You may imagine as you sit back this morning all toasty-warm, thanks to your underfloor heating, and sip on a cup of freshly ground coffee that you want for nothing; that everything that can be invented is already in the shops, on sale for £4.99.

You have a telephone that can send pictures to your sister in Australia. You have a thing for removing the stubborn lid from a jar of pickled onions. You have pills for when you have a headache and pills to keep you unpregnant when you don’t.

Certainly, if I were a modern-day Caractacus Potts and I were sitting in my shed wondering what to come up with next, I’d be suicidal with despair. And a bit murderous every time I thought of that bastard Trevor Baylis, with his bloody wind-up radio.

Maybe I would eventually hit upon the idea of turning someone’s foreskin into a spare pair of eyelids, but guess what. Someone’s already come up with that as a method for helping burns victims.

When we have reached a point at which a human ear can be grown on a mouse’s back, and we have built so many bridges that we are reduced to connecting the tiny Humberside villages of Barton and Hessle just to give the construction companies something to do, it’s easy to sit back and relax.

In fact, though, we are about to enter an age when engineers, designers and men in sheds everywhere will be needed more than ever before. Because one day soon the oil and gas will run out - and the only alternatives being suggested right now are coming from people who smoke way too much cannabis. Like the tide, man. And, you know, the wind is totally, like, sustainable.

If we want to keep the world warm, lit and moving, this is genuinely alarming. Especially, as I discovered last week, when 351,000 engineers are qualifying every year in China, and India is churning out a further 112,000. Meanwhile Britain is producing just 25,000. And most of those have names like something from the bottom of a Scrabble bag and a ticket on the next plane to South Korea.

You may wonder why this is relevant. I mean, if there is going to be a replacement for oil, who cares what country is responsible? Certainly it’s hard to imagine people sitting around in Budapest saying that unless Hungary gets off its arse the world will die. So why should we be worried in Britain? Why don’t we let Mr Ng or Mr Patel get on with the work while we get back to what we’re best at these days? Hiding our kids under the bed, mostly, and stabbing one another in pubs.

Hmmm. This is all well and good, but unfortunately Mr Ng and Mr Patel couldn’t invent a brown paper bag even if you gave them 300 years and a million billion pounds. Oh sure, I’ve heard the stories about how ancient China had rockets and went to the moon 5,000 years ago, but I’ll let you into a little secret. It’s all a big bag of rubbish. They haven’t even discovered the chair yet so I doubt very much they’re even halfway to particle-collector shields in space.

Then there’s India, which I can’t take seriously until its air force has some planes with fewer than three wings. Yes, they have nuclear missiles - but could they actually hit Islamabad with them? “I very much doubt it,” said an Indian professor chum of mine recently. “I’m not even certain we could hit Pakistan.” The fact of the matter is this: while the Germans can claim to have come up with the car, the Italians with electricity and the French with flight, everything else that has ever mattered in the whole of human history has come from a man in a shed in Britain.

Everything. The internet, penicillin, the mechanical computer, the electronic computer, steam power, the seed drill, the seismograph, the umbrella, Viagra, polyester, the lawnmower, the fax machine, depth charges, scuba suits, the spinning jenny . . . I could go on, so I will.

Radar, the television, the telephone, the hovercraft, the jet engine, the sewing machine, the periodic table . . . It doesn’t matter what field you’re talking about – from submarine warfare to erectile dysfunction. The world always turns to Britain when some fresh thought is needed. And with only 25,000 engineers coming out of our universities every year, I fear the world may be doomed.

Of course, you may imagine that the giant economy that is America will ride in on a horse and save the day, but don’t hold your breath. They got through the sound barrier only thanks to us; they stole the computer from under our noses; and they got into space only thanks to the Germans, who knew about rockets only because our Spitfires had made mincemeat of their Messerschmitts.

The Americans? Pah. Left to their own devices, I doubt they could build a pencil.

Sir James Dyson, who makes purple vacuum cleaners of such immense power that they can suck up rugs, mice and even medium-sized children, is so worried about the situation that he’s opening a new academy, which will be called the Dyson School of Design and Innovation.

Backed by Rolls-Royce, Airbus and the Williams Formula One team, it will be open to 2,500 14 to 18-year-olds in 2010. I’m thinking of enrolling my kids now, because – hell – even if they fail to come up with an alternative to oil and their time at the academy comes to naught, they can always make a fortune in life. As plumbers.

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