Originally Posted by
Less Hair
I am not convinced that burning oil is the best way to go for all time. But there are way bigger world oil reserves available than had been assumed for a long time. We are far away from "peak oil". It is not just that more places with oil are found to exist, there are new technologies available to harvest oil fields that had not been considered for exploitation in earlier days.
We should continue to look for better non fossil fuel energy. Not sure if going nuclear instead would be best. How about thermal heat or tidal energy for non transport uses like heating and cooling?
We may well be far away from peak oil, but that may become an irrelevance so far as powering a military machine is concerned. All extractive industries rely on there being a critical mass of customers to make the cost of extraction financially viable. If large swathes of energy production across the globe become non-fossil fuel based, extracting gas / oil for only the military starts being non-viable, whether we like it or not. There will of course be a long tail - extant in-production oil fields will likely have customers for a very long time to come.
There's other industrial domains where military applications already play second-fiddle to a wider civilian market. Look at microelectronics - CPUs. It now costs about $6-10billion to set up a competitive fab and develop the masks for the CPUs that will be made in it. The chips produced are ever so carefully engineered to give satisfactory lifetimes in servers in a normal data-centre environment. If you want a military-industrial spec version of such a chip, you can't get it. This is because even all the worlds' military procurement combined won't be buying the >$10billion's worth of CPUs that would be required to make it worthwhile setting up the plant. There are exceptions of course - some FPGAs for example. If the industrial demand for large CPUs goes away, military applications are going to have to manage without...
There's all sorts of other things that the wider market drives in directions not helpful for military applications. For example, ADA really is a good choice for several types of military system, but no one else wants it so it's impossible to find ADA programmers (and so military systems generally avoid it nowadays). Now it's getting worse; lots of GUI software is now web-based, or uses web-technology; these really aren't suitable for, say, flight control displays, but it's getting harder to find programmers who are willing and prepared to code for an embedded platform's graphic's library. If it's not mainstream that immediately cuts out a large fraction of the labour pool.
I'm not sure that there's many round here who would welcome their flight control displays being run in Google Chrome...