It’s a process that is absolutely underway and making great progress, even the USA now generatea more from solar than from coal, many countries like Scotland are already producing over 90% of their electrical use from renewables with only 2% from fossil fuels.
It’s worth noting too that these numbers are only grid based usage and a lot of solar is direct use, often being stored in an electric car rather than sold to the grid - with rooftop solar at home and at work it would be possible to use a car without requiring any of the oil extraction, transport and refining faculties. I don’t know how many people it would take using solar cars before a single oil well goes untapped but I do know if we get to a point where no one is using gas stations then that’ll be an awfull lot of horrible polluting infrastructure we don’t need, just carrying the fuel through wires instead of in tanker lorries is a huge saving alone.
It’s an interesting one, a lot of people really do seem to be arguing cars shouldn’t exist which is absolutely insane, likewise there are people who have the equally hairbrained idea that cars are the only option for any journey.
There is no doubt at all that fleet managed self-driving electric cars are at some point going to be a vital part of all transport networks, the efficiency and utility is far higher than any other potential option. Lithium batteries can be recycled endlessly and the construction process can be powered from renewables so long term we’re going to get to a point where the ecological impact is negligible.
Of course we should be using other options where appropriate but we don’t have a magic wand so we need the utility of small personal transport, if we’re going to start switching off oil production systems then we’re going to need those vehicles to run on electric - the more we shift to electric the better the support and industrial infrastructure gets and the more refined the technology becomes.
There are so many crazy possibilities that will probably never happen, I love imagining what the world would be like if we could look through a time window - my daydream is normally about sending probes back to the point in space earth used to be and how fascinating the debates about where to look first would be, knowing it’s going to take years to get there and record it with everyone debating and getting anxious as to what it’ll see.
Like imagine how much information you’d get from fifteen minutes 4k footage of a Roman senate debate, and how disappointing it’d be after all that anticipation if you get a day or was closed. Still a billion things to obsess over in the image but disappointing when you’re hoping to see ceaser speak
Of course trying to catch sight of Jesus would be a huge project, I imagine it like those grifts where people go looking for the arc. What do they do if there’s no sign? What do they do if when they look nothing is anything like expected - would be so many people trying to find clues to what actually happened, at some point someone is going to find something really wild like they finally find someone from the Bible but it’s Jesus mate Judas laughing about how rich they’re getting pulling the reward money and rescue scam from the good the bad and the ugly…
And the people scouring to get clips for their YouTube channel, histories biggest cringe moments, wildest parties in history, luckiest trick shots ever…
It’s funny manual is the standard here so there’s no ego boost to driving one, people always tell me it’s because we have more corners which has never made any sense (I e. You need to go into second or third at roundabout which I think older autos would have a little lag with or something, certainly not a problem in cars from this century)
I would love an automatic, i think it would make my driving safer in several ways, for a start not having to focus on gears at key moments like navigating road changes and corners or pulling away in a busy carpark. When I drove in the US it was so nice not having to constantly be doing stuff in traffic that I wasn’t anywhere near as tired which again is a big safety issue
Quick attack users of the most popular distro before normal people start using Linux! We can’t allow a good, stable and perfectly usable distro to get popular, we need to bully everyone back to windows or terrible things might happen like the year of they Linux desktop!!