Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-25479664-20160418125948/@comment-27963514-20160418135231

GreyStark wrote: Crude oil

You're assuming that Remnant has crude oil. It's possible that the planet is too young for that... It took hundreds of thousands of years for the oil on Earth to develop. Maybe humans came to Remnant from Earth, and terraformed a previously uninhabited planet to make it livable... no life, no oil. Or maybe RWBY exists in a universe where humans have always been on Remnant, but oil simply doesn't exist.

As far as finding a new fuel source, there's a lot that goes in to that. It might be society, not technology, that's holding them back. Look at us and our dependance on oil. There's so much money in fossil fuels, it's very difficult for alternative energy production to take hold even though we know we're tapping a limited resource and probably damaging our planet. And here in America, we have a whole subculture of automotive enthusiasts that would never embrace something as "sissy" as ethanol or electric cars.

In real life, I've been hearing my whole life about how fossil fuels are running short, and their use is destroying the planet. From what we've been told, Dust is a limited resource, but we have no indication that its use is damaging Remnant. There's not enough cause to push for alternatives. We have been shown that there is a monopoly on Dust, and it's not outrageous to think that the Schnees would squash any attempt to develop ethanol or fossil fuels before any useful applications can be developed. They would also presumably do what they can to keep any talk of a Dust shortage or energy crisis as quiet as possible.

Getting to space? To the average person, what's it matter? In real life, the space race was motivated by a dick-measuring contest between two countries on the brink of war. Since then, public and politcal interest in space exploration has dwindled, and the funding for such projects went with it. The only practical reason to breach the atmosphere is for man-made satellites. In Remnant, the CCT was, until very recently, doing good enough that there's no need to satellites. Once active, any reason that might have been for going to space was probably forgotten by the public at large.