Maybe I'm just ignorant, or blinded by cognitive biases, but I always imagine the combination of gas/diesel and internal combustion engines as an engineering optimum, reached iteratively after decades of wandering through parameter space. At least wikipedia's version [1] of the history of cars seems consistent with this, showing a history of dozens of engine designs and fuel choices (solids, liquids, gases, and electric batteries) long before the ICE came to dominate. (Maybe I'm unreasonably optimistic, but I'm unsurprised we've succeed in breaking free of our original "path", steam engines). Perhaps it's my lack of imagination, but I'm not aware of any practical fuel (chemical or otherwise) superior, in energy density and convenience, to liquid hydrocarbons. Nor am I aware that there was a historically superior way of obtaining liquid hydrocarbons to letting them gush out of the ground, which I understood was the least expensive source for them throughout modern history.
Am I simply rationalizing the history of modern transportation, and if so can you enlighten me as to the "paths not taken" that I'm blind to?
Re:Space Stasis (Neal Stephenson)
by iuygtfrgth on Thursday February 03, 2011 @01:26AM
(#2173882)
If oil hadn't been available do you think Karl Benz would have sat down and invented the entire drilling, refining and transport system before he started on the car?
The ICE was possible because oil infrastructure was there - the first gas stations were the pharmacists who already sold the oil
Nobody is claiming anything about the internal combustion engine. Uvdiv is claiming that oil is not an example of path dependence because it is actually optimal. That there exists a path to get to the ICE does not refute the argument.
I'm with uvdiv here: the idea that the modern oil industry exists due to path dependence ignores the massive fact that petroleum was by far the most concentrated, easily transported exploitable form of energy on the planet in the 19th century.
Now we have a system where we can only use a fuel that is delivered in a certain quantity to a local gas station as a liquid that can be burned.
Compare this with the electricity grid where we can switch from coal to nuclear to wind to gas without anyone noticing.