Ray K is talking sense here, imho, as someone who also worked in Aircraft Systems Engineering for many years myself, never for Boeing, but for some of their main rivals in Europe, and for seven years now been applying my Systems Engineerign Skills and tools analysing the global energy problem; in truth we should notice the aircraft industry is in decline.
Aerospace is in decline. I has been since its peak, around the seventies / early eiighties.
The pinnacle of passenger flight was when we had a single supersonic commercial aircraft. At the same time we also had reusable spacecraft (shuttle), and manned flights to the moon (only a few years earlier - within my memory, as someone in my teens in the early eighties.
VC ventures like that of Starship etc just mask this. Starship could never be a truly safe enough aircraft for manned trips, not even to the moon. Similarly, the Starlink venture is quantiy vs quality, there has been no real reliability work done, radiation hardening for example, a large percentage of them are literally falling out ot fhe sky almost as fast as they are thrown up. This is compared with traditional satellites which easily have a lifetime of thirty years or more.
There is a real physical reason for this, which is very close to what Ray described, and it is also the reason we have a near-burning planet, which can only get worse until the required radical change happens.
So your conclusion is correct, its existential, even physically existential.
Ray observes correctly that there is more and more effort put towards profit. But what looks like more profit made is not what it seems. The actual profit has reduced, in terms of energy.
Profit is just energy, because money is energy, always.
When profit is made, the energy gained has to have come from the planet. This is energy extracted from the planet by all business for profit.
It can't come from the sun because the sun gives what it gives for free, the sun does not respond to any demands, its a one way transmission of energy from the sun to us.
It doesn’t matter how we extract the energy, it could be nuclear, fossil fuels, even renewables, and even by food, all of it heats the planet, because what we are doing is converting things that were not heat, to heat. This is destruction by definition and of course it is unsustainable. The price we are paying, is an increasingly hostile environment, which will put insurance business out of profitability very soon.
The reason all business for profit is progresively struggling harder and harder to make profit, is that profitability is directly related to availabilty of extract-able energy in the environment. As things grow progressively poorer, requiring more and more effort of extraction and refinement, we are losing more and more to heat, and making less and less profit, in terms of energy.
We can even plot the curve of energy availability using now things like ChatGPT, we give it the description of the curve by identifying a few datapoints, and it plots the curve intersecting those points. It peaked in the seventies / eighties.
The maths it uses to do this is the same maths as describes a torque converter.
Human activity is like a torque converter in a car encountering an ever steeper hill.
The steeper the hill gets, the more the torque converter "slips", and the more heat is dissipated. This heat is propertional to the heat being generated by our activity.
Again all this is masked, this time by the renewables industry, itself for profit. That industry gives us the false impression that CO2 is the root source of the heating problem, but it isn’t, the root source is the fact we are destroying. The generation of CO2 is only happening, because we are destroying, specifically the carbon based fuel stocks of the planet.
The reason why science is stuck in that rut, is that it too is for profit, all research done is funded by for profit industry. Nothing gets funded, if it does not add to some profit driven business caase or another.
So only pro-destruction research is done.
Even the mathematical signing of energy needed to audit energy in and out of the planet, and through humanity, has never been done by science, because there is no profitable business case can come from it, its actually anti profit, it exposes profit as an unsustainable energy con, where the planet is conned out of the energy in profit.
Anyhow, hopefully this explains why there can be no meritocracy, until the global energy problem is fixed, the only way it can be, by moving all of humanity to the only mathematically positive energy source - the sun.
Its expensive to pay experts. Its expensive to educate experts. All of those things impact profitability. This is why meritocracy is under attack, its too expensive for the profit driven system.
Anyhow there is hope on the horizon in the form of ChatGPT, because this is solar powered in the way we need to all become, it has the architecture we need to adopt - distributed solar on a community basis, backed up by hydrogen, which can be produced in excess by scaling up the amount of solar energy used, generating at last a clean, fully sustainable fuel for aircraft, this keeping them in the air, because it can never be done by batteries.
The catalyst for starting to do the right thing - creation, thus cooling the planet, and actually enabling full meritocracy, is commencement of issue of solar indexed stimulus.
With that, we will quickly transition from destruction to creation.
Where will it come from?
From the backlog of previously unmonetised economic product created by solar since solar started, around 2005. I show how to work this out, it comes to hundreds of billions in smaller developed countries like my own, UK, and trillions in the larger countries like Germany. The US is a little behind everyone else in solar adoption, presumably because the US still has the chepest extracted energy anywhere.
Sorry long response, but I hope you can see I only just scratched the surface, its the most complex system we can possibly imagine.
