n.b. I don’t think there’s a factual answer to this, so I put it here. If a mod deems it better suited for GQ, please feel free to move it.
I don’t think we’ll ever run out of oil, but in time, it’ll be to expensive to use to power cars. At $50 a gallon for petroleum based fuel, SUVs are gonna run on ethanol, rape seed oil or something else. At that price, it’ll still be viable to make the polymeres for artificial heart valves though.
However we’re very dependant on air travel for long distance journeys and transport of lighter goods.
My guess is that there will be a revival for rail travel, powered by cheap atomic electricity. The French have been building their network of TGV for over 30 years now and broke a record going somewhere over 300 mph this spring. France is a lot smaller than the U.S. so even at that speed, going coast to cost is gonna take a while. France also has a good geography for building these trainlines, being sort of square, and quite densely populated with many large cities aside from Paris. So in France, the TGV has killed a lot of domestic air travel.
But how are we going to travel overseas? I know there are diesel engines for smaller planes and diesel engines for cars can quite easily, and for a low cost, be converted to run on rape seed oil. Somehow I doubt there’s enough oumph in that oil to get a 747 off the ground (even if using a threadmill). Maybe ethanol can manage.
So will the only way my grandchildren (I need to get a child foirst, but…) travel from Europe to the U.S.? Will it be by boat only? Slow, nuclear powered cruise ships?
What’s wrong with a trans-atlantic rail tunnel? Sure, it’d be obscenely expensive, but if air travel isn’t in play any more, you know you could make it worth your while.
I can imagine a future where air travel is limited to the military, heads of state, and the super-rich. Everyone else will travel by train or ship if they have to, but mostly they won’t go at all. There will be a manufacturing resurgence in the United States and Europe as overseas factories find it harder and harder to compete. Cities will become more compact and more vertical as their suburbs wither away and revert to farmland.
There have been limited attempts to use hydrogen for powering jets. If electricity isn’t an issue in your scenario then that technology might become a lot more attractive.
I’ve heard that scarce oil won’t be hugely more expensive if the world’s car fleet uses alternative fuels, and that keeps demand down. With this in mind, I can see governments forcing land vehicles onto renewable energy sources, freeing up more oil for use in aviation. This may buy a few more decades of relatively cheap international air travel. I can’t see ships being a viable option for trans-oceanic travel: no cite, but I remember hearing that it would cost nearly as much to keep a trans-Atlantic ship passenger fed as it would simply to fly him over. My WAG is that 2057 will see fewer but huger and vastly more efficient aircraft using jet engine technology that would be advanced but recognisable to the average person in the street today.
You can make the fuel from a lot of things: coal, biodiesal, etc. It may be expensive, but it won’t be more than a few times over expensive. Jets will also get more efficient. I remember in the 1980s that jets were about to switch over to more-efficient turboprops; but that didn’t materialize when fuel prices stayed low.
That’s pretty much the future envisioned by James Howard Kunstler. (Of course, suburbs don’t just “wither away” – somebody at some point has to bring in a bulldozer – fuel supply permitting.)
Agreed, passenger airships will only be viable as an expensive vacation novelty (they’ve never been anything else). Cargo airships might be able to compete with container ships.
What you do, see, is build a space elevator with a platform up at around the six-mile mark. Then you use take off from that platform in gliders, catching the jetstream, and you can fly wherever you want.
Getting back is something I haven’t figured out yet.
What I’d really like to see is those personal rotor packs (like a jet pack but with rotor fan blades set in ducted fans above the users head) like the Mythbusters tried to make on one of their shows. They are SO cool looking. Too bad they don’t work…
1935 technology only permitted 72 passengers on the Hindenburg. But that was with 40 crew and 21 trainees. 100+ passengers seems quite obtainable using current technology. I can only imagine what 2057 materials and propulsion would allow. Besides, with enough carriers in the air, prices will drop enough to allow the masses to ride the gasses.
So, the smart money should be used buying stock in an airship company and forget about nuclear powered flying cars or some sort of tunnel and catapult contraption?
As a hard-core aviation buff, I will have to make known my dissenting opinion on almost everything in this thread. My prediction in summary is that we will still be using planes that look and act damned near close to the ones we have now and some of the actual airliners themselves will be used by your grandchildren for commercial travel. Air planes have an absurdly long service life. Ones delivered today will stay in primary service for 30+ years and then get moved into others roles perhaps in poor countries or for freight. Airplanes simply don’t wear out like cars and commercial airliners that cost anywhere from $10 million for a turboprop to $200 million for a 747 bring with them a big incentive to both keep them in service and keep them in good shape. Development time for airliners is very long perhaps best measured in decades. It isn’t just that we will still have planes like we have now, we will have some of the same planes that we have now in 2057.
Supersonic airliners, hypersonic airliners and other exotic technologies have actually slipped backwards in outlook and in public imagination. The energy required and the drawbacks they bring like sonic booms, exotic materials, and absurd expense mean that we won’t getting any of those anytime soon. Development would have to be well under way for one to see service in the next few decades and there simply aren’t any serious attempts for large supersonic airliners out there today.
Next, jets are decidedly not very picky about their fuel. Jet A is essentially diesel fuel is essentially kerosene is essentially home heating oil. They differ mainly in taxes and some additives but that isn’t important for this discussion. This point is the real capper for mean. Hugely expensive Jet fuel also means that the rest of the fuels above are horribly expensive. That is bad news for much more things than just jet or turboprop travel. The good news is that…
we are not running out of oil. In fact, our total worldwide supply is likely to stay flat rather than go down. The Middle East has been a hotbed of oil activity for many decades and their known oil reserves is starting to decline. However, our good friend Canada has at least as much oil as all of the Middle East in the Alberta tar sands and those oil fields are starting to be opened up now in a flurry of construction. Venezuela has the same the Gulf of Mexico has huge discoveries left with one made last year. There will be others.
Even if the rest of the oil producing world gave the U.S. the finger, we have so many coal reserves that the known reserves are predicted to last at least 300 years and maybe much more. Airplanes don’t run on bags of coal but coal can be turned in gasoline or diesel through processes that have been known for a long time and are viable as soon as the conversion plants can be erected on a large scale.
Some of these things are messy but that is more of an environmental rather than an economic concern. If Canada and the rest of the world can pump out oil all day long, airplanes will it at even twice the price because the positives out way the negatives for mid to long trips.
