Dubious Augury

Martian Levittown

I have major doubts whether the following popular forecasts will come to pass ... at least in our lifetimes ...

-  Go-everywhere self-driving vehicles

- Serious global warming caused by increases in carbon dioxide

- Electric vehicles/airplanes totally replacing internal-combustion ones

- Widespread G-5 communications

- Colonization of Mars

- Artificial intelligence/robots controlling humans

- Nuclear-powered missiles

- Vegetarian “meat” replacing real meat

- Total elimination of nuclear and hydrocarbon-based power plants

- Nuclear fusion power generation

- Quantum computers

- Plastic products disappearing altogether

Reefer Madness (Revised)

I have been curious as to whether Elon Musk's  (ditto California's) chimera of converting ALL our petroleum-driven vehicles to electric ones. I have performed the following very rough calculations ... which I welcome you dear readers to check and, hopefully, verify:

Daily US number of vehicle miles driven: 8.8 brillion  miles (2015)

Range of electric vehicles (Tesla): 250 miles

= 35.2 million ... average number of daily recharges of US electric vehicles

X  94 KWh ... power used per vehicle recharge (Tesla cars ... much more for trucks)

= 3.3  billion KWh total additional US electric power demand per day

versus 10.7 billion KWh current (2016) US electric power usage per day

Ergo: For the US to go all electric vehicles, we would have to expand our electric power generation capacity by something like 30%. It ain't gonna happen ... certainly not with just wind and solar ... which now represents 10% of our generation ... and would have to expand at least 13 fold.

I think you may now guess why Elon Musk is smoking weed.