I think that in the future, e.g 20+ years from now, there will be people living on Mars, the Moon and in outer space.
I think they will be appalled at our use of an Internal Combustion Engine. They way we blatantly just BURNED Fossil Fuels to power our transportation.
They’ll be horrified, because plastics will still be needed for building things, medicine and many other uses. But will be hard to come by. Apart from Earth the most likely source would be from biofuel from plants. But you could instead be growing food, which will also be somewhat precious (well anything that’s not some algae derived paste).
So the fact that we squandered Hundreds of Billions Barrels of oil and just mostly just burnt it. That’ll be horrifying.
They’ll wince in pain when you tell them about the EV1 and how we nearly had an Electric car revolution decades earlier. They’ll get riled up when we explain how the fossil fuel industry did such large amounts of lobbying they had a strangle hold on politics. That even a country like Australia was subsidising the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $10 Billion/yr, despite them making vast profits.
They’ll bemoan how we let the fossil fuel industry use FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) against climate change and to reduce the transition to renewable sources of energy. Despite them using using mostly the same tactics that the cigarette companies used. Knowing that it wasn’t that we didn’t learn, it’s that those in power were making money off the situation.
If we don’t have Nuclear Fusion, but only Nuclear Fission, then they’ll be grateful we didn’t dramatically expand the use of Nuclear power plants, as they’ll be wanting the Uranium. But Uranium could be in many other planets. Fossil Fuels are only likely to be on Earth. With every year of our burning fossil fuels, especially at our peak, we are wiping out possibly hundreds of thousands to millions of years worth of decayed plant life. Not something easy to replace.
