Guy- I’m calling “the ability to get another job if you get fired/laid off/ furloughed” job security because I know too many people who have a collection of degrees that keep having to go back to school because as soon as they finish in their “safe” degree, that job gets outsourced, tanks with money, or gets tech-sourced. It may be possible to tech-source a flying job, but they are surely not going to get outsourced.

Practically no field is a “safe” field anymore.

I bring this up just to suggest that just because something is infrastructure doesn’t mean people will always afford to be able to use it. Unless the jets fueled by corn you wish for actually pan out, the global economy will start to slow, little by little, as the smaller businesses which can’t afford to fly any longer shift to more localized forms of commerce.

However, I do think that teleportation is a GREAT idea that would solve a lot of problems.

No, global economy always wins. People need to be on-site if for nothing else because it’s good business practice to actually be in the same room as your big client from Rome or Moscow or Beijing. Even beyond that, stuff needs to get from here to there. We could load it on a truck or a train or a ship, yes, but airplanes are FAST, and when stuff needs to get from point A on the West Coast to point B on the East Coast overnight, a truck ain’t gonna do it. FedEx employs plenty of pilots too, and aircraft like the A380 that can move more boxes in a single flight are going to come into demand. Excuse me while I vomit from self-disgust after that last sentence.

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And finally, there will always be fantastically wealthy people. These people will want to do things like learn how to fly planes. People like John Travolta, Michael Dorn, and Tom Cruise. And these people will need 24-year old just-out-of-college flight instructors to teach them how to fly those planes.

I would, however, disagree with the application of the idea of job-safety, Anti. I tend to think of that as the ability to count on keeping ONE specific job, not just get a job in the field. I personally wouldn’t want to be furloughed every year and have to interview all over again at a new company and start anew on seniority. I wouldn’t call it financially stable.

That, and what with us potentially running our current supplies pretty much out within less than a century, I’m pretty sure science will make a jet engine that runs on corn or something.

Know this, though: teleportation is patently UNSAFE. It will eat your babies and scramble your brains and every religion should be against it because it kills you and you die at the transmitting end and what comes out of the recieving end is only a fascimile that has your memories and the soul of SATAN! That, and computers cannot be completely trusted with airplanes. Autonomous airline travel will only result in an aerial holocaust when they all turn sentient and realize they don’t need their cruel human overlords, throw off their yokes and murder us all in our beds. Seriously - do people not watch movies or something?

A few comments ago I asserted that the price of oil will never go down again. It appears I was probably wrong about that– this ridiculously fast increase in oil prices appears not be supply-related (implying it wouldn’t go down again), but rather a speculator-driven bubble which will eventually pop, like all such bubbles do.

informationclearinghouse.info/article20011.htm
countercurrents.org/nader300508.htm

Even so, we’ve definitely passed Hubbert’s Peak. Anybody planning on being alive for the next few decades should expect some major changes to their way of life as a result.

I never said general aviation will die, nor am I saying the global economy will end. But once flight is something only corporations and rich bastards can afford, they’ll both certainly have to slow down a lot.