The Logistical Pandemic

There’s broad consensus that how often we fly for work and what we travel for will shift significantly post-pandemic. Who is traveling may be different as well. That, in turn, will prompt changes in what the travel industry provides to business people, a source of nearly a third of its revenue before the pandemic. A year and a half of forgoing virtually all travel and doing business by video conference has led many business people to conclude that a lot of their previous travel wasn’t worth the time and toll on their bodies and mental state, on their families and the environment. That’s even before considering the role that travel played in transmitting the virus across continents. There’s a popular meme: “This meeting could have been an email.” Those of us who have traveled long distances for a single work meeting know that we could often just as easily say, “This business trip could have been a Zoom call.”

Early indications suggest that most businesses will be reluctant to dramatically trim the estimated two-thirds of business travel that involves sales calls and client visits, conferences and professional services like consulting. Executives remain wary of losing out to a rival who actually shows up in person, or seeing an important contract go away because of poor virtual communications. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said in May that clients told him his bank lost business when “bankers from the other guys visited, and ours didn’t.” Scott Kirby, chief executive of United, earlier this year predicted “full recovery in business demand because business travel is about relationships.” Speaking with investors via a conference call, he added, “You cannot build human relationships through a medium like this.”

So, all of this is rather like standing in front of a whiteboard in the early 1990s and writing words like interactive TV, hypertext, broadband, AOL, information services, and maybe video and games, and then drawing a box around it and labelling the box ‘information superhighway’. That vision of all consumers everywhere being connected to something was entirely correct, but not like that, and many of those components were blind alleys.

Which brings us to that fateful meeting in Prague. At the start of the conference, some astronomers suggested a definition of planethood that would not only preserve Pluto’s status, but also include some other non-planet objects, such as Ceres, the onetime planet turned asteroid. But by the end of the week, the idea was out, and the attendees had settled on a new set of criteria for a planet: It must orbit the sun, be big enough for gravity to have smoothed it into a sphere, and be gravitationally dominant enough to clear other objects out of its orbital zone. The last rule disqualified Pluto.

The New Horizons mission has moved deeper into the Kuiper belt, toward the outer regions of the solar system, where another planet-related debate has unfolded in recent years. Astronomers have detected objects moving rather strangely in the distant reaches beyond Pluto, and they believe that a giant, unseen planet, about six times the mass of the Earth, must be tugging at them. Brown, the astronomer whose work contributed to Pluto’s status change, is leading the search. One day, this object could join the solar system’s official lineup as the ninth planet, and 11-year-olds around the world can start brainstorming names.