Oil and the Slippery Slope We're On

Finite: having limits or bounds. It's opposite, slightly more recognizable: infinite. Why is it that the word infinite is used so much more in writing, television, and day to day conversation? It's sensationalized by our culture. There are car manufactures, radio services, insurance companies and an entire onslaught of other corporations who take their name from it. The ever expanding universe. To infinity and beyond. Forever and ever. It's all around us. Yet, the idea of anything being completely limitless and without bounds is impossible to even understand; to truly understand. Nothingness and infinity are both outside of what the human mind can comprehend. Things of a limited supply, however, are all around us, and are completely tangible. They're just not as fun to talk about. But a total exhaustion of any major resource could take a major toll on our way of life. Especially when at the core of our entire economic system is one of those finite resources. Oil.

We will run out of oil. There are no more dinosaurs to replenish it; and we just don't have the time. We use it way faster than it generates. Peak oil has already been passed. We will never extract as much crude oil from the ground as we were in 2005. We're at the top of the mountain, and it is a slippery slope. So, we'll have to start driving electric cars. Whatever, hippie. Right? Unfortunately it's just not that simple. In 2009 almost 60% of the electricity generated in the U.S. was made with fossil fuels. Nonrenewable. Another 25% was made with natural gas. Also nonrenewable. Wind, solar, geothermal, and hydroelectric dams made up less than 10% combined. Essentially, electric cars are running off of fossil fuels, and so are your lights, your televisions, and your cell phones.

It doesn't stop there. Gasoline is just one of many casualties. Amongst the others are plastic, latex, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Think about all of the plastic you have in your house. What about our medical supplies and individually wrapped food? What about food in general. Those petroleum based chemicals are what allow us to achieve such high yielding crops. At the same time they are poisoning the land making it useless for the near future. Oil is not only what sustains our population; it is what allowed it to get to such a large, overcrowding number in the first place.

It's time for another Renaissance. Science knows better than to continue on the path we are on and culture is catching up. I think the reason the first Renaissance was so great and lasted so long is because those people didn't just change the way they thought, they changed the way they educated so that the future would be changed for the better too. We have to change the way we teach. The importance of infinity has to be replaced with the importance of conservation and appreciation in our entire way of life. If we allow ourselves to destroy our own economical backbone we will suffer great consequences, possibly a total collapse of out current system. Nothing still in comparison to what is happeng to our ecological system.
We have to replace all fossil fuel technologies. Even if they weren't inefficient and harmful and expensive, they still wouldn't work. They cannot keep up to our growing demand forever. Why wait until we absolutely have to make the change. Faze them out now. Other options are not yet fully realized between a lack of research, funding, and suppression to protect corporate profits. But there are many that show promise. Synthetic silk in place of plastics. It's made from only protein and water. Personally, I think the only logical answer for power is the Sun. After all it is the sole provider energy to every organism on this planet, either directly or indirectly. Biomass fuel power is also very promising.

We can do this. We can do it better than any other group of people in history could have, because we have the internet. We can share these ideas. It has to be made clear; oil is not the choice of our generation. We don't care how much money and convince is at stake. There is a lot of momentum fighting against us, but we are young and anything is possible.

-The film “Collapse,” a documentary focused on American author, Michael Ruppert, brought my attention to a lot of this information. Collapse is available on Netflix. I strongly suggest it.-

Do not just question authority, question everything.

A Problem with Authority

From your earliest available memory, to the moment you left school or work today, you have been programed to follow the rule of your superiors. You were taught from day one that you shouldn't challenge your parents' authority because no other reason than the fact that they are your parents... And those are the rules. Then in school you were told that those rules apply to your teachers, and the principal. You learned about government; city, county, state, and federal, The United States of America, The Constitution, and all of these other things that you're not allowed to question. Above all you learned that you do not question God, or your religion. Questions are looked at like signs of doubt and doubt is labeled blaspheme. I remember from when I was young, wanting to know what God is and how "he" got here. I was scared to even let myself think about the possibility of God not existing for too long. I thought I would be sent to hell. Being scared into a belief system is not an honest source of dedication.

When I got older I started to consider all of the possibilities. I think that Carl Sagan said it best when he posed the question: What happens when two gods claim the same title? It leaves us to assume that one of them is false. If one is, then isn't it possible that another is, or that all of them could be.

God is basically thought of as the sole creator of time, life, and the universe through supernatural means. Supernatural is defined as anything that is attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature. In the Bible God is specifically credited for creating Earth and later making man, in his image.

The Big Bang Theory, God's number one opponent, is scientifically measurable. When Edwin Hubble discovered that other galaxies were moving away from us, it became safe to assert that they were once closer, and that at one time they could have all started from the same point. A common misconception about this theory is that there was nothing, then there was an explosion and Earth, the Sun, all of the stars, and everything else just popped out. It's much more complicated, however. Using an equation that took the speed of the galaxies that are moving away from us to calculate how long ago the Big Bang would have happened, scientists have figured the universe to be Fourteen billion years is how old. Earth came just four and a half billion years ago. Particles coalesced for millions of years before the first supermassive stars were formed. Later when those unstable giants went supernova, the materials that would create rocks, solid planets, and all known life forms were created. Those planets took millions of years to to coalesce too.

That is a very basic understanding of the modern scientific answer to how the universe was made, but their answer for how man got here is less measurable, mathematically, but is much more observable. Evolution is underestimated in both its complexity and how long it has taken. This isn't Pokemon we're talking about here. Monkeys didn't just wake up one morning and shape shift into humans. Natural selection and survival of the fittest is the most powerful of evolution's tools. Selective breeding, an intentional version of natural selection, is used all of the time by humans to make the most efficient race horse, and different breeds of dogs made to be the best for one specific job. Over time all animals, including humans, participate in natural selection by creating offspring with only mates that have what they see as suitable genetic traits. The other major method, survival of the fittest is even more obvious. Animals adapt to what challenges their environment puts in from of them. Animals do not evolve unless survival is at stake. Life on earth is estimated to have first developed at least as early as three billion years ago which seems to allow enough time for it to complexify to the point it has.

Looking at all of this information like a high-school current event assignment: what happened and when it happened, seems to be answered, in regards to the Big Bang. How it happened is a little more complicated, and is simply just not understood yet. Why did it happen is perhaps the most elusive of these questions.

At this point, crying "God" at any unexplained phenomena, like the Big Bang, and then pushing back what he is responsible for at each new scientific discovery seems as much like a cop out as crediting God for thunder and rain before we understood weather. However, the fact of the matter is that the creation of time, life, and everything, is not yet explainable. As of now it has caused by a force that is beyond scientific understanding, so it is super natural. If we began to, as a society, look at God as the force that caused the existence of our universe and not as a man who judges you and is willing to have you tortured for all of time if you don't follow his rules, we will be able to live by morals that are best for all people, and not just what we are scared into. If these boundaries are broken in our most basic rule systems then all the others will follow shortly. Even the fear of governments will fade.

Do not just question authority, question everything.

An introduction

In short, some time ago a study was done over a group of primates living on a Japanese island where one said primate was taught to wash sweet potatoes before it ate them to improve its taste. Soon this behavior was observed and learned by another monkey. Now with two of them using this process it had twice the observational power. Two more monkeys learned to wash the potatoes. Then four, eight, sixteen, and so on until a critical number was reached, allegedly around one hundred, then suddenly the rate of growth was so great that virtually all of the monkeys on the island were washing their potatoes before they ate them. Interesting enough. But the true value of that story is almost poetic. It is an incredible testimonial for the power of exponential growth.

Whether we like it or not, we the people have inherited quite a heavy work load. As cliche as it may be, "With great power comes great responsibility." and perhaps one of the most powerful and unstable forces known to modern man is the current status of technological advancement in communication and global connectivity. Our responsibility then, is to use that power wisely. All of us twenty-something-year-olds are like the graduating class of Facebook high. The age of communication is upon us, and it is such a beautifully unique time to live in. Ideas can grow and spread faster than ever before. Cell phones and the internet gave birth to this massive wave of chatter, and it only seems to be getting larger. And faster.

Anyone, from the typical stoner-conspiracy theorist to world renowned members of the science community, are weary of human life as we know it coming to an end. I'm not talking about December 21, 2012 or any other mistranslated doomsday prophecy, but rather a self-destruction of sorts. Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, Marxism and any other economic or political idelism all have one big flaw in common. None of them acknowledge the fact that our Earthly resources are finite, or not unlimited. We live in a system that relies on constant growth. I am fairly confident that I could explain our current monetary system to my six year old nephew and he would know how bogus it is. There is a reason so many people are getting involved in the Occupy Movement. Corruption is visible all around us and the separation of wealth is, honestly, fucking scary. But the same thing that empowers the masses to assemble and communicate these ideas at the ease in which we enjoy them, is the same thing that hurts us in a way. Because anyone can start a Facebook event and organize a demonstration in the name of Occupy, there is a lack of definitive leadership. There is no single voice to declare the demands of the people, and frankly there isn't really a clear answer, at this point, to what change needs to take place.

So, what can be done? Optimism tells us that every single person can make a difference, but the overwhelming size and complexity of major social issues makes almost any action seem futile. I have never known a more depressing notion than the feeling of not being able to make a difference. So I am constantly on the search for a call to action. All I can say for certain is that we absolutely have to use the tools we have at our disposal. Use your voice. Have the conversations. Do not just challenge authority, challenge everything. Aside fron causing a lot of controversy The Invisible Children's campaign for Kony 2012 did one other thing, and it was exactly what it had set out to do. Joseph Kony is now infamous, and the results of their social experiment tell us that we can make exponential growth the age of communication work for us. We can use them to help steer our ever progressing timeline in the direction that is best for humanity. This blog is nothing more than an attempt to help encourage a much needed revolution of the mind and to help reach the 100th monkey, so to speak. Answers are out there and we can only find them by looking.