Project Green Jet - a vision of the future of sailing

We cover many wondrous things on Gizmag but few fall into this category for elegance and technological excellence and sheer beauty. Project GreenJet is the modern day equivalent of the jet aircraft on the water and builds on the automated functionality of Erik Sifrer’s highly-acclaimed 36 metre SY120 concept only on a grander 57 metre scale. Going several steps further than the breathtaking, already-in-the-water 88 m Maltese Falcon, Green Jet uses automated systems controlling non-conventional sails to offer a glimpse of the future of sail – faster, more efficient, less labour intensive with minimal environmental impact. The vision is a superyacht sailed by one man with a touchscreen. Gizmag investigates the potential for automated sailing in this feature article.

Mankind's history is intertwined with sailing. The Egyptians are the earliest recorded sailors (3500 BC) though evidence exists of Japanese sailors being shipwrecked in South America in the same period. Since then, each new understanding of the science of sailing has brought with it an important enabling technology for civilization itself. Over 5500 years, sailors and boatbuilders have learned better ways to balance the forces of the wind against the sails to safely carry know-how and trade over ever-increasing distances.

The science of sailing may seem simple, yet it is not. At its simplest, a group of sailors control the direction and speed of their boat by changing the rigging and rudder and hull to create and manage an interface between the forces of the wind and water. Over five millennia, mankind has devised better hulls, masts, sails, rigs, rudders, to better manage those forces.

Mastery of the skill of sailing requires vast experience in varying wind and sea conditions, understanding of the characteristics of the vessel you are sailing and implementing the optimum setting to achieve the desired result. Mastery is rare, and even the masters of today often get it wrong despite the array of technological decision-making aids at their disposal. Mankind owes much for the speed of its development to those who mastered sailing and ventured into the unknowns of the sea – those who got there and back contributed disproportionately to the spread of new ideas on the planet for five thousand years.

Now with the internet permeating every corner of the globe, and knowledge readily shareable across all boundaries, we are about to see new thinking brought to one of man’s oldest pursuits, and the prospect is very tantalizing in what it might offer.

Seafaring’s incomplete history

Since the dawn of history this seemingly simple, yet incredibly complex thing known as sailing has afforded mankind greater mobility and capacity for fishing, trade, warfare and an exchange of ideas via human capital travel.

There is enough unsubstantiated evidence around to suggest that many nations developed superb seamanship thousands of years ago, with the possibility that Japanese visited Ecuador (3500 BC), the Phoenicians sailed the Atlantic (1100 BC), Greeks visited America (400BC) and that Roman merchants traded with America (200 BC). You won’t find it in a history book, but knowledge discovery has long since outstripped the history book’s ability to keep up.

The world’s first global trade mission (and circumnavigation)

...continued