Hell, USA, Oil, and Eternity.















Oil is ugly. It's ironic it's called crude when it comes from the ground, because that's exactly what it is and the whole science around its extraction, not to mention the bloated, wasteful, Romanesque societies it's enabled in some parts of the world - CRUDE. They're ugly in so many ways. If every one of our 6.5 billion people of today lived as the average American does, we would need 6 planet Earths to supply enough natural resources for them. We only have one. As the developing nations explode in population and energy needs, and try to reach the palatial living standards the USA has set over the last century, the world will run out of oil and other forms of energy, the envrionment will be decimated, and the whole system will collapse, with the same greedy population suddenly finding they have not the fineries they wanted, but are being hurled back into some agrarian if not stone age way of life. The population will collapse to under a billion (which will be a good thing) - and the type of economic and technological "progress" we seem to take as our birthright will vanish overnight into a hell of way too many people violently struggling for the last scraps of a dying lifestyle.

The road back to pre-oil agrarianism or at best steam power will not be a pleasant one. Mass starvation, mass murder, mass epidemics. The discovery of a huge pool of free energy sitting below the ground was the worst thing that ever happened to the human species. It gave us a brief century or two of a futuristic (though meaningless) existence that was never going to be sustainable. We who are at this discussion right now are at the tipping point of the problem, a strange and blatant violation of the Copernican mediocrity principal. We've come from backgrounds of plenty and are facing a future of little. How anyone could bring children into the world at this time blows my mind. They will only face declining resources and increasing strife their whole lives. They will not live with the presumption of steadily increasing their bearing in the world, of saving for a comfortable retirement. Instead the nastiest, crookedness hucksters, opportunists, and gangsters will scramble to the top of the pyramid, like the mafia of the 1930s depression or the robber barons of medieval times, or any barbarian culture or pack of dogs or... you get it. Far from everyone on earth having a cell phone and a computer and a hamburger and a smile on his face, we'll have a system like Cold War Romania where the few Ceausescus will live in luxury on the back of serfs and possibly outright slaves who live under the most meager of conditions.

Maybe humanity, having been slapped down from its tower of Babel, will actually reestablish meaningful relationships with their extended (and immediate) families again, and the return of laborious work instead of paperwork will reduce the level of stress, depression, and the other ills that have assailed our present society, and increase general health. It make take generations, but maybe a feudal system will be the best thing for both our brains and bodies, as processed food is replaced by whole foods, and the earth slowly recovers its forests and animal populations. Of course, there is always the chance that some breakthrough in fusion energy or some other unforeseen technology will "save" us at the last minute, and enable this exponentially growing human virus to continue to propagate, to devour the planet, and then to begin to spread into space, where people will then have all the time in the world to sit and think about what quality of life means, and to get the answer wrong, and to despair. Human nature devloped gradually via natural selection to be opportunistic; we can't suddenly turn our greed off in the midst of plenty. So we will become fat Baron Harkonnens plugged into some sort of collective mind that cries like a child because it can never find satiation, and humanity and all it touches will continue to be ugly and crude, forever.