Ok, and from the other side of things, I’ve never heard a sonic boom in my life. No idea how loud it is, or what the tradeoffs are. Shouldn’t we get a say?
More generally, bans on a technology “forever” just seem silly. It should at least be revisited every decade or so. A decade brings lots of advancement; maybe there’s some clever way of minimizing the boom from a sonic boom now.
Or maybe there isn’t. But it’s not nearly as clear cut as “if it’s >0, ban it. No noise whatsoever!” Like… you’ve heard loud motorcycles. Why not argue for those to be banned too?
A sonic boom is quite loud and will shake all the windows of every home across a state (though only a smaller section of the state if it is large like California).
I have not heard them since the Space Shuttle was retired.
I agree with the forever part in theory. However in politics (and law) if you leave a door slightly open, then people are incentivized to open it wide open and “get around” various rules.
Permanent “for forever” laws and never that. They are forever until someone changes them. That’s more binary and easier to reason about than “this sonic boom is better than that sonic boom so it’s ok, and it the 1980s already so let’s have at it!”. You set some threshold number, then the politics is about the number not the booms themselves really.
If technology has truly advanced enough, people will change the laws. Done.
Now as an engineer, I prefer the threshold. But it’s so much easier to change that. You start a company in 1980 and have so much better tech after 10 years in 1990, but it doesn’t materially change things enough, so you shut down or try and change the threshold. What do you do?
Implying we have any control over the laws. :) It’s lobbyists all the way down. Outsourcing our freedom to lobbyists seems like a bad idea in almost every case.
“Just change the law” is usually not an easy proposal. One could argue that it shouldn’t be. But technology advances much faster than the law, and having a lag time of decades doesn’t seem optimal in most cases.
More generally, bans on a technology “forever” just seem silly. It should at least be revisited every decade or so. A decade brings lots of advancement; maybe there’s some clever way of minimizing the boom from a sonic boom now.
Or maybe there isn’t. But it’s not nearly as clear cut as “if it’s >0, ban it. No noise whatsoever!” Like… you’ve heard loud motorcycles. Why not argue for those to be banned too?