I am not sure if I completely buy into this, but my friend, who I consider the smartest human being alive, explained to me the situation which is practically upon us. This is of course the end of the flow of oil. My friend told me that OPEC has been lying about it's oil reserves for years, in order to increase production. Apparently if you look at their production numbers and their supposed resereves, the numbers don't add up, and they also stand to gain by lying to the world. Basically, they give the impression that we have oil for decaded to come, but in reality we are at the tail end. Oil was created once in the entire history of planet earth. People take for granted exactly how absurdly useful oil is as an energy source. For a car with decent gas milage, it takes .033 gallons to travel one mile. that would be, by my estimates, something like 10 cents. as my friend pointed out, if you tell ask some dude in a richshaw to take you one mile for ten cents, he'd tell you to fuck off. Electric cars, bio fuel, wind power will never replace oil. In most cases these alternative fuels use more gasoline indirectly in creating that power, than would be used if you just used gas. The only remotely feasible solution is solar energy, but we need a technological break through. Oil as an energy source is ridiculously efficient and powerful. The blindingly fast accelearation into the present state in the span of a few centuries correlates directly with the discovery and application of oil. Regardless of wether you believe it or not, my question is, in this hypothetical energy crises, how do you think people would react? Do you think their would be chaos and anarchy? Or would be come together, or some other fairy tale type ending? Would we return to some crude feudalism? Would we all just become simple-living farmers and craftsmen?
We would get knocked back tech wise pretty bad. Not only is oil used to make gas but is also an ingredient in most everything else now a days.
Idk what will happen if we dont get a new energy source. Maybe well have a huge war or something over resources (gas, freshwater). On the positive side tho this doesnt need to happen. All we have to do is utilize the energy sources that we have been given that are for our purposes infinite: the sun and wind. Maybe we can bioengineer a bacteria that you can just spray onto buildings, attatch a small electrode to the patch, and the bacteria converts light energy into electricity somehow. Idk im just rambling i guess... It would be cool though
I still don't understand why we aren't spending more money to invest in solar energy. Ok, so maybe I do know why (oil lobbyists), but still it's just horrible that we aren't. I read a statistic somewhere that said something like we could power everything in the world for a day with only 1% of the sunlight that hits Earth everyday. 1% What the fuck.