Transportation and Information

Chapter 6

According to the text, the two key attributes to high-energy societies are an unprecedented degree of travel and the exchange of information. Technological leaps and bounds have been made in regards to transportation. Early societies went from having to have horses take them where they want to go, to having engines do that work for us today.

During the first half of the 19th century, many relied on ships to take them where they wanted to go. Steam engines were how they made their way across the seas, and soon that switched to steam turbines, which were more efficient.

Cars and bikes made their debuts several years later, bicycles appearing first. And "cars pollute so much because so little energy converted by internal combustion engines ends up doing the useful work of locomotion." One of the most interesting times in human history is when we learned how to fly. The invention of the airplane certainly changed everything; we could cross the ocean in a matter of hours, as opposed to the weeks it took ships. The use of gas turbines in airplanes aided the invention of rockets. Not only can we travel much more quickly over the water, but now we can travel into space. It's truly amazing.

With all of these inventions, some way of transporting fuel had to be created, thus pipelines; they span all over the world. And also with the new technology, some more efficient forms of communication were needed. The telephone was the answer. Instead of sending a letter and having the recipient getting it in several days, one could now just call them up and talk instantly. More recently, the spread of information has happened through television, computers and the internet via microchips.

Questions

1. Better transportation definitely makes an economy more efficient because you can get the supplies needed to the area much quicker, making the money come in faster.

2. Better communications could absolutely be used to reduce energy use. It would use energy to do this, but even the media could help with this one. If televisions told viewers to try and be more green, it might work. Although, they have been trying this, and I'm not sure how successful it is..

My Questions

1. The texts discusses how pollutant cars are because of basically how inefficient the engine is at converting energy. Is that still the case today?

2. What exactly is a tanker? I'm not really clear on it.

3. Do you personally think bikes are practical? For example, do you think we could go back to using them?