Incautious Optimism: Introduction & foreword

A techno-optimist blog for curious creatures who want to know how it all works.

Technology, Crossing the Tigris and our lost sense of Wonder

Sand-stained skies glow a deep amber over the Persian Gulf from 35,000ft and sunrise clips over black mountain ridges. Nobody on the plane cares. A hundred unseen miracles keep us in the sky, but it's just another day.

We leave the Tigris river valley behind us, the dawn’s gold sweeping over the birthplace of civilizations. Up ahead lies Dubai, the city of the future. Around me passengers blink drowzily at devices while my son and daughter stir in their sleep. A screen in front of me shows a movie where desert nomads on a distant planet ride giant sandworms. I watch this, my children and the sunrise, now hitting the engine nacelle, and think…

…Have we lost our ability to wonder?

Hidden within those engines are turbine blades a little larger than your thumb that can provide almost 1,000 horsepower each, built to the micron and with a hidden, spectacularly complex inner geometry of cooling channels and vanes. They spin ceaselessly at up to 200 times a second and hundreds of degrees above their own melting point, kept alive by engineering brilliance, un-remarked over.

They are each a single grown crystal of Nickel superalloy. Literal gems.

I know this because I used to work at a casting facility that made them, and because it's good to be a curious monkey. Knowing how things work and how they're made brings back the wonder in our life, and that is what this blog is all about.

Here you will learn, as I do, about the hidden miracles.

Are you a curious creature too?

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