[worldsayshi]

> Internal combustion engine - inevitable

This fails to account for competing technologies. If batteries were good enough at the time when we sought to build cars we might've skipped ICE entirely and gone all in on electric cars.

At any point in time there are multiple possible outcomes. The one that ends up being dominant seems so in retrospect because it has been refined and we can follow all the events leading up to it. But we don't see all the paths that failed selection because they weren't competitive enough at that point in time compared to the alternative.

[WorkerBee28474]

You seem to link cars and ICEs, while ICEs predated cars by a century.

[worldsayshi]

Ok sure but electric cars predated ice cars. That's what I was thinking of. We could've skipped ice cars entirely if other enabler technologies were mature enough at the time.

So the ice car wasn't inevitable. It was the car that we could build at that time given the technology we had. So it was only inevitable given the context. Change the context, change the outcome.