Here's what they're not telling us about petrol:

[Captain_ClutchKick]

It's just a widely accepted theory that it's a fossil fuel. It isn't proven for certain, and a very clever bloke worked out that it could be made on other planets without any dead things...

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deep_Hot_Biosphere#Origins_of_petroleum

 

Global man-made climate warming swindle? What a way to artificially inflate the price of everything...

[RedCarDriver]

You know that the cost of getting this petrol back to Earth from even Mars, the cost of the nearest planet, would be prohibitively expensive, right? That's even ignoring the cost and insane difficulty of MINING it from here.

 

It would be awesome if, indeed, we could just drill some oil on Mars and ship it here. Whether or not that can really happen is another matter. Would be interesting, though, if this hypothesis led to a cheap, efficient way to convert carbon and other things into petrol.

 

I think the dangers of global warming are severely overinflated, but I do think that we do need to prevent pollution in general. However, I wouldn't drive a Prius in favor of a Ferrari or something, much like many of the members here - I'd advocate changes in bigger pollution-causers, like factories, first.

[Captain_ClutchKick]

I don't mean ship it from other planets. I said that to illustrate this point: despite what we are told, it is a natural mineral made by the immense activity and chemical reactions in the earth's mantle, and not purely from fossilsed dead things which will expire. The fact that it could be on other planets merely says that it's a universal process of any planet with a molten hot core.

 

So basically, because nobody really knows for sure how petrol and oil are made, the oil companies who say 'we have 50 years' worth down there' could quite possibly be lying to us to drive their prices up and have loads more than they say because it isn't made from ancient organic matter and actually from carbon deposits dating back from the formation of the earth itself.

 

The evidence of biology in oil could just be down to the thermophiliac (heat-seeking) bacteria that live near the bottom of the earth's crust.

 

You should never rule this stuff out, especially when we don't know enough.

[RedCarDriver]

I've never been convinced that converting raw materials to petroleum is impossible. It's just that, like converting ashes back into wood, it consumes more energy than you'd save. :P

 

I'd be very happy, though, if we found out that creating gasoline cheaply is possible, or if there's much, much more petrol than we had previously thought.