We're Running Out!!

Los Angeles oil fields, 1935

 Courtesy of Paleofuture, a roster of Peak Oil predictions:

1909: until 1934-39

"Petroleum has been used for less than 50 years, and it is estimated that the supply will last about 25 or 30 years longer. If production is curtailed and waste stopped it may last till the end of the century. The most important effects of its disappearance will be in the lack of illuminants. Animal and vegetable oils will not begin to supply its place. This being the case, the reckless exploitation of oil fields and the consumption of oil for fuel should be checked."
— July 19, 1909 Titusville Herald (Titusville, PA)

1919: until 1921-1924

"In meeting the world's needs, however, the oil from the United States will continue to occupy a less and less dominant position, because within the next two to five years the oil fields of this country will reach their maximum production and from that on we will face an ever increasing decline."
— October 23, 1919 Oil and Gas News

1937: Gone in 15 years (1952)

Capt. H. A. Stuart, director of the naval petroleum reserves, told the Senate Naval Affairs Committee today the oil supply of this country will last only about 15 years.

"We have been making estimates for the last 15 years,' Stuart said. 'We always underestimate because of the possibility of discovering new oil fields. The best information is that the present supply will last only 15 years. That is a conservative estimate.'"
— March 9, 1937 Brooklyn Daily Eagle

1943: Peak oil has been reached

"There is a growing opinion that the United States has reached its peak oil production, the Oil and Gas Journal pointed out in its current issue. Since 1938, discoveries of new oil have not equaled withdrawals, in any single year, although there is a very good chance that 1943 will see enough new Ellenburger oil in West Texas to provide an excess."
— June 7, 1943 Bradford Evening Star (Bradford, PA)

1945: Just thirteen years left (1958)

"Faced with the threat that our nation's petroleum reserves may last only thirteen years, geologists are striving to tap the almost limitless supply of oil located beneath the seas off our coastline. The first attempt to get oil from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean was begun this month near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes revealed that the scientists are making progress in their efforts to reach the underwater oil."
— December 10, 1945 Times Recorder (Zanesville, Ohio)

1956: Ten to fifteen years until peak oil (1966-1971)

"M. King Hubbert of the Shell Development Co. predicted [one year ago] that peak oil production would be reached in the next 10 to 15 years and after that would gradually decline."
— March 9, 1957 Corpus Christi Times (Corpus Christi, TX)

1966: Gone in ten years (1976)

"A geologist stuck a figurative dipstick into the United States' oil supplies Tuesday and estimated that the country may be dry in 10 years."
— August 3, 1966 Brandon Sun (Brandon, Manitoba)

1972: U.S. oil depleted in twenty years (1992)

"At any rate, U.S. oil supplies will last only 20 years. Foreign supplies will last 40 or 50 years, but are increasingly dependent upon world politics."
— May 1972 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

1977: Oil will peak by the early 90s

"As a nation, Americans have been reluctant to accept the prospect of physical shortages. We must recognize that world oil production will likely peak in the early 1990's, and from that point on will be on a declining curve. By the early part of the 21st century, we must face the prospect of running out of oil and natural gas."
— 1977 US Department of Energy Organization Act

1980: In the year 2000

"Stressing the need for conservation, [physicist Dr. Hans] Bethe said the world will reach its peak oil production before the year 2000. Production of oil worldwide will then drop to zero over about 20 years, he said. Rigorous conservation could stretch the world's oil supply to the year 2050, he said.
— October 17, 1980 Syracuse Post Standard (Syracuse, NY)

1996: Peak oil likely by 2020

"Unfortunately, oil production will likely peak by 2020 and start declining. Without a change, developing countries will ultimately be left in the dark, and developed countries will struggle to keep the lights on. Conflict is inevitable. My guess is that this won't become a big issue unless there is a thalidomide event. We will have to see in the rear-view mirror that we are past the peak in worldwide oil production."
— Richard Smalley, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 1996

2002: Global peak by the year 2010

"Global supplies of crude oil will peak as early as 2010 and then start to decline, ushering in an era of soaring energy prices and economic upheaval — or so said an international group of petroleum specialists meeting Friday."
— May 25, 2002 Index Journal (Greenwood, SC)

2007: Sometime between now and 2040

Most studies estimate that oil production will peak sometime between now and 2040. This range of estimates is wide because the timing of the peak depends on multiple, uncertain factors that will help determine how quickly the oil remaining in the ground is used, including the amount of oil still in the ground; how much of that oil can ultimately be produced given technological, cost, and environmental challenges as well as potentially unfavorable political and investment conditions in some countries where oil is located; and future global demand for oil.
— February 2007 GAO Report

So buckle up sports fans. The oil is gonna run out Real Soon Now. Unless it already did and we're living in the Matrix.

Yet each time one of these predictions comes along, we still take it seriously.

Just Imagine!

"Just Imagine!" is a movie from 1930 -- all about life in 1980! People will of course have flying cars. (Sigh). And the government will decide who you're allowed to marry. El Brendel was evidently the top comedian of the year, but one might wish to see the Marx Brothers take on this movie!

The whole thing is about an hour and a half:

(h/t Dr. Boli)

A Warning to Air-Ship Investors!

Freight haulage?  We think not?

Ir's amazing how incisive rational thinking is when applied to new possibilities. 

Good old Paleofuture delights with these excepts an editorial in the December 10, 1908 Engineering News on the future of air transportation (as reprinted in the January 2, 1909, issue of Literary Digest*)

So far as the possibilities of freight transportation are concerned, it may be passed with a word. Wherever ordinary methods of transportation on land are available, it will be absurd to carry goods of any sort through the air. The cost of such transport would be measured not in mills per ton mile, as in rail or water carriage, or cents per ton mile, as in wagon haulage, but in dollars or hundreds of dollars per ton.

In 1961

...futurists imagined that the milkman would have a robot "dobbin" that would follow him as he made his rounds.  Courtesy of Paleofuture.

What they did not imagine was that kids today would wonder, "What's a milkman?" 

When I was a kid, the milkman and the eggman both made home deliveries.  They came down from the farms on the hill or from the co-op.  (My mother also took us on weekly hikes to the corner grocery story, to Korte's meat market, to Thatcher's fish market, etc.  There was also a weekly farmers' market in Centre Square.)  The milkman is long gone now, and from a confluence of multiple factors:

1. Reliable electrical refrigerators meant that frequent deliveries of fresh milk were no longer necessary.  
2. The movement into the suburbs meant more travel time between houses, adding to the cost of home milk delivery
3. So-called "super markets" combining grocery store, meat market, fish market, bakery, et al. into a single establishment made milk available on one's regular market trips.  



Stan Schmidt writes of the convergence
of multiple strands of techochange

4. The personal automobile enabled housewives (yes, housewives) to make such market trips to the central super market and carry large amounts of food on each trip.  

Futurists often see tomorrow's technology as merely enabling or improving today's practices and customs.  Whatever we do today, we will be able to do faster, cheaper, better tomorrow.  But in fact, we will generally do something else entirely.  The confluence of multiple changes creates complex feedback loops and synergistic effects.  This is also what makes central planning a mug's game.  Imagine government planning in the 1950s for the future of the home milk delivery process! 

[O]ne of the games to which [the human race] is most attached is called … “Cheat the Prophet.”  The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation.  The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely.  Then they go and do something else.  That is all.  For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.

– G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill

The Talkies

Some of you may have seen the recent silent movie The Artist about a silent movie actor who resists the move to the talkies.  It's a very good movie,and if you have not seen it, you should.  One of the interesting aspects (aside from ironic dialogue bills in which, e.g., the wife tells the actor, "We need to talk" or the actor declares "I will be heard!") is how very different the acting protocols were for silent films.  They were, in essence, recorded pantomimes, and whatever the actor had to convey was conveyed through posture and facial expression.  Usually, these were exaggerated compared to what we are used to and seem now to be hamming and mugging.  (Something similar, though opposite, can be said regarding radio acting protocols, in which everything had to be conveyed by voice or sound effects.)

The Age of Romance

PALEOFUTURE clues us in to the way the future was. 

In the year 1933 physician Ira S. Wile predicted what marriage would be like in 2033.  In his day, Darwinism was all the rage, and all the Best Thinkers were looking forward to the day when marriage would be put on a rational and scientific basis.  In this future, there would be

"a bureau of records under government control that would begin monitoring people the day they were born. ...Everything about a person would be recorded; from someone's physical and mental defects at birth to the subjective progress and imperfections of that person throughout their life. Then, when someone wished to be married, they would be assessed by bureaucrats and found a suitable mate based upon case cards that have been cross-indexed against members of the opposite sex. These assessments would be made based on class and desirable physical and mental traits." 

The Radio of the Future as Conceived in 1942

h/t Paleofuture

Beware the Awesome Mega-Blimp of Death!

America's battleship of the skies!