Everyone knows it’s well past the time when the people of all advanced societies on the planet should be finding ways to spill the oil, and by that, I mean ditch it.  Oil, while based on renewable fossil fuels, is still running out of stores of useful petroleum and since the global dependence for energy seems to rely on fossil fuels, unless we find another source of energy.  Cars, planes, trains, trucking lanes, ships and nearly every other form of mass transportation are all dependent on oil.  So is the economy of all the countries in the gulf area of the Middle East, which gives them a dangerous amount of leverage in global politics and human rights issues are rampant there in that unstable region.

If you consider a regular, domestic, ideal state in the US, such as New Hampshire, where the average person has no access to public transportation, you soon see the dilemma of the United States of America:  so much land to cover to get from place to place that the only recourse is for families to own, and use, multiple motor vehicles and most of those do need fuel based on oil in order to run.  Efforts to manufacture electric cars have really not been that impressive to date, and safety issues with those vehicles abound.

What then could be the answer to this complex situation?  Will it take some miraculous new discovery of science to find the next source of safe, clean, renewable energy for powering the planet’s transportation?  If so, who will make the discoveries when American students lag behind those of our competing countries in performance in Math, Reading, and Science?  What about the social implications of changing to a new form of fuel?

These questions, all quite intriguing, will fuel the future no matter how they are answered.  If we neglect to take on the challenge of finding renewable sources for fuel and creating truly safe ways to utilize that fuel, the world as we know it is in trouble.  The very future of humanity and the planet on which it lives is at stake.  Unless human beings from Earth can manage to get their act together when it comes to resource management and distribution, they might as well sign themselves out of the future and prepare to join the ranks of the other extinct species that have occupied space and time with little success.