The World Without Us describes how Earth could react to our as hypothetical as istantaneous disappearance. It is clearly a pretext to write about some fundamental properties of this planet and, indirectly, of the temporary nature of our human adventure.
How could I have refrained myself from reading a book so close to the concept of temporariness that gives the name to this blog? I’ve previously written about this subject, altough under a slightly different point of view.
The book, that is definitely interesting, describes, amoung other things, which remains will remain in the very long period: at the top of such a list we find objects made to last (Mount Rushmore might last 7.5 million years - the same time that divides us from our farthest ancestor - or Channel Tunnel, that could survive in the deep darkness for a few million years too… anyhow it would be quite less than the rests of the Voyagers) while others were not intentionally designed to survive us such a long time, like many kinds of very large artificial polymers that we, not so wisely, spread all around every single day.
As described in the book, even though in many ways this planet could mostly return to itself within a few hundred thousand years, under many other aspects it is deeply signed by us and, surely, who accidentally come after would find what we left as well as the empties we created during our passage (like huge underground volumes once filled with carbon, gas, petroleum and alike): a poorer planet compared to the one we’ve got just 7.5 million years ago but with a still strong Nature.
I’ve thought many times that while our instantaneous disappearance is very unlikely (it’s just the idea that the author used to write about those subjects) it could be more realistic reading his pages thinking about a still populated planet in which, for the reasons that the Olduvai theory describes, we couldn’t be anymore able to control most dangerous activities we’ve already started.
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Passing peak oil, skeptical people would say:
Soon or later, we’ll reach again the past peak… it’s just a question of time.
Strictly speaking, it’s not possible to negate this statement but, thinking about it, I’ve started to wonder about another question:
What is the longest period in history between a local peak and its next greater or equal value?
To find the answer to my question, I’ve used:
As you notice, I wasn’t able to find data for the 1959-1964 period but fortunately it’s not a problem because the answer - according to the available data, of course - is: 14 years (therefore it’s more than the missing years). This period of 14 years is placed between 1979 and 1993.
That would’nt be enough for the incorrigible sceptic but it might be of some interest for anyone else. 
You can download here the computed data:
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How many times did you hear these words:
Oil? There’s plenty of it. There are countries floating over oil!
Of course it’s just a metaphor but decades hearing the same old metaphor have lead people to think that it’s mostly true.
So my naive question is: what is the total volume of crude oil on Earth?
BP (formerly known as British Petroleum) has on its website a very detailed Historical data Workbook (1965-2006) that I used to find the answer.
Doing the maths with years of 365 days, I got that our beloved humanity extracted (from 1965 to 2006) “just” 977.448.953.647,0277 barrels of crude oil.
- 1 standard barrel of crude oil = 42 US liquid gallons
- 1 US liquid gallon = 231 cubic inches
- 1 cubic inch = 0.000016387064 cubic metres
therefore
1 standard barrel of crude oil = 0,158987294928 cubic metres
so
977.448.953.647,0277 barrels (1965-2006) // years of 365 days
are equals to
155.401.965.069,65 cubic meters (1965-2006)
that are roughly
155,402 cubic Kilometers
Knowing that:
- the amount of oil drilled during that period (1965-2006) prevails over the previous years;
- crude oil is half gone;
- we shouldn’t think about it like a huge underground lake (it would be geologically unrealistic)
we could multiply the given volume by a factor of four to get the total volume of crude oil on Earth (past, present and future) having a suggestive picture of 622 cubic Kilometers. According to the list of lakes by volume provided by Wikipedia, it would be something larger than Lake Van and smaller than Lake Titicaca (that is the 14th greatest lake of the world).
My little work was done to have a volumetric idea of the oil we have on our planet (the volume it really takes up or that it has taken up is larger, of course) but that IS NOT like a sea: it’s not renewable so we should have cared more about using it.
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Reading the referers of this website, I found that someone reached it querying a search engine for
Why do we need to do a campfire at night?
Perphaps this is not the right question: a better question would be “Why do we want to have a campfire at night?”. We don’t live in the wilderness anymore and, nowadays, using a campfire at night to keep beasts away is a very unusual need. Anyhow, our paleolithic ancestor still holds a place in our, let me say, deep thoughts brain area. The surface of this planet hosts many billions of humans, not just one hundred thousand as it did during that era but, sadly, the way we approach the world has not changed that much.
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A few days ago I was wondering what life would be like without electricity: no hot water in the morning (using a traditionally controlled boiler, of course) and no light after sunset either. I know that it’s not so rational but one of my concerns at first blush was that I would never be able to listen to Nick’s voice any more.
I’m sure that everybody has an irrational fear about this kind of situation: what is yours, Scott?
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Yesterday we reached the so long awaited price of 100 USD per barrel for front month crude oil… could you imagine a better opportunity to publish the first, pessimistic, post/review of this snowy new year?
Peak Oil Survival is one of the saddest books I ever read: don’t read it until you are acquainted with Peak Oil; do your homework first:
Now you might be ready for this book but I would suggest you delay reading it if
- you suffer from depression or you have become depressed doing the previous homework;
- you own a shotgun or you often think about the way people like Ernest Hemingway or Kurt Cobain took their own lives. :-\
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Reading the referers of this website, I found that someone reached it querying a search engine for
Why do we need nouns?
I think I’ve spent many years abstracting ideas so I could say that we need nouns to better understand the world… but when I’m really tired, I rock myself with anarcho primitivism ideas. I remember the well known question
So, you just want to grunt?
To be honest, sometimes I just want to quietly stay in a quiet world.
I remember an afternoon of more than ten years ago… the day I passed my Continue Systems Theory exam: I went on the top of a hill and rested peacefully while gazing at the snowy landscape.
In the meantime, my mind was so full of ideas that I really desired a wordless world… later I remembered a tale by Borges, where Cain and Abel sit beside their campfire at night
under a sky full of stars that still haven’t received their own names
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I think that I can list five main reasons to explain why good suggestions are so hard to follow (and it doesn’t matter if we are talking about the economy of a country or the settings of a GNU/Linux server).
- we are lazy
- we are unskilled
- we would like to make clear to everybody that the work of many people is useless
- we would like to stop someone from making easy money (someone that we support or whose support we need)
- we’ve built, through the years, a monster system that we don’t understand completely and we are very reluctant to change anything in it
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In a few years, some survivors, roaming through the ruins of our cities, could find the front page of an old daily newspaper, printed during November 2007, the day that the price of crude oil reached 100 USD/barrel…
The price of the row material that keeps this civilization going has increased by more than 50 percent since last year. Did you find something about that on the mainstream media? Let’s go dying, wearing a brand new headset.
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Yesterday I tried to attend a performance of Uto Ughi, the world class violinist and conductor: it was not his fault but, I suppose that it was one of the worstly promoted and organized events of his career… what a way to think back to the catastrophe that, under our feet, is waiting for us!
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