Hacker News Reader

Comment by j2bax | Hacker News Reader

I like and agree with the general sentiment of your comment (people are more adaptive than they may think) but I think the example isn't a great one... What would be your suggestion for people that live in rural areas of the US (we have a lot of them in almost every state)? Public transit would operate at a pretty significant loss in these areas and would be a logistical nightmare. Given enough time, I'm sure some solutions could help make it possible, but there would be significant inconvenience, loss of security/safety in the short term.

View on HN

> What would be your suggestion for people that live in rural areas of the US?

ALCOHOL FUEL! (Forgive me for shouting.)

If they are that spread out, they almost certainly have room to grow some sugar beets or sugar cane or potatoes or something like that, then they can ferment and distill alcohol fuel. This was pretty common for a long time.

> Before the American Civil War many farmers in the United States had an alcohol still to turn crop waste into free lamp oil and stove fuel for the farmers' family use.

> In 1826, Samuel Morey uses alcohol in the first American internal combustion engine prototype.

> By the 1890s, alcohol-fueled engines are starting to be used in farm machinery in Europe, making countries more fuel independent.

> By 1896, horseless carriages (cars) were showing up on roads in Europe and the United States. Because gasoline is so cheap and abundant, and also because ethanol is taxed at a high level, early US automobiles are adapted to gasoline from the beginning. Racing cars, on the other hand, usually used ethanol (and other alcohols) because more power could be developed in a smaller, lighter engine.

> In 1902, the Paris alcohol fuel exposition exhibited alcohol powered cars, farm machinery, lamps, stoves, heaters, laundry irons, hair curlers, coffee roasters, and every conceivable household appliance and agricultural engine powered by alcohol.

&c.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_alcohol_fuel

Alcohol is clean-burning, non-toxic, carbon-neutral, much higher energy density than any battery, cheap and easy to make, feed stocks are everywhere (I knew a guy who had a deal with a donut shop to collect and use their old scrap dough!), and the leftovers are a nutritious and valuable animal feed (yeast are protein.)

> would be your suggestion for people that live in rural areas of the US (we have a lot of them in almost every state)? Public transit would operate at a pretty significant loss in these areas and would be a logistical nightmare. Given enough time, I'm sure some solutions could help make it possible, but there would be significant inconvenience, loss of security/safety in the short term.

I honestly don't think I have any suggestions. Not technical ones. I am neither an expert on transportation nor planning. My comment is about psychology, and to some extent about history.

As you say, given enough time maybe new solutions would make changes possible. But also, maybe not. Given enough time it may be that people living in rural areas accept that the world has changed, and travel far less. Given time, maybe the societal pressures to travel will ease. It may be that in time the main attraction of rural life returns to being its pace and relative isolation. These are not necessarily good or bad things, progressions or regressions, just change.

To the extent that change involves loss as well as gain I do think that change is like the stages of grief. The early stages, before acceptance, involve various mental tricks to try carrying on as before.

Yes, the only reason for my comment was that you gave multiple examples where you and family members and historical groups made a big deal out of something and it turned out it didn't have any significant impact on their lives. There are probably few rural folks who wouldn't experience significant life altering consequences of losing their personal transportation autonomy.

This is an interesting comment: it makes me wonder if those places that we feel are habitable really are habitable. If humanity needs to inhabit parts of the world that can not be reached unless you have a particular mode of transport then it may turn out that effectively those places are no longer inhabitable. Just like the North Pole isn't habitable. We already give up on some areas of the planet for practical reasons (mountains with too steep a slope, for instance). We'd just add more of those, and the fact that they were habitable in the past probably should not make a difference.

Good creative analysis. I think time not distance may be adjustment we will make first. Barring a catastrophic technology collapse I doubt at this stage of human development we'll withdraw so fully from wilderness and remote rural settlement. But perhaps the change we can embrace is just chilling out. Other than firefighters and paramedics, lifestyles where people "need" to be in a city 1000 miles away in a few hours are untenable. Slower transport like rail and airships will likely make something of a comeback in less dense countries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com