/tech/ - technology

OP I took this into consideration back in 2001. I wasn't very old just a teenager. Instead of bothering to get a drivers licence I took skills I learned in cadets and started walking places. Then a few years ago one of my neighbours gave me a bicycle which more than halves the time spent traveling.

Humans always find a way to adapt. Maybe it will be harder, perhaps we return to horses or more likely we just innovate like we always do and find some cheap means of transportation or at least come up with high efficiency oil based fuel powered engines.

>>980
Bikes are underrated.
Thinking about acquiring an electric motor for mine and trimming it to go faster than intended. Of course you have to slow down around the po-po but as long as you're not intoxicated beyond reason that's hardly a difficult thing to manage.

>>979

Peak oil in the sense of "skyrocketing oil prices due to difficulty of extraction and rising demand" will never happen. Extraction is easier than ever, thanks to modern drilling technology. And demand is set to plumet. Renewables are getting really cheap, really good, really fast.

Just look at China; they're halfway through a plan to spend US$361 billion on clean power projects and manufacturing capacity by 2020. US$200 billion of that is going into solar alone. The economies-of-scale of Chinese solar panel and wind turbine manufacturing is already starting to hit the world market. Their program has been such a success that they're already cancelling the construcion of many coal plants that had been planned to supplement those renewables, since the renewables are outperforming all expectations at lower-than-expected costs. Energy companies worldwide are pulling investment cash out of fossil fuel plants and power stations, and putting it into solar and wind instead (using those same inexpensive Chinese turbines and panels). The return on investment of renewables in most of the world is now competitive with fossil fuels, even in the absense of subsidies or tax credits.

And that's not even getting into other awesome projects, like the Bay of Fundy Tidal Energy Project (http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy/funding/current-funding-programs/cef/4955). The kinetic energy of an ocean current is staggering. And ocean currents tend to be pretty stable and predictable. The technical problems with the TEP weren't in a lack of energy available to capture; the problem was actually the other way around. Building a turbine strong enough to survive the currents without shredding itself to bits took a lot of engineering work. But that seems to be a solved problem now.

On the other side of the coin, bulk stationary electricity storage is also advancing fast, and not just in the comes-to-mind-first lithium-ion tech. Redox flow batteries are a really interesting way to cheaply store mass quantities of power. It's basically a battery the size of a small building. The amount of power storage is limited only by the size of the tanks holding the liquid electrolyte solution, and the input/output rate is limited only by the surface area of the electrodes. It's a solution that can scale in size pretty easily depending on local needs.