Originally Posted by LanghamP

I'd like to apologize ahead of time to ILIKETOBIKE and MOBILE; the following post is utter nonsense.

I grovel at their feet for such a bad post. I can't help it; I'm addicted to bad ideas.

I would like to think flying EV's would work quite well.

Helicopters require about 16 or more times energy to go the same mileage as a car does; however if you have time on your side then you could just run energy from your solar roof into the airborn EV. If all EV's were automated then I could see them rarely colliding. Air space is big, it's the runways that airplanes and pilots fight over.

The road infrastructure could be greatly reduced, made tiny, because a runway is much smaller than a road. For short distances, last mile transport could work. For bad weather, perhaps drones could deliver supplies.

We think of helicopters as being extremely loud but this is not always true! They are loud because they need to be effecient, and efficiency is a rotor just below the speed of sound. We've seen whisper-quiet helicopters when no care at all was made for gas mileage. If you are getting solar energy then you can care much less about being fuel efficient.

The ICE automobile and its expensive infrastructure is what will kill most of us, possibly all of us, and so if we oourselves do not adopt long term policies to reduce auto culture, then in the somewhat near future limitations will be imposed upon us.

Since only nations can impose such long-term policies, and since most nations are now democracies that are beholden to the short-term interest of their voters (or influencers), then it follows we will all follow the automobile down to its natural conclusion.

History is full of societies that collapsed following their destruction of their habitat to its natural conclusion:
--Easter Island utterly lost its fishing base when its all of its trees were cut down.
--Iceland and Greenland destroyed their slow growing trees and grass through cow herding. Iceland barely survived but Greenland lost every single European settler.
--Rwanda recently went through a genocide that freed up more land to people. Before the genocide there was less than a quarter of an acre of farmland for each person. A sky-high birthrate alongside modern medicine results in a Melthusian nightmare.

I think the present US and Western European policy of importing vast number of immigrants, legal or otherwise, is a misplaced policy because we cannot give everyone the same high standard of living without tremendous environmental cost.

Instead, we should be attempting to import their standard of living (within reason); the 1st world is like a lifeboat that cannot even safely carry what it has much less three times.

Every society above, when goods run out and they lose all their trees and grass, then experiences a sudden and dramatic loss of population as people scramble desperately to save themselves and their loved ones. Cannibalism is documented in those collapses (human protein is found in dna samples of human feces). The lifeboat is tipped, and so nature runs its grim course.

So I think living car free is the most important policy our civilization can have. There is no long-term future in cars, and to be honest the cost of giving up cars isn't much because we have so many other technological alternatives. Electric bicyles, AI driven electric cars, airlines using batteries (heavy, expensive, but perfectly feasible), work from home, urban planning, immersive video games so you do not often have to leave your domicile, online dating, and a myriad of other alternatives.

We can say, well, that's too expensive! Well, an ICE car is not cheap; it just appears cheaper over the short-term, the cost is distributed over everone and therefore is somewhat hidden. ICE's are cheap because they spew hydrocarbons where ever they please, but the great cost of doing so will become more apparent over time (as if it isn't already apparent and destructive).