Regnirps wrote:

Stephen Harding wrote:

That's pretty typical of American thinking. But increasingly, we're going to
find that car is making demands on us that we aren't going to like. In some
areas, that's already the case.

snip

You must be at a University. Faculty? Grad student? I know a Stanford physicist

Former UMass/Amherst computer science dept programmer. Now part-timer and
self-employed technical writer and programmer. [Anyone looking to hire a tech
writer??]

you should talk to. This has been his field for the last 30 years. For
instance, he can give you The Five Reasons Commuter Lanes Don't Work and how
traffic engineers know how to fix most of the problems if the politicians would
let them. There is no looming catastrophe and we are not running out of
resources.

I pretty much agree with that, although I'm skeptical of politically limited
solutions to traffic problems.

Oil will run out probably sometime in the next 100 years, but by the time it
does, I suspect fuel cell technology running on straight H2 (rather than the
initial gasoline) will be meeting energy needs for centuries to come.

Here is a good question.

If you spread all the mining and digging and such from all of human history out
over the land area of the Earth, how many inches deep do you think we have gone
in the "exploitation" of resources?

Lots of earth [earth] surface area with very small volume of earth dug over
history, so I'd be surprised if it came to anything more than 1/1000th of an
inch!

But will the correct answer speed my commute to work?


SMH