This is a very interesting "not baseball" topic. I did not stay at a Holiday Inn last night, but my bachelor's degree is in science, so it's fun hearing everyone flex that part of their brains (especially Woodrow, hilarious as usual ...
... but FBMom, that was really funny too)!
I'm wondering if this fuel and power topic might be analogous to the development of computers and the Internet:
Parents my age, think back to when you were in college, 20 to 30 years ago. What did the Internet mean to you? I had not heard of it. How large was a computer, and how many people did you know who owned one? How much did a computer with minimal processing power cost?
Think back to just 10 to 15 years ago. Wasn't it cool to be able to hook up a computer - small enough to sit on your desk at home - to an Internet connection in your home? And how about when high speed Internet became available ... and then became affordable?
Now, I am working on one computer at my home with ten times the processing power and 100 times the hard disk space of a decade ago, using a super high speed connection (except today; it is not working and I'm on dialup, but that's beside the point).
My husband and son each have their own laptops and connect through mine as a wireless server, moving to anywhere in the house they wish without losing their connection. Today I brought a laptop from home to work, sat in a conference room to demonstrate a Flash widget I had developed, and connected wirelessly and instantly to a high speed network there. I could not have conceived of any of that 10 years ago, and certainly not 20 years ago.
So as I read your posts above, I started dreaming a bit. Ten years from now, what will be the energy/power evolutionary equivalent of the development of the wireless high speed internet connection and modern laptops? Solar panels that are tiny enough, efficient enough, and inexpensive enough to be featured on every car without adding much to the cost or weight of the car? Or a series of small but powerful solar-energy generating stations along every highway system, with "wireless-equivalent" devices in every car which absorb needed power from the stations as they speed along?
Or 20 years from now, will we even travel in cars on a daily basis? Or will we commute via personal transportation capsules (PTC's, I just made it up) which glide through the air following computer generated paths from origin to destination???
Julie