I'm absolutely positive they've done exactly that.
Never on a historical scale we moved so much cargo. Long-range ships were primarily used to move something extremely valuable, such as spices and gold - and now we have ships hauling everything because it's so much more efficient than anything else.
Our owners have never been so far from needing more of us
And so the solution is, instead of reducing work week and expanding social programs, to crank people up in dangerous conditions and make them do one of the hardest and most avoidable jobs known to humanity?
I didn't say "use bad methods to grow food and fuel the crew with that."
Fair, but it follows. Nowadays, in the age of cheap solar and new, eco-friendly power storage options, it is much, much easier and cheaper to add an electric engine than to maintain a fleet of wage-slaves fed by agricultural surplus.
Your kind of "solution" is both economically inefficient and inhumane, and doesn't seem to get out of the box of "9-to-5 to everyone by all means". So, don't rush to accuse me of shortsightedness.
Thousands of tons on a single vessel. The reason we have such huge container ships is that while the surface area and subsequent water resistance gets squared, the volume growth is cubic.
This means the larger the vessel, the more energy efficient it is at delivering anything from point A to point B. This is exactly how shipping has become the most efficient way to deliver goods.
If you want to deliver the same amount of cargo by many smaller ships, you'll need way, waaaaaay more energy to do so. This is incredibly inefficient, and ships of the past were of that scale exclusively due to structural limitations. Hence, shipping costs were incredibly high, leading to only the most expensive items being transported.
Now, rowboats cannot technically be wide, because otherwise you won't be able to seat enough rowers to drive the ship. And they cannot technically be too long, or else, being narrow, they will be turned over or broken in a storm. So, they are forced to be small.
I answered you right there - you can use electricity generated through renewables instead of heavy human labor. Sodium ion batteries for smaller missions (like ports in Asia), green hydrogen for longer hauls (like China-US), and nuclear for particularly long hauls through complicated areas (like the Northern Sea Route).
I re-read your comment again. You claim we're all wage slaves anyway and it's better to row a cargo ship until people in power decide to rather throw us into war. You also mentioned that it's either rowboats or ecological collapse. Did I get it right, or did you mean something else entirely?
Studies on the issues of modern agriculture and recent developments in renewable energy tech. We do have safe ways to grow food, indeed, but they require much higher level of investment and do not pay off very well, while renewables are already cheaper than their traditional counterparts, naturally leading to massive rollout. We just need to keep going with this.
Obviously not as in "9 hours a day, 5 day a week job". It's more of a cultural reference to the current work time conditions. If there are too many workers and too little job, maybe the best course of action is reducing work time and redistributing gains made through automation?
This way people won't need to do useless jobs like rowing a boat in the era of electric propulsion, and will have more time for themselves.
By no means. I was genuinely engaged with the conversation, but it just so happens that the point of your argument completely misses me. There are obviously better ways to do what you propose, and I fail to see the merits of going back to rowing as means of ship propulsion.
Rowboats cannot be big, hence they fail to reap physical benefits that come with larger ship sizes, which alone makes them so incredibly inefficient; they require intense manual labor and overblown crew, raising costs and reducing useful load, and they offer a very grim picture of the future full of pointless jobs instead of worker liberation.
So...why rowing, of all things?