THBT: Present-day style motorsports will not go extinct even if more advanced forms of transportation replace the car/motorcycle industry

• The term "If" determines that the scenario is not realistic and has not happened, and thus everything here is speculated to be hypothetical
  

• Agreed.  Doesn't such an admission make PRO's case almost impossible to prove?
  
• Since PRO and CON agree that PRO's evidence is not likely to be more reliable than informed speculation and hypothesis, PRO seems to concede that his burden to prove that no motorsports will ever go extinct is untenable.
  

• Due to tradition and recreation, people would find fun and thrill even competing in outdated machines
  

• PRO offers 4 examples of racing using obsolete modes of transportation
  
• Horse racing
  
• Let's note that the dynamic that kept horse racing alive in the 20th century was gambling.  In the US, there are almost no examples of professional horse racing absent wagers
  
• Even so, the expansion of American gambling alternatives has led to a steep decline in horse racing in the 21st century
  
• "Horse racing in America today, on the other hand, is marked by decline. Decline in the number of tracks, total attendance, number of horses bred and racing, owners, purses paid to those owners, wagers placed by the bettors and the number of people employed by the horse racing industry....  And unlike the other low-popularity sports, horse racing has been beset in recent years with negative publicity. As animal-welfare consciousness has grown in the United States, horse racing has been continually challenged to justify its existence. Scandals within the industry involving the improper drugging of horses, and public spectacles of stakes-level horses being injured or dying on the track have further eroded the public’s interest and enthusiasm for the sport.  The lifeblood of racing has always been the wagering dollars pumped into the sport by both committed horseplayers and everyday gamblers. Those dollars keep going down... Figures published by the Jockey Club show that from 1990–2016, pari-mutuel handle for United States horse racing peaked at around $15 billion in 2004, and has steadily fallen to less than $11 billion by 2016"
  
• "The downfall of horse racing first became apparent in 2011. A census conducted by The Jockey Club showed that without any type of intervention, betting on horse racing would see a major decline. They estimated that by 2021, horse race betting would see a total decline of up to 25 per cent. They noted that the sport had failed to keep up with other, more modern types of gambling, and that the competition was starting to outpace many of the attempts of horse race betting companies to make the sport more popular"
  
• Horse-drawn carriages
  
• Same as horse racing but much, much smaller in popularity and we should add additional negative publicity because the jockey uses a whip
  
• Penny farthings
  
• CON questions whether penny farthings can actually be used as a  predictor for the motor vehicle industry since these bicycles were  never really popularly adopted by the masses
  
• "bicycling remained the province of the urban well-to-do, and mainly men, until the 1890s, and was a salient example of conspicuous consumption"
  
• The first penny farthings were built in 1869 and commerical production largely ended by 1893
  
• Today, only 140 years after the height of penny farthing's popularity, continued of the vehicle has dwindled to a few thousand.
  
• For example, the largest penny farthing event in the world has been held in Tasmania at the annual Evandale Village Fair since 1983.  The total number of racers is small enough to count- 472 over the event's 37 years amounting to an average of fewer than 13 unique participants per year.
  
• PRO points to this level of participation as evidence of "not dead yet" but CON argues that this evidence of extreme rarity should be seen as a forewarning of likely future extinction.
  
• old cars
  
• Likewise, PRO offers a limited reproduction of 25 Jaguar D-Types as a example of "not dead yet."  Only 87 were built between 1955-57 and only 18 were ever built for actual racing.  None of these were ever road worthy or enjoyed market popularity beyond an exclusive subset of very wealthy men (none of these cars cost less than a million dollars to produce).  A 3 year production life followed by a 60 year gap in production should be seen as a decline in popularity even as increased rarity improved the model's price at auction.
  
• 
  
• Look, there are still 49 Gutenberg Bibles known to exist in various states of decay 570 years after production but can it be said that any of these bibles have been used as bibles for the last few centuries?  Continuation among museum curators and wealthy collectors may be called existence but the absence of any use consistent with original design certainly proves obsolescence and even extinction.
  
• After all, a volcano is said to be EXTINCT once the rupture loses its supply of magma.
  
• Species are said to be EXTINCT in the wild once the only known living members are preserved beyond that species historic range.  If a motorcar is only rolled out for auctions, car shows, exhibition races, and museum displays, CON argues that motorcar should be validly considered EXTINCT even if some production remnants suggest that the model has not vanished entirely.
  

• PRO has offered no evidence that PRO has any means of reliably predicting the future and the future is notoriously difficult to predict, decreasing in reliability of forecasting as time from present increases.  Since PRO has offered no time limit for his prediction, PRO has to show that his forecast will prove true even thousands of years into the future when predicting market trends even a few decades hence has proved notoriously difficult.
  
• For example, famous futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted in 1999 that human life expectancy would exceed 100 years by 2020 AD but that number is only 72.63 years today and has actually declined in the US over the last decade.
  
• PRO has suggested no capacity for excluding the possibility of catastrophic events, large or small, that might entirely disrupt the popularity of archaic motorsports in future.
  
• Luisa Rodriguez at the Effective Altruism Forum estimates that the chance of thermonuclear warfare over the next 75 years at about 60%
  
• "For a child born today (say 75 year life expectancy) these probabilities (.0117) suggest that the chance of a nuclear war in their lifetime is nearly 60%, (1-(1-.0117)^75). At an annualized probability of .009 which is the probability from accident analysis it’s approximately 50%."
  
• According to NASA, the probability of an asteroid capable of destroying a city striking Earth is 0.1% every year.
  
• Many major sporting events have been unexpectedly disrupted by the present COVID-19 Pandemic.
  
• The Formula One Grand Prix of Monaco and 8 other Formula One events have been cancelled
  
• Major events like the Indianapolis 500 and the 24 Hours of Le Mans have been postponed for months and will be run without any live spectators.
  
• The scale and multiplicity of these cancellations is unprecedented in the history of the sport.  Can PRO really pretend to know how these disruptions will impact future popularity?
  

• The second law of thermodynamics states that "the total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time, and is constant if and only if all processes are reversible."
  
• Which in turn implies that universe is mortal by eventual cooling until equilibrium is reached and all physical processes cease, if not by some earlier catastrophe.
  
• PRO is unlikely to prove that motorsports will continue to be popular after the universe has subsided into utter quiescence.