For achieving maximum speed, sure. To simply guarantee you get there? Not at all - the Iberians knew how to navigate solely on maritime currents 500 years ago.
If sails were that great we would still be using them for freight, we didn’t switch to petroleum for the fun of it.
We started using pretroleum because capitalism requires infinite growth as fast as you can muster it. Particularly with modern refrigeration techniques and automation, time insensitive navigation for transport could easily be done with sails.
For achieving maximum speed, sure. To simply guarantee you get there? Not at all - the Iberians knew how to navigate solely on maritime currents 500 years ago.
We started using pretroleum because capitalism requires infinite growth as fast as you can muster it. Particularly with modern refrigeration techniques and automation, time insensitive navigation for transport could easily be done with sails.