Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: AC Flyer who wrote (13316)	1/11/2002 2:44:14 PM
From: Moominoid	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

The thing about oil is that fairly reliably in all regions that have been explored for oil there is a bell curve of discoveries that peaks and then declines. The peak in discoveries precedes the peak in production that follows the same path. Things like enhanced recovery help extended the tail on the downward slope but it is still inevitable. All the evidence suggests that discoveries have peaked in all major oil regions. There could be oil in Antarctica or somewhere (but expensive). However, the eventual running out of oil doesn't have to mean doom and gloom. Technology is continually advancing....

To: AC Flyer who wrote (13316)	1/11/2002 5:07:07 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

<...you can guarantee that the current projections of world oil reserves are also dead wrong. We will find out that the Antarctic continent (or Siberia, or whatever) is literally floating on an ocean of oil. > Or, more likely, we'll find that life changes in unexpected ways, just as the investors in railroads in the USA didn't envisage the vast fleets of cars and trucks and buses and aircraft which would render railway lines fit for limited services. For example, suppose the Segway really does turn out to be the best way to get around a city. There could be Segways where hordes of Segways cruise along at 30 kph [or maybe more]. There could be rental Segways, where a person simply steps on one and takes off, their automatic ID being debited for the kilometres they travel. Rainy days would mean covered Segways, bike paths and walkways would be necessary. SUVs are good for distance but not good for hordes of people getting about town. Cyberspace will do away with the need for a lot of travel that people do. People are not always choosing to drive their cars - they simply have to to achieve their goal. Often those goals involve information transfer [not chatting, which is personal - and even that could be done a lot via 3D cyberspace]. Numbers of people are going to drop dramatically in many vehicle-using countries. India isn't a car or truck place and they might go straight to Segways and cyberspace. China too. There is no reason that they should copy the crazy world of the SUV and long, dull, [or stressful], hours on freeways and at malls, burning lakes of oil. CDNA and CDMA can change the world in surprising ways. Who'd a thunk in 1900 what the USA would look like in Y2K and what people would be doing and how their lives would be lived? We should expect even more dramatic changes before 2100. Oil might not figure very prominently at all. The greenhouse effect will, in my opinion, be as funny as the Club of Rome doomsday script. It takes very little energy to move a person 100 km at 150 kph. An SUV is a very inefficient way of doing it with many frustrations from traffic jams and parking to earning the money to pay for the brutes, their freeways and a small house to keep them in. People buy them because they suit their purposes [such as being bigger and tougher in a crash - of course SUV vs SUV is no better than Ka vs Ka for passenger safety [Ka is a dinky little car which is perhaps not on sale in the USA]. Of course, SUV vs Ka is an SUV victory. But SUV vs Crash barrier can mean SUV over the cliff! SUV vs SUV makes it a lot tougher to get still-living survivors out of the wreckage [big steel is harder to rip apart]. Segway vs Segway would involve broken bones only [for the most part]. Anyway, back to the energy needed to move a person. Even existing internal combustion engines can be much more efficient. If small, quiet, superconductor-levitated and propelled, individual or duo units with electronic controls were hurtling alone converted freeway lanes, the fuel requirements would be tiny. If partial-vacuum tubes were built across country, air travel could be generally replaced as people swoop at 400 km per hour on major routes in nose to tail superconductor-powered electronically-controlled convoys. The little bubbles would fly through the tubes, pushed by magnetic fields and supported and stabilized mainly by teeny wings [and the superconductor as necessary]. The tubes would be transparent for passenger viewing. The roof would have photovoltaic panels [to keep sun off and make it useful]. There would be enough air in the tube for ventilation. The right air pressure for passengers could be maintained in the capsule by letting in air at the high pressure tip of the nose and out at the back. As the units push through the thin atmosphere, they'd push old air out of the tube on leaving and fresh would suck in behind each unit. No more terrifying bombs in shoes or checked baggage, or suicidal pilots or box-cutter flights into tall buildings. No more accidental shootings down. We all know it's mad to be 10km above earth, in an aluminium tube full of kerosene, travelling at 1000km per hour to arrive at a freeway jam, with bombers and distraught pilots crashing you into the ground if you get the short straw. We'll be able to tell our grandchildren stories about how there really were planes full of people crashing out of the sky on a regular basis and millions of people spent much of their day in traffic jams in big steel boxes burning a fortune in fuel, suffocating in smog. Mqurice