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I ran some numbers and the amount of energy I consume driving to work and it shocked me. I googled that there are 33.7 kWh in a gallon of gas. My work is about 20 miles away, so in units of food this translates to roughly about 30000 kCal (or 30000 dietary calories) I consume driving to and from work in 1 day, assuming 40mpg of gas.
To put this in perspective, a person eats about 2000 calories per day, and before modern technology this would have been the only energy that people take from planet earth. But now I spend 15 times as much energy just driving to work. This is fossil fuel energy, which is depleted from the earth after it is consumed. And this is not including all the other kinds of energy I consume (e.g. running a refrigerator, air conditioner, etc).
This tells me that our current system of technology can only be temporary, until earth is depleted of the resources that make powered transportation possible. So much of the way the modern world functions is a result of powered transportation. It's what makes mass production worthwhile, because mass production can only be profitable for as long as it is cheap to send the product all over the world. Without cheap powered transportation, more things will have to be produced locally.
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