Updated with a h/t to Texas Scribbler. Don't worry, he's not a Cowboy's fan.
This article is about finding oil more than 5 miles below the Gulf of Mexico.
First, I didn't realize we could drill that deeply. That's cool.

They kept finding that wells would refill after a time, as if they had a reservoir that refilled them.
So BP drilled deeper, down to 35,055 feet, and found a huge reserve, which is cool, but the article had this bit almost as an aside.
This observation, as well as the discovery of vast gas deposits at depths of 10,000 feet and more, has led to a theory that oil and gas deposits are not the fossilized remains of organic matter from the ancient surface of the earth, but are instead a product of organic processes at work underneath the surface of the planet.

That makes sense. We don't have to dig that deeply to find dead stuff from hundreds of millions or even billions of years ago, how else would it get there? I'm pretty sure that "organic" is in the chemical sense of "with carbon" and not the "used to be alive" meaning that most people think of first.
That means any random planet, or even all, could have oil.

That's cool. That means we can go to even inhospitable planets and start polluting them right away.
Think of the hilarity as eco-wackos freak out over "releasing greenhouse gases" into Mars' atmosphere.
That could actually make terra-forming Mars possible. Just keep burning oil, lots of sweet, sweet oil, getting CO2 into the atmosphere, thicken it up with lots of smog (ozone) and then you could introduce plants to create O2 and then you introduce animals. 
It's so crazy, it could work.

This is also one of the things that makes me laugh, in my lifetime oil has gone from being dead dinosaurs to dead vegetable matter to possibly just carbon trapped in the interior and having pressure and heat turn it into oil instead of diamonds.
Just like dinosaurs went from slow-moving, cold-blooded precursors to reptiles to much more mobile, warm-blooded precursors to birds.
In 20 years, we'll have descended from raptors who were mutated in the Yucatan strike (they rode the tidal wave to Africa) and all the oil in the Universe will have been created in the Big Bang and it's never going to be created again because of some theory of quantum biology.

Posted by: Veeshir at 11:29 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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