A transportation vision, will we even need it in the future???

chad s thomas

Member since
October 2012
234 posts

Posted by chad s thomas on Monday, May 11, 2020 4:51 PM

Inspired by ttrraaffiicc's post: April 09, 2048: A Railroading Vision

This is great food for though and a great thread. I thought I would throw one of my visions into the mix My 2 Cents

SOMETIME IN THE FUTURE......

The world is far removed from 2020, though that was the turning point. A pandemic trigered a pivital change in the world as we knew it. Technology, already changing at an exponential rate for decades, was brought to the forefront of society in the aftermath of a fundamental change in the way things were done. In a 'stay at home order world' people were forced to self isolate. People were forced to function in society isolated from human contact beyond their own home. As the older generations died off, mostly from natural attrition, but accelerated by the pandemics of the era, the younger generations realized most of the thinking part of their jobs could be done at home with the technology available. For some that was 100%. for others that was less practacle, those functions being declaired 'essential'. The longer this went on the more people adapted to working at home. The "more essential" jobs became work at home jobs with the aid of robotics and automation.

With huge percentages of the population adapting to the situation and becoming functioning work at home members of society, large parts of the then required infrastructure started to vanish while other technologys slingshotted far and fast. Transportation rapidly evolved from goods moving long and short distances on conventional (at that time) means, to transportation of information over communications networks of electrical and optical information networks. Fiber optics cables slowly replaced outdated interstate highway & railroad infrastructures. The need for those 'essential workers' also diminished as the labor required for those 'field' workers that maintained the infrastructure was greatly reduced.

As virtual reality technology development catapulted in capabilities and acceptance the need for personal transportation rapidly diminished and our road and highway infrastructure was left to wither. Only the commercial transportation companies continued to use them. A boon to the industry in the short term as they continued to be relied upon to diliver food products and other staples to the population, they also began to decline and '3-D' printing / mgf. technology also skyrocketed. Entire transportation industries shrank rapidly from the goliaths they once were into conveyor belts in small nich functions. Oceanliners, barges, railroads, trucks and airlines were altered into entities a fraction of their former size ultimatly destined to a place only in the history 'books'.

Hand in hand with the diminishing need to work from central locations and population centers, cities shrank at unprecidend speed as the populations decentralized. Utilities transformed into 'pipelines' of feedstock conduits and wasteproduct disposal conduits overlayed with the communication conduits for information exchange.

Energy needs that were once provided by national and huge regional generation and distribution systems that mostly consumed fossil fuel (a finite rescource in that form) became altered from the all powerfull systems they once were to a thing of the past. Energy needs are now provided by very local systems that very efficiently convert the natural resources of the universe (solar via many means) into useable energy sources.

The only real 'industry' as we once knew it is now production of food products (highly efficient and automated) on land and sea and the construction of personal dwellings. This is acomplished with automated mobile large scale '3-d printer' style manufacturing processes and underground automated excavating machines. And to some degree automated feedstock conveyerbelts that mine & deliver the feedstock to those automated manufactureing machines (think big 3-d mfg macines) to a very local level. Those mfg machines also recycle as much of our wasteproducts as possible (through the wasteproduct utility, think modern sewer system) leaving only a wasteproduct of compleetly consumed material to be disposed of in 'legacy landfills' like old salt mine and coal mine cavities of centuries past.

Now we live a life in individual 'homes' (life support) living a 'virtual life'. And the lines between man and machine are blurred beyond anything we knew back in 2020.