Agree. Think about life 100 years ago. Sometimes I just sit in wonder at what human civilization has accomplished since the start of the 20th century, compared to all of human history before then.
I think it's pretty likely that sometime in the next few decades we'll have a replacement for oil. It may very well be technology that hasn't been discovered yet. But I see no reason to think that we'll just use up all the oil and have no alternatives.
We won't come up with some magic replacement for oil, unless ITER is successful, and we manage to adapt the fusion principle to a scale small enough for transportation use, but that's not something I would bet on at this stage.
More likely we'll see incremental change together with market forces reshape our society in a way that we can currently not predict.
My best guess would be more nuclear (pebble bed?), more solar, more wind, more oil from weird places and much more conservation efforts driven by prices that you can (probably) not imagine today.
In Europe a Gallon of gasoline sells for ~$6 today, imagine what would happen to the US if it had a gas prices that high.
Yeah, there are technical alternatives already, but it's a question of econonmics.
If there is less oil produced prices will rise and less will be consumed. There are many alternatives, but today oil is just cheap enough for many uses.
Natural gas is one alternative, that can be used instead of oil to fuel cars and for heating. There is plenty of that around. If the price of oil rises a lot more than natural gas, more people will run cars on natural gas.
Electrical cars and wood gas are other technologies that have been around for a long time, but just aren't quite as practical. But if oil becomes a lot more expensive, the alternatives will start to look better in comparison.
It's nice to be optimistic, but we can't just assume that all of the problems we have today will be fixed be some 'mircale' technology tomorrow, so there is no need or drive to fix them now.
I think it's pretty likely that sometime in the next few decades we'll have a replacement for oil. It may very well be technology that hasn't been discovered yet. But I see no reason to think that we'll just use up all the oil and have no alternatives.