You would suspect that, sure, if you just looked at the past and considered the future would be much of the same, progress wise. The fact is if we go back 150 years we see amazing discoveries in technology achieved with a mere pittance of today's capital expenditures. The discovery of Electricity, the light bulb, optical systems, the diesel engine, telegraphy, the list is endless. But today it takes millions just to make a simple improvement of these systems. All of these new systems depend heavily on
oil and
coal as feedstock and for manufacture, which if anyone hasn't noticed, is depleting at a rapid rate.
Some will argue we can switch seamlessly to solar panel power and bio-fuels etc, I see serious flaws in this belief based mainly on the energy used to create them, but those concerns aside I ask the simple question. How do you replace the massive sealed road system across the nation without oil? You can't use concrete either because a simple investigation of the manufacture of cement and steel shows how energy intensive that is. So at the end of the day in the decades ahead we will be driving on a lot of dirt roads and what will a hitech driverless car mean for the average consumer then?
You don't need a crystal ball to see the future. You have 50 million people on food stamps and the figure is growing, do the math.
Converting Paved Roads to Unpaved
Converting Paved Roads to Unpaved | Blurbs | Publications
TRB’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Synthesis 485: Converting Paved Roads to Unpaved explores how common and under what conditions paved roads are converted to unpaved.
485 found that the practice of converting paved roads to unpaved is relatively widespread; recent road conversion projects were identified in 27 states. These are primarily rural, low-volume roads that were paved when asphalt and construction prices were low. Those asphalt roads have now aged well beyond their design service life, are rapidly deteriorating, and are both difficult and expensive to maintain. Instead, many local road agencies are converting these deteriorated paved roads to unpaved as a more sustainable solution.
If these roads are difficult and expensive to maintain with today's technological advancements, how the hell did they build them all from scratch 40, 50, and 60 years ago? Cheap oil built them, that's how.