One can only hope.
In the United States there are many people who think high speed rail won’t work in America (or at least think that is what they are suppose to think). My guess, is start small. Where could we have rail travel besides Disney World and Las Vegas?
The argument is that the lower population densities here make it impractical. But I don’t see how that applies to long-distance transportation.
In Florida, we approved a 2000 referendum to build a high-speed rail line (the first segment would have run between Tampa and Orlando). After a massive counter-campaign, the measure was repealed in another referendum in 2004. You can read about it here. According to this, the new Governor, Charlie Crist, might revive the project.
Amtrak’s Acela Express, from Washington to Boston, is not really high-speed rail by European/Japanese standards.
Here is a group advocating a national high-speed rail system (integrated with steetcars, regional light rail systems and interurban commuter trains) for the U.S.
I just wonder how much gas savings could be realized by automated highways - computers controlling thousands of cars cruising along at a steady 70mph a few feet apart. I expect that’ll beat rail travel and with the first baby boomers getting into their high-crash seventies, computerized cars may be inevitable anyway.
That might make cars safer on the highway, but I doubt it would make them significantly more fuel-efficient. Highway driving is already the most fuel-efficient kind anyway.
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s near-future SF novel The Gold Coast, all cars are driven, on all roads and streets, by computers (i.e., an onboard “carbrain”) – you just key in your destination and sit back. But they are powered by electric tracks running down the middle of each street. Very different concept.
It’s about 200 miles between NY and Washington, right? Using the TGV setup would get you from city centre to city centre in an hour, without having to transit to an airport, check in and board (remember, boardings trains is a lot less hassle). If there were a shuttle service leaving every 30 minutes, would anyone want to fly?
Shagnasty, you might’ve noticed that in my OP, I specifically said that I don’t think we’ll ever run out of oil, only that it’ll be too expensive to produce to be used in different types of combustion engines, including those in airplanes.
As for the rest, I know b52s have an expected lifespan of 80 years, that there are quite a few 747s still operating. As for fuel… Boeing, NASA and the U.S. Air Force are looking into alternative fuel sources:
“Large quantities of energy are used during the FT manufacturing process that release about 1.8 times more CO2 into the atmosphere as compared to crude oil derived jet fuel.”
Alternate Fuels for use in Commercial Aircraft (pdf from the Boeing website)
They might be on a sollution, but reading that pdf gave me the impression it’ll be far more work than you outlined.
I did notice that but my point was a little different. We have so many oil and other petroleum resources that it won’t become uneconomical for them to be used in planes 50 years from now. Prices can’t go up to say $30 a gallon (in today’s money) because we already have resources in hand that will prevent that. If some type of hydrogen or nuclear technology becomes very popular by then, the cost of Jet A (Diesel fuel) will go down, not up.
We know that the airplanes being delivered today are going to be around for a long time. People also really like and need airliner travel in some form at any price. The cost of fuel is only a portion of the cost of a ticket and people can and will pay more for tickets because some do it now voluntarily and air fares are still historically cheap today. Airliners are about the worst example of anything to pick for conversion to alternative fuels. Billions have gone into making jet engines into some of the most reliable machines ever made and a lot of that has to do with the fuel. Small planes (where this experimentation would begin) have experimented with all sorts of weird engines and haven’t gotten very far. Diesel full engines are the main newcomer to small airplanes and notice the fuel used.
What is the point? I truly believe the whole premise is flawed and that 2057 airliners will look very similar to today and use petroleum based fuels because those are the best design known at all regardless of cost or even reasonably speculative alternatives. It is foolish to believe that people will just abandon the whole system because the fuel costs have gone up to a certain level. The alternatives likely wouldn’t work well in the U.S. and be far more expensive in the short, medium, and possibly be even the long run. They are also likely to be more dangerous, much slower, and less flexible than planes. Sound like a winning combination?
Sure, unfettered freeway driving, but what about the jams that reduce rush-hour traffic to stop-and-start bumper-to-bumper twice a day?
The German had this “problem” 60 years ago. As others have said, we can easily make aviation fuel out of coal, as the Luftwaffe did way back in the olden days. It wasn’t hard then, and it’s probably easier now.
Synthetic fuel has potential, but it’s not economical yet (at present it’s available only because of government subsidies). The Germans used it only for lack of alternatives (most of the world’s petroleum supplies being in their enemies’ hands). It might become economical as petroleum becomes more expensive.
Of course, that brings us no nearer to solving the greenhouse-gas-emissions problem.
Computer control might make that run a little smoother, but I doubt it would cut fuel costs significantly. I also doubt it will be available in the next decade – we’re verging on Strong AI here, a technology that, like controlled nuclear fusion, seems always to be ten years in the future.
That’s a neat idea. You could have a hybrid, gasoline-powered electric engine in your car that could switch over to full-electric in designated corridors, essentially making your car a tiny train. Would there be energy savings from, say, driving 50 miles on a large-scale-powerplant-run electric interstate over driving 50 miles using your car’s gasoline engine to produce the power?
Perhaps not, but air pollution is easier to control from a single point source (a power plant, even if coal-fired) than from multiple point sources (every hydrocarbon-fueled vehicle on the roads). Furthermore, electric-tracked cars could conceivably by powered ultimately by nuclear fission plants; and we’re probably going to (for all practical, economic purposes) run out of petroleum long before we run out of uranium.
Well, that’s pretty short-sighted. Have you no concern for the uranium shortage we’re inflicting on our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-
great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-
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great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren?
They’ll be overwrought with concern for the legacy they’re leaving their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-
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great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren.
Wow, Bryan. You know it’s a good joke when it actually breaks the layout of the page!
Does it? On my screen the hyphens let the words wrap normally. If it’s causing video problems for people, I’ll report it and ask a mod to delete it.
I get that, but why are the guys from Boeing, Nasa and the Air Force looking into seeweed.
I get that some people involved are just paying lip service to environmental issues, mumbling about carbondioxide, while secretly hoping traditional fossile fuels will last their lifetimes so they won’t have to worry about alternatives. They’re happy to burn fossile fuels and don’t care squat about CO2 levels.
But even if we skip the environmental issues and just look at the economics, oil reserves aren’t actually judged by the supply, but if it’s economically feasible to extract the crude. If it costs more to pump it out of the ground, than they can get selling it, they’ll stop pumping.
Sure, they’re gonna look elsewhere, but since these deposits aren’t getting replenished, there will come a time when setting fire to the stuff to propel things, is going to become too expensive. Maybe I’m a bit pessimistic in think it might happen when I’m 96, maybe it’ll take 50 or 100 or 200 years. And maybe, in that time, we’ve solved cold fusion, fuel cells and other stuff to just keep going. I have no problem with that, and no desire to shft my lifestyle to early 20th century European.
But there are a lot of ifs and meanwhile, Boeing is still checking out seeweed. Not to dampen your optimistic viewpoint, but when those guys are making contingency plans, I don’t think the whole idea of my OP s flawed.
Oh, not “problems,” per se. The text shoots out the right side for 4 or 5 screen widths. It’s pretty funny.
Screw 'em.
No, R&D and basic science look at everything that sounds reasonable. The vast majority of it doesn’t pan out but the payoff is huge if even one of them does. That is why they do it.
Making predictions about the future, even 5 - 10 down the road is a fools game even among the best experts on earth. I did a term paper on futurism in 1994 for example that was focused on technology and not one referenced mentioned the World Wide Web even though it was up and running and I had access to it on my labs computers. In 1996 I read a prominent consultants report that the web was too costly for businesses to implement and most planned to abandon it within a year. I was devastated but I have tried to find that study later and all traces of it were washed away. I like to believe that they were wrong.
What we can predict is incremental improvements on existing technologies that serve a vital need. Like I said before, passenger jet airliners much like the ones we have today are at the midpoint of what we are talking about it. The Boeing 707 from the 1950’s wouldn’t be obviously out of place at any airport today. We have incremental improvements like much better avionics, better safety and materials, and better fuel economy but today’s airliners don’t go any faster or do anything fundamentally different that a 707 could do except maybe performing better in weather due to advanced avionics.
I think that you picked the worst possible candidate for the area that fossil fuels would replace the soonest. Countless billions have been spent to make the birds with high longevity among the safest and reliable machines on earth and yet their fuel is among the most primitive. It is non-explosive, easily stored, has qualities that actually lubricate and protect the engine itself, and you can create it from lots of sources.
Compare that to some imaginary start up transportation mechanism and the transition and need for it to switchover 50 years from now. I can’t see anything and the new technology would have to prove itself so well and so quickly that the massive costs would be worth it. I can’t see it happening.
Most technologies don’t move at the speed of computer advances today. Look around your home and note how many are wiz-bang new within the past 20 years and how many have been around for a hundred or more and have just been improved incremently. It is a short list and most are electronics based. There a a ton of others such as regular phones, radios, light bulbs, heating and air conditioning, cars, house design, boats, airplanes, TV, books, plumbing etc. that saw some nice improvements over the years but work basically like they did in 1957 in the most common applications.
The infrastructure required to support any of the alternatives mentioned is gigantic and will take decades to develop on its own. In that time, more airliners with a 30+ year service life will have been delivered and the cycle continues. In that time, those new technologies will not have had the benefits of 100 + years of knowledge and development so they are at a huge disadvantage. It is the same problem with replaces fossil fuels for cars except worse because we have reasonable alternatives for fossil fuel cars.