hey, maybe that's it. Microsoft will accidentally reinstate the year 2000 bug, and all the world's computers will die before they can create a patch.

where theres a will theres a way....and im pretty sure if i went to the rough areas i could find a double barrel

err what now?

As seen on Digg (and a dozen other sites):
http://img385.imageshack.us/img385/7...ling221oy7.jpg

geez, now all we need to do is find a picture of Farrah Fawcett-Majors on a boat (Farrah whalin') and we'll be set.

(1) I don't think that demand for oil is going to continue to grow. I think that it is going to start to plateau as environmental movements continue to push for greener policies from governments. Many governments are talking about cutting emissions by 50-80% by 2020. Even if they only achieve half of their goals, it will still have a significant impact on oil consumption. Even allowing a constant growth in demand (production increased by 14% from 2000 to 2008), the timeline is still out by 40 years (again too far off for the short-sighted nature of the world markets).

(2) You may be right about violence peaking in 30 to 40 years. I have more faith in human ingenuity, however. I think that the push for environmental concerns will continue to drive us to seek out alternative energy. Perhaps ITER and DEMO will pave the way away from fossil fuels. Or perhaps it will be other technologies. I am confident they will emerge, however, as necessity is the mother of invention - and what a tough mother she is!

You forget that only part of oil consumption goes to energy. Plastic products, rubber products, lubricants and bases, things like vinyl and latex, all sorts of things that you wouldn't expect (like certain kinds of medicine that are synthesized from organic compounds). your average car is probably 20% (by volume) organic synthetics with an empty fuel tank. even if companies start working towards cleaner energy sources, they will still put a tremendous drain on fossil reserves. our lives would get pretty bare without organic chemistry (and from the look of that list above, our sex lives would get hit hardest - lol).

I hope you're right. :) that's a classic debate, you know: paranoid conservationists vs. techno-theosophists. :rolleyes:

Where do you get 48 million bpd? The US uses around 21 million bpd, and is estimated to consume about 25% of production. That would put world production/consumption at 84 million bpd, cutting your 63 year supply almost in half.

Wikipedia. I didn't see a reference for your numbers, so I grabbed my own. I wasn't intending to debate the number so much as point out that it is a relatively long timeline in comparison to the factors that typically dominate market fluctuations in the short-term. I don't see the impending drought of oil affecting the market any more in four years than it currently does.

There's a reason wikipedia is blocked on our school network... *cough*

I haven't forgotten anything. In 1828, Friedrich Woehler synthesized urea from ammonia and cyanic acid. This was the first time an organic compound had been synthesized from inorganic compounds. Since then, we have refined the process to be able to produce a wide variety of synthetic organic compounds from inorganic compounds. For example, synthetic motor oil is not made from petroleum products.

The reason we do not produce everything from synthetic organic compounds is a simple matter of economics. Energy is required to produce synthetic organic compounds. That energy must come from somewhere. For most of the world, that somewhere is petroleum and coal. So, why not just use the petroleum directly?

In the case of fusion and alternative energy source, the original source of the energy is not petroleum based. Consider that a working fusion reactor should be able to produce energy cheaply (note that I emphasize working - no one has gotten to that point yet). Cheap energy makes synthetics much more viable.

I am not publishing a paper based on Wikipedia articles. I was simply looking for some quick number from which to do a calculation. The point is the order of magnitude, not the specific number. I still maintain thatWikipedia is a good starting point from which to do research. Just don't take it too seriously (which I wasn't trying to do).

In that case I would argue that 35 and 70 years are both short enough to have devastating consequences as more people become aware of the certainty that oil is running out and the increasing speed at which it is doing so. Free markets are based on the idea that increased production reduces cost, but we aren't producing oil. We're just pulling it out of the ground. As we pull it out faster, what's left becomes more valuable at a faster rate, and the more we pull out of the ground, the harder it becomes to get at what remains.

Every day that goes by is another day closer to when it will cost more energy to get a barrel of oil than the energy contained in the barrel. We're already close to that day.

Look at it this way: Iran isn't interested in Nuclear power just to piss off America. They're running out of oil and they know it. It won't be long before other oil producers come to the same conclusion.

has anyone mentioned earth will become incredibly prone to the sun once the magnetic sphere weakens tremendously?

Only you. The magnetosphere isn't going anywhere any time soon.

How about the '23' theory?
Like the world is going to end in 2012 because 20+1+2=23. That is based on the thing that 2/3 is .666, which is the 'evil number'. That and the fact that 23 appears a lot in our history and stuff(link). And there are a whole lot more things that add up to 23 that you could prob find online such as 9/11, Hitler's death, etc. Then again, you could probably do that with a whole lot of other numbers ;)

Or 2+0+1+2=5 ... 5th letter of the alphabet is E, which stands for End.

hmm,
"/Applications" > "Calculator.app"
"View" > "Decimal Places" > "3"
"2" ÷ "3"

I get 0.667

Hooray, we're saved!

...and Calculator.app actually gets something right for a change.

Well, technically 2/3 is .666666666666666666666 to infinity. It's just rounded as .667 ;)

Right, but last I checked 666 was the number of the beast - not .666 or .66666.... In fact, I doubt they use a decimal point anywhere in the Bible!

well, that just means there are going to be an infinite number of beasts; one for each triplet.

I'm constantly amazed at how easy it is to make anything mean anything...