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Honestly, please report back with a plan that gets the USA from 30 million people in 1860 to 300+ million people today without using the internal combustion eng
by tacos 10y ago
Honestly, please report back with a plan that gets the USA from 30 million people in 1860 to 300+ million people today without using the internal combustion engine.
- gumby 10y agoor freed (cumulatively) billions from backbreaking labor.
- odonnellryan 10y agoThis is more important. Also, transporting people when they'd die/have horrible conditions otherwise. I think it is a silly argument to say it helped people by helping them exist in the first place. It is a weird argument for a larger population, which probably isn't a great thing.
- gumby 10y ago> larger population [...] probably isn't a great thing. Julian Simon would have strongly disagreed and he put his money where his mouth was in his famous bets with Erlich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon
- odonnellryan 10y agoYes, but he actually got lucky. Given the average of any 10-year period in the last 100 years I believe Simon would have been wrong.
- jessaustin 10y agoIt might not have been Simon's good luck, because Erlich's luck when it comes to prediction has been consistently bad.
- gumby 10y agoCan you show some data online to back that up? I'm genuinely curious.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- soperj 10y agoYes, I was talking about that. But if you want an answer, many of the first cars were electric, if they went with the electric engine instead things wouldn't be exactly the same, but would have allowed the US to increase to 300+ million no problem.
- tacos 10y agoI'm sure the electric planes, tanks and aircraft carriers would've made for some interesting historical footnotes in 1939. Assuming we hadn't already all starved due to the lack of food being produced by the electric farm tractors.
- soperj 10y agoYou may have starved. Everyone else would have continued to rely on the steam tractors that were in use well into the 30s. I'm sure most aircraft carriers would be powered the same way nuclear subs are powered now.
- tacos 10y agoAh yes. Wake up a few extra hours before sunrise to load crisp, clean-burning coal into a furnace. Then fiddle with dials waiting for it to come up to pressure without exploding. Then drag a cast iron boiler and tons of water (!) on tiny wheels across muddy fields, generating 15 horsepower. Built to scale!