How can any religion survive that revelation? I know I'm going to get modded down as a troll, but why would you think this? Firstly, I don't think any mainstream religion DEPENDS on any of your ideas.
Looked at it another way: The sun became the center of the universe. -Religion survived We found out we were one star in a galaxy that was the centre of the universe.. -Religion survived Then we found there were countless billions of stars. -Religion survived Now we find another local planet with ancient water on it.. -Religion will survive The next find I expect is simple life living on Mars. -Religion will survive
Whenever I hear about tactics like this from the very government that is supposed to represent 'higher values', I'm reminded that government is The Perfect Con.
Maybe it's your fault for thinking the world is like a big game of Candyland?
I'm so utterly sick of this balderdash. People who say things like this are much like who was it, Stimson? who (attempted) to shut off all US codebreaking activities with the inanity "Gentlemen do not read other peoples' mail." It's a bloody good thing that the people who were doing the work ignored him, or we WOULDN'T have had the Magic intercepts that allowed us to stop the Japanese at Midway. The same mentality in the UK would have prevented them from breaking Enigma.
If you don't think that even the "good guys" have to fight dirty, then you seriously underrate the "bad guys" capabilities. It's not a TV show or a Hollywood-scripted movie where the Good Guys inevitably win.
If you think that this blurs the line between who exactly IS the "good guy" and the "bad guy", well, I'll only point out that the world isn't black & white...something you were probably going to criticize me for, the first time I said "good guys".:)
"...and I say that we should wipe them out before they cause any more trouble. Their incessant broadcasting in practically every frequency gives me headaches every time we pass that system. I tell you, they are galactic trailer trash."
"OK, tell you what. We'll let them develop without interference. We'll take that dead world nearest them, and sprinkle it around with some single-celled organisms. Once they start exploring, they'll find the organisms, and THEN - when confronted with an entirely defenseless foreign life form - we'll see their true moral character."
3D games programming is out of the reach of the hobbyist
Not just programming. Scuttlebutt is that Doom3 is going to have such a high level of physics built in that even simple level design might require a time commitment in excess of that available to any but the most dedicated coders.
Take any action you do on a computer. Now figure out a way to SPEAK that action, without any ambiguity. Now compare how long it takes to SAY that, with how long it takes to do via a keyboard or mouse.
It may not replace it COMPLETELY but....
"Power on" "Sort...uh....hot asian lesbian cheerleader pr0n" "Power off"
I can see a big potential in hands-free computing, and frankly, this probably wraps up what, 60% of the market and 80% of/.ers?
Strange how they always seem to be trying to make video phones. What practical advantage does it have over ordinary audio-only phones?
You can see the person you're talking to. Duh Think again about the context: WHERE this was posted, and WHO would be reading it. And then remember he asked for advantages.
the only reason to be armed is out of paranoia and fear. Such a comment only illustrates a naive and Pollyannish view of how states interact.
Enlightened self interest is the only motivator. If gain > loss (when factoring in the potential for success, the costs of retribution, etc.), then states do whatever they want to - always have, always will. Having the biggest stick on the block is not, by some twisted reverse logic, a dangerous thing to the wielder. What a bizarre idea.
The first one to build this is opening a huge can of worms. Again, I hear this but I don't understand it. Do you, for one second, think that Russia or China (or France, for that matter) would hesitate a SECOND to build such a thing, were it within their capabilities?
Hardly.
More likely, they'd have it 10 years before the press would even find out. And for those 10 years, the US would be excoriated for even considering such a heinous thing.
And why worry about our trade deficit? Right now the weak dollar is rebuilding our economy - how's Europe doing? Japan? And being the world's biggest market is its own security; The US shutting off trade to any single nation would do far more damage to that nation (or group) than to the US. Sorry, I just don't think the trade deficit is that big a deal.
This really isn't anything new. Space-based weapons have been thought of for at least as long as man has been in space. Starting in the late 1950s the Soviets began working on an nuclear orbital bombardment system that would bypass US early warning systems. There was also Salyut 3 in 1975 which carried a 23mm cannon that was used to fire at a target satellite
You obviously didn't get the memo. This/. thread is for pasty vegan leftish academics to post their routine furor at the insensate warmongering of the criminal Bush Administration. This is NOT the place to point out anything that contradicts or mitigates that view. Sheesh.
You'll want "Pragmatism", that's down the hall. It's the door on the right.
From the article: "This will certainly prompt China into actually moving forward" on space weapon plans of its own, she added. "The Russians are likely to respond with something as well." Yeah, because they'd NEVER have thought of it themselves! (rolls eyes)
This is a hyper-brilliant scientist (or, rather a collection of hyper-brilliant scientists), saying: "The President is telling the country things about science that are not true"
Well, it's not a clear as you (or the UCS) would make it seem. A random collection of points:
For example, an early reference says that the Administration "blatantly tampered with the integrity of scientific analysis" by editing the findings on a 6/03 EPA report. They say things like that the administration wanted so many words like "may" and "potentially" that it would have inserted "uncertainty...where there is essentially none."
No uncertainty on the human impact on climate change? I'm not a atmospheric scientist, but I think it's abundantly clear that there IS uncertainty, and there IS dispute among many 'experts' on both sides. For the EPA to attempt to whitewash the issue and claim certainty is at LEAST as damnable an offense, no?
Another case of such 'horrible' conduct by the Administration involves the effective "censorship" by the CEQ of a carbon sequestration brochure put out by the NRCS. Please, talk about reaching. The NRCS had already put out more than 300,000 of the brochures, and they wanted to do a Spanish edition too. Ever sit in a government office? Ever see the giant piles of beautifully printed brochures that sit gathering dust? Aside from killing the whole spanish-language thing (which IS a political decision, not a science question), personally I'd have cancelled it too. 300,000 brochures that nobody reads is probably enough, self-justifying bureacrats aside.
Mercury reports: they claim that the White house 'stalled' it and only released it because an EPA staffer leaked it. Proof, or speculation? It's certainly PRESENTED as a hard fact.
The Sierra Nevada Framework: let's see, a *highly* political and Green-biased management plan that was adopted as part of a previous administration's last-minute tidalwave of rule implementations and regulations? Heavens, who could object to such a thing?!
They dislike the new rule change that prevents government-funded scientists from acting as peer-reviewers. Not only does that mean that government scientists are relegated to less 'stage time' among their peers, but if they want to have a 'voice' in such a process, they have to get off the government teat? I find that hard to dispute.
They criticize the appointment to the FDA's RHAC of an OB-Gyn with "highly partisan political views". I'm going to take a WILD guess that he's conservative. I don't recall any complaints from the UCS about the appointment of ardent liberals during the Clinton administration? Isn't that funny?
I'll admit, I don't have time to RTFA completely, but they use loaded language, supposition, and hyperbole to make a point where the truth is obscured by the grandstanding.
Maybe they'd have more credibility if they actually acted as a neutral body, critical of 'bad science' instead of cheerleading adjunct to the DNC.
Trouble is, if you can't count on 20 Nobel laureate scientists to make an honest, apolitical assessment of the state of science in our government, who on earth can you trust?
There's the problem: ANYBODY thinking that "nobel laureate" means NEUTRAL. Some of the most blindingly leftist people I know are otherwise quite bright, but have some sort of personal insecurity or issue that defines their politics. I'm not saying that EITHER side has a monopoly on smart people, but I will point out that the hallowed halls of academia are disproportinately populated by leftish utopians, who have never really had to work outside the Ivory Tower. Coincidence? To believe that such people *don't* have some sort of axe to grind is folly itself.
Nobel noble.
Part of this is the media, who seem to think that success in a given field means that somehow that equates into expertise in everything else - otherwise why would people even LISTEN to the political pronouncements of hollywood stars?
A physicist might be hyper-brilliant in their field, but that no more qualifies her or him to adjudicate the *use* of nuclear weapons, for example, than the pin-setter at the local bowling alley.
I think that's funny, but there are some interesting points.
If we presume that pink are girls and blue are boys, there is one poor dude to the right of that guy that looks like he took 3 of the others castoffs.
I see only 1 homosexual relationship in the upper left corner, despite the chestnut that upwards of 10% of high school students are gay.
It would be interesting to plot this 3-dimensionally, to set them in a z-axis chronologically, and/or weight the connections for the duration of the relationship.
there is still only a finite amount of oil in the planet.
Well, I *could* just point out your syllogism by asking "how" all that oil got created? From the decomposition and compression over time of microorganisms, yes? As far as I know, those processes continue. Therefore you're factually wrong, it's NOT a finite resource, it's just very slowly-renewing. (And that presupposes a conventional view about the origin of oil, some believe that it has other origins from extremophile organisms.)
But I'll confine myself to pointing out that my long list simply serves to illustrate the constant mantra that "we're running out of oil!" has been said many, many times before, by people who are highly qualifed to say such things. Inevitably, tech advances make "reachable" resources balloon before the taps run dry.
Technology is advancing faster than ever, and if we ever manage to achieve fusion power (still only 20 years away!...as they've been saying for 40 years LOL) we will have functionally limitless energy to reach deposits. In fact, by then who knows if we'll be slurping hydrocarbons from Io or whatever?
Even if you are talking about only Earthbound resources, and unlimited energy means we can seek out every last drop of petroleum between 5000' and 21000', it STILL doesn't mean that, when we scrape the bottom of the barrel dry we're empty. It will still keep trickling back as long as there is a carbon-based biome on the surface of the planet.
Isn't it rather sad... that we've become more obsessed about life on other planets, than life on our own planet ? Sooner or later we'll just be what we've created in the movies: A group of living things going from planet to planet stripping it of its resources.
Tell you what: when we do, you can take Ark B, m'kay?
For those who don't get the HHGttG joke: http://www.sadgeezer.com/hhg/golgaf.htm)
The amount of oil available on our planet is finite....Which means we are going to eventually need alternative fuels.
Not that I actually disagree with your essential point on a gut level, but I'll point out a few salient facts:
1) World oil production has continued to increase through the end of the 20th century.
2) Prices of gasoline and other petroleum products, adjusted for inflation, are lower than they have been for most of the last 150 years.
3) Estimates of the world's total endowment of oil have increased faster than oil has been taken from the ground.
4) Before the first U.S. oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859, petroleum supplies were limited to crude oil that oozed to the surface. In 1855, an advertisement for Kier's Rock Oil advised consumers to "hurry, before this wonderful product is depleted from Nature's laboratory."
5) In 1874, the state geologist of Pennsylvania, the nation's leading oil-producing state, estimated that only enough U.S. oil remained to keep the nation's kerosene lamps burning for four years.
6) Seven oil shortage scares occurred before 1950.
7) 1973:"The Oil Crisis: This Time the Wolf Is Here," warned an article in the influential journal Foreign Affairs. Geologists had cried wolf many times, acknowledged the authors of a respected and widely used textbook on economic geology in 1981; "finally, however, the wolves are with us." The authors predicted that the United States was entering an incipient 125-year-long "energy gap," projected to be at its worst shortly after the year 2000.
8) In 1989, one expert forecast that world oil production would peak that very year and oil prices would reach $50 a barrel by 1994.
9) In 1995, a respected geologist predicted in World Oil that petroleum production would peak in 1996, and after 1999 major increases in crude oil prices would have dire consequences. He warned that "[m]any of the world's developed societies may look more like today's Russia than the U.S."
10) A 1998 Scientific American article entitled "The End of Cheap Oil" predicted that world oil production would peak in 2002 and warned that "what our society does face, and soon, is the end of the abundant and cheap oil on which all industrial nations depend."
11) A 1998 article in Science was titled "The Next Oil Crisis Looms Large -- and Perhaps Close."
12) A 1999 Nature article was subtitled "[A] permanent decline in global oil production rate is virtually certain to begin within 20 years."
Granted, even though Chicken Little kept saying the sky is falling, that doesn't mean it isn't actually falling this time, logically.
But moreover: In May 1920, the U.S. Geological Survey announced that the world's total endowment of oil amounted to 60 billion barrels.
In 1950, geologists estimated the world's total oil endowment at around 600 billion barrels. From 1970 through 1990, their estimates increased to between 1,500 and 2,000 billion barrels. In 1994, the U.S. Geological Survey raised the estimate to 2,400 billion barrels, and their most recent estimate (2000) was of a 3,000-billion-barrel endowment. By the year 2000, a total of 900 billion barrels of oil had been produced.18 Total world oil production in 2000 was 25 billion barrels.19 If world oil consumption continues to increase at an average rate of 1.4 percent a year, and no further resources are discovered, the world's oil supply will not be exhausted until the year 2056.
"Oil shales may hold another 14,000 billion barrels -- a 500 year supply." Additional Petroleum Resources.
The estimates above do not include unconventional oil resources. Conventional oil refers to oil that is pumped out of the ground with minimal processing; unconventional oil resources consist largely of tar sands and oil shales that require processing to extract liquid petroleum. Unconventional oil resources are very large. In the future, new technologies that allow extraction of these unco
Slashdot Mirror
...the first steps in producing the powered armor of RAH's "Starship Troopers".
Screw that, Evangelion here I come!
My favorite quote...
Volvo will never actually take this car into production, of course.
What does THAT say?
How can any religion survive that revelation?
I know I'm going to get modded down as a troll, but why would you think this? Firstly, I don't think any mainstream religion DEPENDS on any of your ideas.
Looked at it another way:
The sun became the center of the universe. -Religion survived
We found out we were one star in a galaxy that was the centre of the universe.. -Religion survived
Then we found there were countless billions of stars. -Religion survived
Now we find another local planet with ancient water on it.. -Religion will survive
The next find I expect is simple life living on Mars. -Religion will survive
Whenever I hear about tactics like this from the very government that is supposed to represent 'higher values', I'm reminded that government is The Perfect Con.
:)
Maybe it's your fault for thinking the world is like a big game of Candyland?
I'm so utterly sick of this balderdash. People who say things like this are much like who was it, Stimson? who (attempted) to shut off all US codebreaking activities with the inanity "Gentlemen do not read other peoples' mail." It's a bloody good thing that the people who were doing the work ignored him, or we WOULDN'T have had the Magic intercepts that allowed us to stop the Japanese at Midway. The same mentality in the UK would have prevented them from breaking Enigma.
If you don't think that even the "good guys" have to fight dirty, then you seriously underrate the "bad guys" capabilities. It's not a TV show or a Hollywood-scripted movie where the Good Guys inevitably win.
If you think that this blurs the line between who exactly IS the "good guy" and the "bad guy", well, I'll only point out that the world isn't black & white...something you were probably going to criticize me for, the first time I said "good guys".
Malfunction?
Heck, I thought that was the mission plan. The "Mars" set is in the building right next to the "Apollo" set.
"...and I say that we should wipe them out before they cause any more trouble. Their incessant broadcasting in practically every frequency gives me headaches every time we pass that system. I tell you, they are galactic trailer trash."
"OK, tell you what. We'll let them develop without interference. We'll take that dead world nearest them, and sprinkle it around with some single-celled organisms. Once they start exploring, they'll find the organisms, and THEN - when confronted with an entirely defenseless foreign life form - we'll see their true moral character."
"Deal."
Epia VIA motherboard users do it in smaller places
Careful, I think a more accurate button would be "Epia VIA motherboard users have smaller hardware than usual"
Or you *could* get all of them for free at http://www.the-underdogs.org/company.php?name=Info com
Bandwidth friendly games, Suspended is 86k zipped LOL.
Of course, that's like the last site in the universe that needs a good slashdotting.
3D games programming is out of the reach of the hobbyist
Not just programming. Scuttlebutt is that Doom3 is going to have such a high level of physics built in that even simple level design might require a time commitment in excess of that available to any but the most dedicated coders.
Take any action you do on a computer.
...uh....hot asian lesbian cheerleader pr0n"
/.ers?
Now figure out a way to SPEAK that action, without any ambiguity. Now compare how long it takes to SAY that, with how long it takes to do via a keyboard or mouse.
It may not replace it COMPLETELY but....
"Power on"
"Sort
"Power off"
I can see a big potential in hands-free computing, and frankly, this probably wraps up what, 60% of the market and 80% of
The prototype version is of course the PRE(a)PISM.
It's expected to be hard to use.
Strange how they always seem to be trying to make video phones. What practical advantage does it have over ordinary audio-only phones?
You can see the person you're talking to. Duh
Think again about the context: WHERE this was posted, and WHO would be reading it. And then remember he asked for advantages.
the only reason to be armed is out of paranoia and fear.
Such a comment only illustrates a naive and Pollyannish view of how states interact.
Enlightened self interest is the only motivator. If gain > loss (when factoring in the potential for success, the costs of retribution, etc.), then states do whatever they want to - always have, always will. Having the biggest stick on the block is not, by some twisted reverse logic, a dangerous thing to the wielder. What a bizarre idea.
The first one to build this is opening a huge can of worms.
Again, I hear this but I don't understand it. Do you, for one second, think that Russia or China (or France, for that matter) would hesitate a SECOND to build such a thing, were it within their capabilities?
Hardly.
More likely, they'd have it 10 years before the press would even find out. And for those 10 years, the US would be excoriated for even considering such a heinous thing.
And why worry about our trade deficit? Right now the weak dollar is rebuilding our economy - how's Europe doing? Japan? And being the world's biggest market is its own security; The US shutting off trade to any single nation would do far more damage to that nation (or group) than to the US. Sorry, I just don't think the trade deficit is that big a deal.
This really isn't anything new. Space-based weapons have been thought of for at least as long as man has been in space.
/. thread is for pasty vegan leftish academics to post their routine furor at the insensate warmongering of the criminal Bush Administration. This is NOT the place to point out anything that contradicts or mitigates that view. Sheesh.
Starting in the late 1950s the Soviets began working on an nuclear orbital bombardment system that would bypass US early warning systems. There was also Salyut 3 in 1975 which carried a 23mm cannon that was used to fire at a target satellite
You obviously didn't get the memo. This
You'll want "Pragmatism", that's down the hall. It's the door on the right.
From the article:
"This will certainly prompt China into actually moving forward" on space weapon plans of its own, she added. "The Russians are likely to respond with something as well."
Yeah, because they'd NEVER have thought of it themselves! (rolls eyes)
So, the smart people you know have "left" political leanings? Maybe this should tell you something.
Maybe the "otherwise" was unclear?
Before you try to be clever, perhaps you should read something a couple of times so the meaning sinks in.
This is a hyper-brilliant scientist (or, rather a collection of hyper-brilliant scientists), saying: "The President is telling the country things about science that are not true"
Well, it's not a clear as you (or the UCS) would make it seem. A random collection of points:
For example, an early reference says that the Administration "blatantly tampered with the integrity of scientific analysis" by editing the findings on a 6/03 EPA report. They say things like that the administration wanted so many words like "may" and "potentially" that it would have inserted "uncertainty...where there is essentially none."
No uncertainty on the human impact on climate change? I'm not a atmospheric scientist, but I think it's abundantly clear that there IS uncertainty, and there IS dispute among many 'experts' on both sides. For the EPA to attempt to whitewash the issue and claim certainty is at LEAST as damnable an offense, no?
Another case of such 'horrible' conduct by the Administration involves the effective "censorship" by the CEQ of a carbon sequestration brochure put out by the NRCS. Please, talk about reaching. The NRCS had already put out more than 300,000 of the brochures, and they wanted to do a Spanish edition too. Ever sit in a government office? Ever see the giant piles of beautifully printed brochures that sit gathering dust? Aside from killing the whole spanish-language thing (which IS a political decision, not a science question), personally I'd have cancelled it too. 300,000 brochures that nobody reads is probably enough, self-justifying bureacrats aside.
Mercury reports: they claim that the White house 'stalled' it and only released it because an EPA staffer leaked it. Proof, or speculation? It's certainly PRESENTED as a hard fact.
The Sierra Nevada Framework: let's see, a *highly* political and Green-biased management plan that was adopted as part of a previous administration's last-minute tidalwave of rule implementations and regulations? Heavens, who could object to such a thing?!
They dislike the new rule change that prevents government-funded scientists from acting as peer-reviewers. Not only does that mean that government scientists are relegated to less 'stage time' among their peers, but if they want to have a 'voice' in such a process, they have to get off the government teat? I find that hard to dispute.
They criticize the appointment to the FDA's RHAC of an OB-Gyn with "highly partisan political views". I'm going to take a WILD guess that he's conservative. I don't recall any complaints from the UCS about the appointment of ardent liberals during the Clinton administration? Isn't that funny?
I'll admit, I don't have time to RTFA completely, but they use loaded language, supposition, and hyperbole to make a point where the truth is obscured by the grandstanding.
Maybe they'd have more credibility if they actually acted as a neutral body, critical of 'bad science' instead of cheerleading adjunct to the DNC.
Trouble is, if you can't count on 20 Nobel laureate scientists to make an honest, apolitical assessment of the state of science in our government, who on earth can you trust?
There's the problem: ANYBODY thinking that "nobel laureate" means NEUTRAL. Some of the most blindingly leftist people I know are otherwise quite bright, but have some sort of personal insecurity or issue that defines their politics.
I'm not saying that EITHER side has a monopoly on smart people, but I will point out that the hallowed halls of academia are disproportinately populated by leftish utopians, who have never really had to work outside the Ivory Tower. Coincidence? To believe that such people *don't* have some sort of axe to grind is folly itself.
Nobel noble.
Part of this is the media, who seem to think that success in a given field means that somehow that equates into expertise in everything else - otherwise why would people even LISTEN to the political pronouncements of hollywood stars?
A physicist might be hyper-brilliant in their field, but that no more qualifies her or him to adjudicate the *use* of nuclear weapons, for example, than the pin-setter at the local bowling alley.
I find it ironic to hear a console gamer bemoaning that the PC market doesn't have something...especially when the PC market HAS had it for years.
www.gamespy.com - been doing it since at least, what, 1998?
www.teamspeak.org - been putting out quality online voice software since at least 2000.
Both essentially free or with optional registration.
If this happens then all releases will go back to film as piracy is such a concern.
Because there's no black market in pirating analog movies now, certainly.
(The comment's meant only to be ironic, I agree with you essentially.)
I think that's funny, but there are some interesting points.
If we presume that pink are girls and blue are boys, there is one poor dude to the right of that guy that looks like he took 3 of the others castoffs.
I see only 1 homosexual relationship in the upper left corner, despite the chestnut that upwards of 10% of high school students are gay.
It would be interesting to plot this 3-dimensionally, to set them in a z-axis chronologically, and/or weight the connections for the duration of the relationship.
A researcher at the University of Michigan... ... a bright, promising freshman by the name of Hari Seldon....
there is still only a finite amount of oil in the planet.
Well, I *could* just point out your syllogism by asking "how" all that oil got created? From the decomposition and compression over time of microorganisms, yes? As far as I know, those processes continue. Therefore you're factually wrong, it's NOT a finite resource, it's just very slowly-renewing. (And that presupposes a conventional view about the origin of oil, some believe that it has other origins from extremophile organisms.)
But I'll confine myself to pointing out that my long list simply serves to illustrate the constant mantra that "we're running out of oil!" has been said many, many times before, by people who are highly qualifed to say such things.
Inevitably, tech advances make "reachable" resources balloon before the taps run dry.
Technology is advancing faster than ever, and if we ever manage to achieve fusion power (still only 20 years away!...as they've been saying for 40 years LOL) we will have functionally limitless energy to reach deposits. In fact, by then who knows if we'll be slurping hydrocarbons from Io or whatever?
Even if you are talking about only Earthbound resources, and unlimited energy means we can seek out every last drop of petroleum between 5000' and 21000', it STILL doesn't mean that, when we scrape the bottom of the barrel dry we're empty. It will still keep trickling back as long as there is a carbon-based biome on the surface of the planet.
Isn't it rather sad ... that we've become more obsessed about life on other planets, than life on our own planet ?
Sooner or later we'll just be what we've created in the movies: A group of living things going from planet to planet stripping it of its resources.
Tell you what: when we do, you can take Ark B, m'kay?
For those who don't get the HHGttG joke: http://www.sadgeezer.com/hhg/golgaf.htm)
The amount of oil available on our planet is finite....Which means we are going to eventually need alternative fuels.
Not that I actually disagree with your essential point on a gut level, but I'll point out a few salient facts:
1) World oil production has continued to increase through the end of the 20th century.
2) Prices of gasoline and other petroleum products, adjusted for inflation, are lower than they have been for most of the last 150 years.
3) Estimates of the world's total endowment of oil have increased faster than oil has been taken from the ground.
4) Before the first U.S. oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859, petroleum supplies were limited to crude oil that oozed to the surface. In 1855, an advertisement for Kier's Rock Oil advised consumers to "hurry, before this wonderful product is depleted from Nature's laboratory."
5) In 1874, the state geologist of Pennsylvania, the nation's leading oil-producing state, estimated that only enough U.S. oil remained to keep the nation's kerosene lamps burning for four years.
6) Seven oil shortage scares occurred before 1950.
7) 1973:"The Oil Crisis: This Time the Wolf Is Here," warned an article in the influential journal Foreign Affairs. Geologists had cried wolf many times, acknowledged the authors of a respected and widely used textbook on economic geology in 1981; "finally, however, the wolves are with us." The authors predicted that the United States was entering an incipient 125-year-long "energy gap," projected to be at its worst shortly after the year 2000.
8) In 1989, one expert forecast that world oil production would peak that very year and oil prices would reach $50 a barrel by 1994.
9) In 1995, a respected geologist predicted in World Oil that petroleum production would peak in 1996, and after 1999 major increases in crude oil prices would have dire consequences. He warned that "[m]any of the world's developed societies may look more like today's Russia than the U.S."
10) A 1998 Scientific American article entitled "The End of Cheap Oil" predicted that world oil production would peak in 2002 and warned that "what our society does face, and soon, is the end of the abundant and cheap oil on which all industrial nations depend."
11) A 1998 article in Science was titled "The Next Oil Crisis Looms Large -- and Perhaps Close."
12) A 1999 Nature article was subtitled "[A] permanent decline in global oil production rate is virtually certain to begin within 20 years."
Granted, even though Chicken Little kept saying the sky is falling, that doesn't mean it isn't actually falling this time, logically.
But moreover:
In May 1920, the U.S. Geological Survey announced that the world's total endowment of oil amounted to 60 billion barrels.
In 1950, geologists estimated the world's total oil endowment at around 600 billion barrels.
From 1970 through 1990, their estimates increased to between 1,500 and 2,000 billion barrels.
In 1994, the U.S. Geological Survey raised the estimate to 2,400 billion barrels, and their most recent estimate (2000) was of a 3,000-billion-barrel endowment.
By the year 2000, a total of 900 billion barrels of oil had been produced.18 Total world oil production in 2000 was 25 billion barrels.19 If world oil consumption continues to increase at an average rate of 1.4 percent a year, and no further resources are discovered, the world's oil supply will not be exhausted until the year 2056.
"Oil shales may hold another 14,000 billion barrels -- a 500 year supply."
Additional Petroleum Resources.
The estimates above do not include unconventional oil resources. Conventional oil refers to oil that is pumped out of the ground with minimal processing; unconventional oil resources consist largely of tar sands and oil shales that require processing to extract liquid petroleum. Unconventional oil resources are very large. In the future, new technologies that allow extraction of these unco