Peak Oil & Black Holes
J. Walter Plinge
August 2006


At the risk of sounding adversarial, it seems to me that Peak Oil is a 
Solution rather than a Problem.

Of course it will cause some people hardships - sure - me included. But 
not all people. Maybe half the world's population have no use for oil. 
They won't miss it; they never benefitted from it in the first place. 
In fact it is cheap oil that greased the skids for the theft of wealth 
(copper, diamonds, uranium - you name it - all kinds of mineral and 
agricultural materials) from poor African, Asian and South American 
countries.

The reality of peak oil and climate change is that it's just Mother 
Nature grabbing humankind by the scruff of the neck, slamming our 
collective heads against The Great Brick Wall of Doom, and screaming, 
"OK-RIGHT! - if YOU won't change your habits, then I WILL !"

If you look at the Big Picture it all makes sense. Life on earth 
started around 3 billion years ago. For the first 2.9 Billion years 
there were only single cell organisms that occupied themselves with 
making the planet habitable for living things. They changed the 
atmosphere - took carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air, and put oxygen 
in, - and built up soils. Had these single celled animals failed to 
make the planet habitable, then the earth would have passed through 
that window of opportunity and continued on its path to being a hostile 
lifeless rock like most other planets . . . with poisonous atmospheres.

Only at the end of the third billion years did multi-celled plants and 
animals develop. So, to summarize, what we have here is: Mother Nature 
taking CO2 out (OUT !!) of the atmosphere (where do you think oil and 
coal came from?) for BILLIONs (BILLIONs !!) of years, and humans trying 
to PUT IT ALL BACK IN (!), in a few hundred.

This is too obviously LoonyToons. The answer to the question about how 
much fossil fuel can be burnt safely is: None, without increasing 
forests at the same time.  And burning fossil fuels while eliminating 
forests is just zany. But it's a little LATE for that assessment isn't 
it? I mean if the above is standard operating procedure for creating 
life on planets -- and there's no reason to think it isn't -- then it 
would seem to be a trap.


	__/\/\/\/\/\__



All of this reminds me that I have a theory which, if correct, could 
save Carl Sagan's SETI people (Search For Extra-Terrestrial Life) a lot 
of trouble. The Theory is: Black Holes are Proof of  Extra-Terrestrial 
Human Life.

The hypothesis is this: I'll presume the work of Lovelock and Margulles 
(above, and see footnote) is fundamentally correct. Whether there are 
other non-carbon based forms of life in the universe is irrelevant. 
What is happening here on Earth is probably happening similarly 
elsewhere throughout the universe. And what is happening here is just 
evolution working its way through a standard set of events toward a 
standard and inevitable conclusion. And that conclusion -- the whole 
evolutionary purpose of life in Earth -- is to turn Earth into a black 
hole.

As evidence that we are on this track I submit this item from Chuck 
Shepherd, News of the Weird, in (where else would you expect to find 
serious scientific data?) Funny Times, Oct 1999:

Big Bang II -- In July [1999] the director of Brookhaven National 
Laboratory on Long Island, NY, finally got around to forming a 
committee of physicists to explore whether the lab's replication of the 
world-forming Big Bang, could possibly backfire and destroy the Earth. 
Full nuclear collisions by the lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider 
will start in the fall, building to the Big Bang. Some physicists 
believe there is a small chance that the machine could create new kinds 
of matter or form mini- "black holes" and suck in all surrounding 
matter.


There is no point  in speculating whether the coming black hole will 
happen in years, decades, centuries or eons -- only that it will happen 
eventually. It's as predictable as the invention of matches leading to 
a child burning the house down; as predictable as the development of 
chemistry leading inevitably to a Bhopal or Thalidomide. Eventually 
there will be portable Relativistic Heavy Ion Colliders that work 
better and curious teenagers will be able to carry out full nuclear 
collisions in their kitchens.

Furthermore, the hypothesis is not entirely derailed by the possibility 
of human extinction by, say, nuclear means or climate change; 
extinction is only a 3 billion year set-back. The earth will recover 
and humans will be back ... sooner or later. Indeed, extinctions would 
actually support the hypothesis; An extinction or two would only go to 
verify that humans are smart enough to find a way to create a Black 
Hole, and at the same time, stupid enough to actually do it.

There is always the possibility that humans will go extinct -- or 
nearly extinct -- and that they will learn something from that, and 
they will be able to avoid playing with black holes. I doubt it though. 
Or maybe there could be a leap to a newer smarter species.


The second half of the hypothesis is that there was not one single Big 
Bang, but many. That is a rather common notion today. My contention is 
that the universe, like Gaia itself, sustains itself -- regenerates 
itself -- through periodic Big Bangs. And the source of those Big Bangs 
are -- you guessed it -- Black Holes: the Holes increase in size over 
the eons, due to their gravitational force, and when the forces, 
unknown to me or anyone, become great enough, they explode with a Bang. 
A Big one.

This part of the hypothesis depends on figuring out what causes Black 
Holes and Big Bangs, and humans are a prime candidate. Humans are 
likely to be spread thinly throughout the universe and they provide a 
unique stupid/smart mechanism which may not exist anywhere else in 
nature.



____________
FOOTNOTE
Lynn Margullis, a biologist in California was proposing, 25 years ago 
or more, that human life (all life actually) has evolved from a few - 
like 4 or 5 - single celled organisms, which have organized 
cooperatively to form the human body (along with everything else). 
German scientists recently announced that cells from mice testes can 
act like embryonic stem cells; growing new brain, heart, and bone cells 
from the human testes cells which  would seem to confirm Lynn's theory.

Her close associate, James Lovelock,  (the Gaia guy) had an equally 
intriguing notion. Years ago Lovelock was asked by NASA, along with 
other scientists, to formulate a simple test which would indicate if 
there was life on Mars or not. He  proposed a test of the atmosphere -- 
looking for increased oxygen and reduced carbon dioxide -- a test which 
NASA, in their infinite bureaucratic, hierarchical wisdom, chose to 
ignore presumably because it would slash their Mars budget to near zero 
and that would destroy their Erector Set Robot budget. Meanwhile the 
Gaia theory has proven substantially if not wholly correct, and the 
atmosphere question fits precisely.


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J. Walter Plinge <[log in to unmask]> is the pen name of a writer / 
researcher / monetary theorist / plumber / electrician, a one time duck 
herder, and a US refugee living in France. Reproduce freely except 
for-profit publications.  He always appreciates additions and 
corrections.