It's not Earth 2.0, but our new rocky neighbour is a planet worth watching

Who goes there? It's very unlikely humans ever will, for sure. NASA/JPL-Caltech

The recent discovery of Earth-like exoplanet Kepler 452-b has caught people’s imagination, with some calling it “Earth 2.0”. But this has led to another new, potentially far more important exoplanet’s discovery going unnoticed. While it may not have a catchy name, HD 219134 b, the nearest known rocky planet outside our solar system, deserves our attention too.

The planet (”b”) orbits its star HD 219134, which is visible to the human eye near the constellation Cassiopeia, only 21 light-years from the sun. The planet orbits its star alongside three others – like our solar system with Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, HD 219134 b has planetary siblings.

Say hello: HD 219134 is easy to spot in the night sky. NASA

What makes HD 219134 b special is how near it is to us – relatively speaking. We can learn a lot about exoplanets like this with techniques that would be difficult or impossible for those at greater distances.

For example, using a technique called the radial velocity method it’s possible to deduce an exoplanet’s mass by measuring tiny movements of the star caused by the exoplanet’s gravitational pull. This reveals that HD 219134 b has a mass of between four and five times that of the Earth, making it a type of exoplanet known as a “super Earth”.

The radial velocity technique for measuring a planet’s mass. Credit: ESO

We can learn more about exoplanets when their orbit takes them between their host star and us. This blocks some of the starlight during the transit, which reveals the planet’s diameter. HD 219134 b is just 1.6 times bigger than the Earth, which together with the measured planetary mass establishes that the planet has the density of rock.

In contrast Kepler 452-b’s mass hasn’t been measured, so it’s not known whether the purported “Earth 2.0” is really a rocky planet at all, although similar-sized planets with measured masses are generally rocky. The fact is, at a distance of 1,400 light years it’s very difficult to measure anything using radial velocity methods.

Getting to know our neighbour

So HD 219134 b is now both the nearest known rocky planet and, more importantly, the nearest known planet that transits in front of its star. This kind of planet is particularly exciting for astronomers. If it has an atmosphere, then its nature can be revealed when starlight passes through it during transit.

The atoms and ions making up the atmosphere each absorb starlight at their own characteristic pattern of wavelengths. These tiny amounts of extra absorption can be detected, allowing us to measure the atmosphere’s composition. This is important: it reveals details about processes like volcanism on the planet surface, tells us something of how the planet has evolved, and the atmosphere determines the planet’s surface temperature.

Space telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the proposed Twinkle mission, can take these measurements. But the accuracy is limited by the amount of light we collect. Give an astronomer a choice between two similar stars at very different distances from the sun, they will always choose the nearer. A factor of 10 increase in distance means 99% less light, and this is precisely why finding such a nearby transiting planet is a big deal.

The HD 219134 family portrait: artist’s impression of the system. Avet Harutyunyan/TNG

What about Earth 2.0?

The search for exo-Earths has moved on, from science fiction to just science. To place ourselves, our planet and our solar system in their proper galactic and universal context by studying other examples can answer questions which have probably existed since human consciousness arose.

Kepler 452-b has an important place in this new science of comparative planetology, as one of the first convincing candidates for an Earth-like planet. But it’s just a candidate: there is a lot about Kepler 452-b that we can’t be sure about, as it’s just too far away. On the other hand the relative proximity of HD 219134 b, though it orbits very close to its host star and so is far too hot for liquid water to exist on the surface, provides us better opportunities to unlock its secrets.

One of the most important things the Kepler observatory has revealed is that small rocky planets appear to be plentiful. This makes it a statistical near-certainty that there are Earth-like planets much closer to us than Kepler 452-b – we just haven’t found them yet. Meanwhile, planets around bright, nearby stars such as HD 219134 constitute one of the most exciting areas of astronomy.

HD 219134 b will teach us much in the next few years about the formation and evolution of a neighbouring planetary system, and this will begin the scientific journey that will ultimately place our own solar system in the wider story of planet formation throughout the Milky Way galaxy.

Researchers are looking to a surprisingly old idea for the next generation of ships: wind power

University of Tokyo

In many ways, it’s an obvious solution. For many centuries, world trade over the oceans was propelled by wind power alone. Now that we’re seeking an alternative to the fossil fuel-burning vehicles that enable our modern standard of living, some people are turning again to renewable solutions such as wind to power our tankers, bulk carriers and container ships. Globalisation and economic growth might mean a direct reversion to the wooden sailing boats of yore makes no sense, but there are several 21st-century ideas that could make wind-powered shipping commonplace again.

Ship design certainly has a way to go to return to its heritage and take advantage of the wind’s free, renewable resource in the same way we have reinvented the windmill to produce electricity. However, it’s worth remembering wind turbines took a long time to evolve into the structures optimised and deployed at scale we have today. In fact, they’re still developing. Scientists and engineers have debated for years about the relative merits of two, three or more blades, of horizontal versus vertical configurations, and of onshore versus offshore generation.

For ships, the design process for wind technologies is potentially even more complicated and multi-dimensional. There are soft sails, rigid “wing” sails, flettner rotors (a spinning cylindrical vertical column that creates lift using the Magnus effect, originally conceived by Flettner in the 1920s) and kites all vying for a share of this market. Soft sails are fabric sails, most reminiscent of existing sailing ship designs, examples include the Dynarig and Fastrig. Rigid wing sails replace the fabric with a rigid lifting surface like a vertically mounted aircraft wing - for example the oceanfoil design.

A flettner rotor is a vertical cylinder rotated by a motor. The rotation modifies the air flowing around the cylinder to generate lift much like the lift generated by an aircraft wing (it’s referred to as the Magnus effect). While there are many examples of all four, so far it’s the kites and the flettners that have seen the most significant implementation on large merchant ship designs.

Notable examples include the work that Cargill and Wessels have done trialing kite systems , and the experience of two separate operators, Enercon and Norsepower with installations of different flettner designs on different ships. These trials have produced important full-scale experience, lessons about costs, performance data, and evidence for investment cases. All of which are undoubtedly taking us closer to the tipping point when wind once again becomes a ‘no brainer’.

Enercon’s E-Ship 1 with flettners Carschen/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Trials of these new technologies, in combination with the history of wind turbines, can help us understand why any transition to modern wind-powered ships won’t happen overnight. For one thing, no one yet knows which of the many candidate designs will be the most successful.

Modern wind-powered shipping technology also carries a significant engineering challenge that wind turbines don’t: it needs to be mobile. It’s not as simple as bolting a rig to the deck. The highest safety standards have to be maintained and the rig must pose no constraints to loading and unloading cargoes in an uncertain and wide range of different ports (many of which might be obstructed by bridges).

Resolving these issues will take time, money and investors with the appetite for risk and stamina to see an emerging technology from a prototype to a fully developed new product. But I believe the change will happen because of the price of fossil fuels and environmental regulation. Wind power is free so the technology will become a worthwhile investment once it can be clearly evidenced that the saving from moving away from fossil fuels outweighs the costs of installing and operating a wind-powered ship.

Many think that threshold oil price has already been achieved and exceeded, as evidenced by the large and growing number of projects proposing wind propulsion solutions, even allowing for the recent fall in oil prices.

While there is currently only weak regulation on shipping’s greenhouse gas emissons, the sector – like all those producing carbon dioxide – is likely to face more stringent controls as its emissions continue to grow. Exactly what form such controls will take remains the subject of further ongoing work. But any meaningful regulation would reinforce the case for wind-powered shipping as a favourable investment.

Shipping is a vital, if somewhat hidden, part of modern economies. Decarbonising those economies is the only way to avoid destroying them (and the environment). Wind power presents an astoundingly obvious and elegant solution to these combined challenges. But it will languish in the sidelines until we see rapid change from investors, politicians, or ideally both.

Artificial whiskers could inspire future instruments to aid keyhole surgery

Hjvannes, CC BY-SA

The image of a cat’s quivering whiskers has always been suggestive of an animal with a sixth sense. Now scientists are experimenting with robo-whiskers, synthetic versions of the super-sensitive fibres, which may one day allow surgeons to perform extremely delicate procedures via keyhole surgery.

Biomimetics – the imitation of living systems – is a branch of engineering that copies from or is inspired by nature. For example, tissue engineering uses scaffolds often designed to directly imitate the structure and properties of native tissues. When used in bone repair, these can be made from collagen or calcium phosphate, both found naturally in bones. While it makes sense to mimic nature for an implant that is going into the body, there are applications for external uses too, such as this bio-inspired whisker array.

Probing sensitive subjects

Animals with whiskers (technical term vibrissae) include various rodents, cats and sea mammals such as seals, which use whiskers to probe and sense the environment around them. Whiskers are larger than typical mammalian hairs, but similar in structure and composition. They do not contain nerves – but where the whiskers meet the skin is an extraordinarily sensitive mechanism that allows the animal to feel with the whiskers. At their base, the nerve endings can sense direct stimuli when they are bent through contact, and indirect stimuli, when the hairs deform or shift in response to air or fluid currents moving around them.

The study by researchers in Singapore and the US takes a discount store approach by using common objects such as plastic drinking straws and Lego blocks to create a bio-inspired array of five artificial whiskers.

The straws act as the whiskers, responding to air currents generated by a hair dryer. Strain sensors at the base of the plastic whiskers monitor their movement and shape change in response to the currents. This simple experimental set-up is linked to complex mathematical analysis capable of demonstrating whether the artificial whiskers faithfully capture various different airflow patterns from the hair dryer.

Making whiskers active

Artificial whiskers, with Lego, straws, a hair dryer - and a complex mathematical model. Tuna/Jones/Kamalabadi/IOP, Author provided

As is often the case in bio-inspired engineering, the true promise goes beyond what it might be imagined Lego, straws and hair-dryers could provide.

By bringing together complex fluid mechanics, control theory and electronic signal processing, experiments with artificial whiskers could provide significant engineering advances. Bioengineering is an interdisciplinary research area – and experiments like this can bring together experts from different fields of inquiry that would normally operate independently. Although the authors deal only with passive whisker sensing, there’s significantly more promise to an approach that uses robotics to create robo-whiskers, capable of responding to stimuli and passing information. These whiskers would be “biofidelic” – able to mimic the natural system more closely.

Whiskers as a surgeon’s hands

Even in a relatively simple form, the potential applications for synthetic whiskers arrays are far more interesting as they could demonstrate invaluable medical uses, such as in surgery. With traditional open surgery, surgeons use the tactile feedback provided by the extremely sensitive nerve endings in their own fingertips to guide their tools. The tactile feedback helps the surgeon, but infection and other risks are a problem.

The other approach is minimally invasive, keyhole surgery, when the surgeon’s hands do not enter the site of the operation. Instead the surgical tools are mounted on fibre-optic scopes or other sorts of remote instruments that are inserted into a far smaller hole. As doctors adopt this approach, the need to provide new ways of gaining a clearer sense of feeling, as when physically holding the instruments, has become more pressing.

If the thought of cat (or rat, or even seal) whiskers inside your aorta makes you shudder, consider that it’s entirely possible that your own future cardiac outpatient procedure some years from now may be quicker and more successful because of robotic tactile feedback mechanisms inspired by this whiskery experiment.

How to embrace technology without dooming humanity to destruction

Official U.S. Air Force/Flickr, CC BY-NC

The world today is facing some serious global challenges: creating sustainable development in the face of climate change, safeguarding rights and justice, and growing ethical markets, for a start. All of these challenges share some connection with science and technology – some more explicitly than others.

We are currently witnessing a growth in traditional technology – with computers processing data in new and exciting ways. We’re also seeing the birth of transformative technology, such as bioengineering. But the question is not about old or new technology – rather, it is about how they are being used to facilitate or change human behaviour.

Good tech, bad tech

Developments in information and communication technology (ICT) are vitally important to help us make better, more informed choices about how we prepare for the future. For instance, democratic governance is about being able to articulate contesting views across society and from different parts of the government. The advent of the internet allows us to receive and spread such information. Likewise, security and public safety relies on having good information on risks and their potential threats. Consider, for example, the way police departments in New York and Memphis have been able to make better use of data to prevent crime.

While science and technology are giving us the tools to improve, they – and the people who use them – are also presenting serious problems. Technology connects us, but it also makes us vulnerable to cyber-attacks. The amount of information that we produce every day through our phones and computers can help shape our environment to cater to us. But it also means that our identities are perhaps more vulnerable than ever before, with smart phones and club cards tracking our every move.

Similarly, in biology, we are able to make amazing gains in physical corrections, repairs, amendments, and augmentations, whether replacing old limbs or growing new ones. But we must also seriously consider the issues around ethics, safety and security. The debate around gain of function experiments, which give diseases new properties to help us study them, is a good example.

Hopes and fears

To help us grasp the shape and scope of these challenges, the Millennium Project – an international think tank – releases an annual State of the Future report, which outlines the major hurdles facing humanity over the next 35 years. It illustrates our complicated relationship with science and technology. Just as the beginning of the industrial revolution influenced the underlying themes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, we too are worried about the unforeseen complications that the latest developments could bring.

The report tells us of the great hopes that synthetic biology will help us write genetic code like we write computer code; about the power of 3D printing to customise and construct smart houses; of the future of artificial intelligence where the human mind and the computer mind meet, rather than conflict.

Frankenstein bringing his monster to life. twm1340/flickr, CC BY-SA

But at the same time, the authors of the report – Jerome Glenn, Elizabeth Florescu and their team – express fears that there is a great chance we could be outstripped in pace by the evolution of scientific and technological development. The authors suggest that we seek out human-friendly control systems, since advances in these fields mean that lone individuals could make and deploy weapons of mass destruction.

There are two concerns here: one to do with agency, the other relating to structures. Individuals have the potential to use scientific and technological advances to cause harm. This is a growing problem, as science and technology continues to degrade what Max Weber referred to as the state’s “monopoly on violence”.

To reduce the risks associated with agency, we will rely on structures that encourage good behaviour, such as systems for justice, education and the provision of basic necessities for life.

But it is not clear how we will arrive at such structures, and where the responsibility to develop them will fall; whether it’s to regions, states or international organisations. This is especially pressing, as many states have either foregone a welfare system, or are in the process of destroying it. It’s unclear where education and training come in, or how regulatory control is to work across so many local, national, societal, and commercial boundaries.

An ethical approach?

Whether or not our global society is outstripped by science and technology largely depends on us. And this is part of the problem, as William Nordhaus warned us as early as 1982, in his work on the Global Commons. The report calls for an ethical approach to creating systems, forms of information, and models of control that would allow us to engage with science and technology as it develops.

This means embedding ethical considerations into the way we think about the future. The authors want a larger discussion on global ethics, such as that we have seen rooted in the work done by the International Organisation for Standardisation – the world’s largest developer of voluntary international standards.

Ultimately, where we end up in relation to science and technology is a matter of coming to terms with how we interact with these developments. Until we do so, a safe and prosperous world may elude us.

Forget the Silicon Valley revolution: the future of transport looks remarkably familiar

Lokan Sadari/flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

From autonomous vehicles and the rapid rise of Uber to the global diffusion of bike-sharing schemes, transport is changing. Developments in information technology, transport policy and behaviour by urban populations may well be causing a wholesale shift away from conventional cars to collective, automated and low-carbon transport.

Yet there are still many uncertainties in technology development, finance and trends in user practices and expectations about the scale of these changes may well be inflated.

Perhaps the most significant development is “peak car” use – the stalled growth or modest decline in car ownership and use since around 1990 across the developed world. As well as economic reasons and the returning popularity of city living, this seems to be driven in part by a move away from pro-car planning. Metropolitan governments in particular are increasingly reallocating road space away from private cars and concentrating office and housing developments around public transport stations.

They are even supporting a wide range of innovations in local transport, including self-driving pod cars called up by a smartphone app. All these initiatives aim to reinvent “old” transport systems – metro, tram and cycling – as efficient, fashionable and healthy, enabling both economic growth and a better quality of life.

Public transport problems

However, public transport still faces significant challenges. Research consistently shows that satisfaction with tripmaking is lower on bus and rail than on other forms of transport. The industrial-era logic of only offering services at particular stops or stations at specific times sits uncomfortably with the changing rhythms of work, shopping, care-giving and leisure in post-industrial societies.

These service provision problems are particularly acute in suburbs (and of course rural areas) where the flexibility afforded by private cars continues to be the norm. Yet, even in the densest parts of cities, public transport only meets everyone’s needs when there are more flexible options as well. This is why greater public transport use is linked to, and to some extent triggers, increased use of cycling and, more recently, smartphone-enabled taxi services.

These forms of transport are available (almost) everywhere at all times – and therefore better compatible with the individualised lifestyles of people accustomed to the convenience that private car use epitomises. But even bike and car-sharing schemes with fixed docking stations and parking bays suffer from some of the same limitations as public transport does. The future may well be brighter for smartphone-dependent “free-floating” schemes, whereby cars can be picked up and left at any location within a designated zone that stretches across a city or parts thereof.

Pod to the future. Department for Transport/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

There are also big obstacles to a public transport revolution in the form of entrenched government patterns and vested interests. Past planning decisions, in particular, constrain current and future changes in transport systems. This is because the construction of road infrastructure, sprawling suburbs, car-dependent retail/leisure complexes and mono-functional business areas since the 1950s is largely irreversible, at least for the coming decades.

Industry fightback

The car industry remains powerful and does not sit still. In many countries, car manufacturing continues to be important to the national economy and can therefore count on considerable support from local, national and supranational (EU) governments. This is exemplified by the UK government’s Office for Low Emission Vehicles which was set up to stimulate the uptake of electric and other low-carbon vehicles.

Car manufacturers may now be experiencing competition from powerful technology companies such as Google and Apple, but this is catalysing their own development of innovations. The Google driverless car may be the most famous but the first such vehicles from conventional manufacturers are expected to hit the market by 2017-2018.

Many hurdles still need to be overcome. The technology needs substantial refining, major issues around insurance and liability need to be resolved, it is not clear how adaptations to road infrastructure will be financed, and public opinion is divided. Based on experiences with electric and fuel cell cars in recent decades, current expectations about commercialisation and consumer uptake are (vastly) over-optimistic.

Unexpected and unforeseeable events may radically reshape current development trajectories, but there are good reasons to expect that transport systems in 30 years will not be drastically different from today.

Now advertising billboards can read your emotions ... and that's just the start

It's a shame the adverts aren't displaying a real product. Bahio would've won over a mesmerised customer. Clear Channel

Advertising giant M&C Saatchi is currently testing advertising billboards with hidden Microsoft Kinect cameras that read viewers’ emotions and react according to whether a person’s facial expression is happy, sad or neutral.

The test adverts – which feature a fictitious coffee brand named Bahio – have already appeared on Oxford Street and Clapham Common in London. So we now have adverts that can read the reactions of those that view them and adapt accordingly, cycling through different images, designs, fonts and colours. With partners Clear Channel and Posterscope, Saatchi has made advertising history. When future media historians look back they will see 2015 as a landmark year.

There are three key things we should recognise: adverts can read our behaviour, this is based on our emotions rather than website browsing history, and that adverts use this to improve themselves.

What are we to make of this? Is it a bit creepy? The answer is both yes and no. What the campaign represents is an attempt to get closer to us, something that’s a defining characteristic of the advertising and audience research industries. They want to know us more intimately so as to be able to craft messages that will affect and resonate with us. It’s an example of what I call “empathic media” because, through reading facial expressions, adverts are able to bypass the guesswork and make direct use of our emotions.

Evolution of the ad

While uncanny and creative, Saatchi’s adverts are not a threat to privacy. After all, unlike our PCs, phones and tablets, these posters neither know nor care who we are. The adverts’ creators say they do not store images or data, and there is little reason to disagree. All their adverts do is react to facial shapes – the truly creepy stuff is online and in the mobile phone apps tracking our habits. For example, one study records the Eurosport Player app as having 810 data trackers collecting hardware and software information, but also navigation (where a person visits online), behaviour, visit times, visitor actions and geolocation (where a person is located in real space).

The real genius of the new advert is in using our facial expressions to learn and alter the design of the advert. Through responding to our expressions the adverts have purpose – an evolutionary urge to improve and become more effective.

This idea of adaptable advertising was foreseen around 100 years ago by advertising luminaries such as Daniel Starch and Claude Hopkins. They insisted advertising should be treated as a science based on collecting information, analysing it and using these insights to improve campaigns. Starch and Hopkins both sought to understand which techniques do and don’t work in order to make the business of advertising subject to laws of cause and effect. The grandfathers of advertising would be very pleased with today’s progeny.

Although the logic is old, processing feedback to self-correct in real-time is new. For years, Google has masterfully led the way in how adverts are automatically served based on our interests; self-improving adverts in the physical world are another step forward.

Connecting with the subject

Much of the media coverage surrounding M&C Saatchi’s adverts lauds it as an artificially intelligent campaign. While this is true to an extent, the advert is actually quite mechanical: the advertiser has no understanding of why we are smiling, grimacing or straight-faced, or of what these expressions imply. They simply match the shapes, and react.

So what would intelligent advertising look like? It would have to be able to engage with the context of our lives, in real time. What that consists of is a somewhat philosophical question, but it might encompass our individual life histories, our natural spoken language, human values, politics, current affairs, popular culture, and aesthetic trends – all topics that human ad creatives consider when putting campaigns together.

Clearly, these adverts don’t – but others in the advertising business may have the technological muscle to do so. For an insight into tomorrow’s artificially intelligent advertising, have a look at Google’s Deepmind that promises to “combine the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general‑purpose learning algorithms”. When we remember that Google is first and foremost an advertising company, Deepmind is one to watch.

Then there are the sensors. We will soon wear and carry more sensors and we will have more sensors around us. Empathic media will grant advertisers even more insight into our emotions through how we speak to our mobile devices, more granular facial recognition and emotional insights derived from our heart rates, respiration patterns and how our skin responds to stimuli. And if that sounds far-fetched, remember you’ve just read a true story about adverts that recognise your emotions.

The future of rail travel, and why it doesn’t look like Hyperloop

Maryland GovPics/flickr, CC BY-SA

As the world’s population becomes increasingly urbanised, it is estimated that the number of journeys measured in passenger-kilometres will triple by 2050. Roads simply can’t absorb this increase.

Railways, with their greater capacity for carrying more people, quickly and with greater energy efficiency, are the best bet to become our mobility backbone. It’s no surprise that some of the most advanced urban rail systems are in places that are already as much as 80% urbanised, such as in Europe.

Of course, engineers’ imaginations have created many alternatives to the original steel-on-steel approach to the railway. Maglev and the much-publicised but so far theoretical Hyperloop are often regarded as the alternatives to watch – but do they really represent the future of rail travel?

Maglev

Magnetic levitation (maglev) uses powerful magnets to propel the train along dedicated lines that are as straight as possible. The attractive forces between electronically controlled electromagnets in the vehicle and the ferromagnetic guide rails pull the vehicle up, while additional guidance magnets keep it laterally on track. This version of the technology was developed in Germany and is currently used to link Shanghai airport with the city centre at speeds of 430kph (267mph).

However it’s perhaps Japan that is most associated with maglev. The nation that established the modern era of high-speed trains is also attempting to define the next chapter. Superconducting magnetic levitation (SCMaglev) has been in development for decades but was recently approved to run from Tokyo to Osaka from 2027, when it will complete the 500km (311 mile) journey in just over an hour. Unlike the Transrapid system in Shanghai, the Japanese maglev principle uses more powerful superconducting magnets and a guideway design based on repulsive rather than attractive forces.

But while maglev is technically possible, its commercial viability is questionable. There is an extremely high initial infrastructure cost – Japan’s SCMaglev line is expected to cost ¥9 trillion (US$72 billion. It also cannot be integrated with existing rail networks and has a phenomenal energy demand, during both construction and operation. This casts serious doubts about maglev’s true potential as an alternative to conventional high-speed technology, which still has enormous potential.

Hyperloop

Fifth mode of transport? Hyperloop Transportation Technologies

Hyperloop is an elegant idea: travelling seamlessly at 1,220kph (that’s right, 760mph just under the speed of sound) in gracefully designed pods that arrive as often as every 30 seconds is very appealing. The concept is based around very straight tubes with a partial vacuum applied under the pods. These pods have an electric compressor fan on their nose which actively transfers high-pressure air from the front to the rear, creating an air cushion once a linear electric motor has launched the pod. All this would be battery and solar powered.

Technically it’s a challenging design, although if someone can make it happen it’s the man who proposed the idea, Elon Musk, the mind behind SpaceX and Tesla. However, Hyperloop is not rail travel. It is, as Mr. Musk puts it, a fifth mode of transport (after trains, cars, boats and planes). It’s designed to link Los Angeles to San Francisco, cities hundreds of miles apart that can be connected in an almost straight line over a relative flat landscape. This simply isn’t an option in much of the world.

Ultimately, given its unique principles, Hyperloop if it happens at all will be a stand-alone system. It’s no substitute for rail.

What else?

In practice, the vast majority of us will continue to travel on trains that are not dissimilar to those today. The UK is about to take delivery of 122 trains that will be the workhorses of most intercity travel for decades to come. If the trains they are replacing are anything to go by, we will still be using the new ones in 2050, albeit following several refurbishments.

Greater automation are expected to dominate not just rail but all types of travel. Automatic train operation is already used in some urban railways which allows for shorter distances between trains on the same line. It is anticipated that all mainline trains will be able to talk to each other, meaning significantly more trains on the track, increasing capacity and service levels. This in turn will make physical line-side signalling equipment redundant, leading to more simple layouts for new lines. Better use of energy on electrically powered intercity rail travel will likely play a significant role. For instance, energy storage systems and advanced substations will allow a shift to smarter rail systems in a transition similar to that witnessing the power grid becoming a smart grid.

Future predictions are to be treated with caution. But regardless of the bleeding edge, modern state-of-the-art railway investment around the globe is still based on the steel-on-steel principle of trains on tracks. And there’s no reason to doubt that, by and large, this will be the future of rail travel just as it was at its birth nearly 200 years ago.