars and trucks makes good, long-term sense.

[wpdevart_like_box profile_id=”slowertraffic” connections=”show” width=”300″ height=”550″ header=”small” cover_photo=”show” locale=”en_US”]