Reply #70: My argument is different.

[caseymoz]

A similar argument to mine would have been, "There's not enough oil in the ground to run these things." That argument wasn't made, was it?

Nevertheless, those who criticized of the car were, in fact, right, but they became wrong simply due to luck. It turned out those problems you listed were easier to solve than they thought. Luck. It was the best answer and the absolutely rational one to bet against the car. It was the likeliest one to be correct.

Good luck is not going to be the case for every invention you desire to succeed. It is superstitious to expect innovation to come through the way you think it will on every product you think is cool, in fact, on most inventions.

Examples abound, in fact, failures have pretty much boxed us in now. Space travel, for instance. We thought we'd have colonies on the moon and Mars now. It did not happen, because space turned out to be far more daunting than we thought, and gave us far less direct returns than needed. I mean there's high radiation, the zero-g is fatal to us, plus the fact that it takes a lot of resources to put anybody in space, let alone land them on another planet. Unlike automobiles, technological fixes for space travel did not come through and relativity still binds us close to the earth.

Then there's fusion. If you invested in fusion in the 1950s, it would have been a good bet. Don't say the oil companies have suppressed it, either. We spent tens of billions on developing it.

The simple fact is, though, most inventions are not going to change the world, most have one flaw or another that ruin them and that are never fixed. So, I stand by my criticism of solar. If you could demonstrate that the problems I see are much easier/cheaper to solve than they look, then it becomes more rational to think solar will become substantial. Until you do that, no.

You don't know what I mean by "transport of energy," and I was afraid you wouldn't. That does include in house, and that's nothing compared to the problem of storage and the toxic chemicals produced by that.

Batteries, BTW, are environmentally very polluting. Whereas the automobile started out when people had no care about the environment.

The actual trouble, however, is that if we do solve the problems and get solar to work without covering over Arizona, the population will grow. We will keep needing panels and wind turbines until it is unsustainable.

I'm glad you got it to work for your dryer. Now try it for everything, including your car. Run a plane on it.

Just to show you how much of this is dependent on luck, here is a quote by a scientist in the 1930s: “There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.”

Who said that? Why, Albert Einstein in 1932. Yes, the guy who knew more about physics than anyone, and whose incidental predictions are still discovered to be right to this day.

PS- Petroleum is solar energy. It's energy that the earth has stored. But it took hundreds of millions of years to gather that much. You're not going to replace a gallon of gas with a solar panel in five minutes. There's not enough energy there.