Nerve impulses travel at about 120 m/s, max, and that's along long myelated runs. Cohering raw pain signal into the experience of pain takes at least 150 msec according to the best measurements we have on the topic.
The vertical speed of the plane alone at last reported speed indication exceeds the speed of neuron transmission along myelated nerve tissue. This impact event is mechanically impossible to feel.
High-speed camera footage of rocket sleds and fuselage testing is fascinating stuff.
You can see the macroscopic deformation fail to transit the body of the impacting object with enough speed to make gross deformation happen as it collides. The front of the rocket body is literally turning to a vapor at the impact site, and the tail assembly is 100% fine.
And if they were so iced over that control surfaces weren't responding and the wings were no longer generating lift, at that point they were well past the "Anything we do is going to have any effect whatsoever on the future" point.
I don't intend to listen to the audio. Second-hand, it sounds as though they did absolutely everything they could after hitting the cell, and the only way to have avoided this whole situation was "Don't fly that route that day."
... a problem that, in general, we see more often in private-jet and single-engine aviation than commercial-carrier aviation. Far more incentives to make a really, really bad call... And when the bad call happens, the Venn diagram of victims and responsible parties tends to have a lot more overlap, so there's, practically speaking, fewer consequences to discourage such bad decisionmaking in the future (can't meaningfully punish the dead, and the dead can't learn from experience what a bad call "smells" like on the lead-up to it).
I don't agree they had no way to avoid this. Every accident is a chain of mistakes, gaps or mechanical issues. We don't know the whole story here, but I do know that planes of this class are not given up for dead when they hit a surprise weather system. If they are, that means they missed something earlier - weather radar was misinterpreted or a bad judgment call was made.
Forward velocity is proportional to lift, assuming your lifting surfaces still work. If you're stalling, standard practice is to apply power and get the nose down so that gravity and engine thrust are working in your favor to put air back under your wings.
In this case though, it sounds like the icing was much worse than they thought and fatally compromised the aerodynamics of the wings, and then the overspeed would have torn at the wings and fuselage... In that circumstance, you're no longer flying a plane, you're riding a javelin.
Training would generally still encourage the pilots to apply power; in the worst-case scenario (here), failing to apply power would not have made the crash survivably slower, so the sum total of best bad actions is still "Apply power and hope you're not in the worst-case scenario."
A fully-fueled private jet is an inefficient missile, but it exceeds the raw chemical energy of most in-theater single-target tactical missiles (although the energy conversion is far less precise and efficient).
But yes, that's a lot of kinetic mass dead-stopping on a hard surface and 1 to 2 kiloliters of jet fuel.
I think, with this many decades of hindsight, it is not unfair to claim The Inner Light is TNG's City on the Edge of Forever.
It's every performer in the episode hitting on all cylinders on a script that is doing what science fiction is for.
ETA: Having poked at it a bit, I have just learned that Morgan Gendel and Peter Allen Fields shared a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation for that script... The first time a Star Trek script won a Hugo since the previous award to Harlan Ellison for the script for City on the Edge of Forever. Nice to know there's a semi-objective metric by which the episodes are already rated as equivalently impactful.
There's an (and I'm reluctant to use this word, but I can't find a better one) weird kind of misanthropy in this post. The author seems only capable of connecting to people through shared work and shared large task.
Human beings have lived for tens of thousands of years in communities where the work was "being alive" and the large task was "being human." People in medieval villages had friends and loved ones in spite of being illiterate and only having subsistence skills.
If anything, hyper-specialized labor and the divorcing of geographic proximity from the tasks people undertake have been undermining this traditional modality of living. I would anticipate in the absence of those pressures it might very well come back.
I might agree that it's possible the pressure to form cities goes down, though the author seems guilty of the Singularity thinking of just assuming the super-smart AI magically solves the logistics, transportation, and energy challenges in a way that distributes people... Not impossible, but I think a bit unlikely. If it happens though, there would be advantages... Cities are relative hotbeds of human-transmitted disease, even with modern hygiene and vaccination, and spreading us out a bit could actually make us healthier on average (... maybe. Unless the magic AI doesn't actually solve the logistics issue and non-proximity to a population center implies lack of access to resources or the skilled hands of people the robots haven't replaced yet).
Most of the improvements have been keeping it running in the face of being the place everyone stores and retrieves video, and that's a lot of invisible work (but is the real reason you don't really see working YouTube competitors; it's a technically challenging big-iron problem).
The knife in the back of Youtube competitors is that people ad-block because they don't like ads, not because they have some kind of moral compass. Youtube mostly tolerates ad-blocking, which pretty much cements it in place as the absolute best streaming service (no ads, no subscription, unlimited free consumption).
The result is that it's basically impossible to get off the ground to compete with yt, because early adopters are almost universally tech forward. And tech forward people don't pay for shit (except the 1-5% who do).
Enterprises actively do not want Cloud provider's services distinguished by anything other than speed, cost, and reliability, because features imply lock-in. They'd rather have someone else's computer as bare-metal and run features atop that.
That's a recipe for racing to the bottom in the cloud space against the other providers, where the wins are very raw: what hardware did you predict two years ago you needed today, what breakthroughs in information structuring have your competitors not yet implemented in their own clouds, etc.
It's raw capitalistic competition, and that's good for consumers... But companies don't want that because it's a path to net-neutral revenue in the long-term, which is not how you put your stock on the moon.
The history of the cloud computing market belies your argument, in that the entire market has grown significantly since 2020, with all 3 big cloud providers >3xing their operating income (and 3-5x'ing their revenue) over that period. That isn't what you'd expect from undifferentiated, interchangeable commodities.
The scenario you've described sure sounds like the enterprise ideal, but it probably isn't the reality: in fact, some combination of high switching costs, feature differentiation, and/or price insensitivity means you have 3 highly profitable businesses.
If your business is tech and compute is a major cost of business, then sure, you want to avoid lock in.
But if your business is not tech, it makes a hell of lot of sense to pay a few bucks extra for a managed service like Cloud SQL to host your databases and let Google handle the security patches and backups etc, instead of hiring your own DBA to do it for you.
The vertical speed of the plane alone at last reported speed indication exceeds the speed of neuron transmission along myelated nerve tissue. This impact event is mechanically impossible to feel.
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