Eat crayons. That is all.

How does Secretary of State sound to you?

Not true. My dad works for an oil company (his job's to do with getting petrol station contracts rather than anything to do with oil itself) and he's also told me plenty about the fuel state (before you go "BOO EVIL OIL COMPANY CORPORATE SUIT", no. He's not saying oil is clean/eco friendly, just that we're not running out s badly as the media reckons.). There's much more than 16 years of fuel left. Much more. Under Siberia alone there's decades supply of oil left. Of course the cost of getting it out is immense and almost negates it, but the supply is not as low as everybody thinks. Everyone hears of wells running dry, nobody hears the stories of how dry wells are re-tapped.

The problem's not the amount of fuel left, it's the fact it's gonna fuck up the atmosphere and ozone so bad it won't matter that we've got plenty left. And so called green fuels like vegetable oil cause equal pollution, just with different gases. Solar/Electric power's the way to go but is currently impractical. Or Fusion, but again we're not there yet.


Maybe so but as recently as last week there was news that in the UK the population's rocketed again and there's more people here than anybody thought. There's still a population overflow in the West as well as the 3rd world countries.


Also T-nex made an excellent point on the issue of "freedom not to have children". Dunno what more to say on that really.

From what i understand, oil is a funny thing. Just when they thought it's going to run out another monsterously huge reserve pops up somwhere in the world.

There was i think a prediction that it would be gone several years ago(?)


And OANST, prehaps some rectal laser is in order?

Reserves "pop up" at the expense of billions of dollars and usually some kind of violent spat with whomever is living on top of said reserve.

But they do pop up, i don't dispute the expense/violence. But reserves do nevertheless pop up.

I would say that the end of oil although still likely to happen in our lifetime is still a longer while off than we expected.

Regardless, like MM said, our environment can't take another pounding with fossil fuel emissions. Even if there are oil reserves left, we shouldn't fucking use them, or we should use them very sparingly. This general attitude annoys me so much; we won't look for alternatives unless we've indefinitely used up all of the original.

Ethanol and fuel-efficiency research has perhaps 1/10th the funding it should have. Back to The Future said that by 2015 we would have flying cars that ran on garbage, so lets put Robert fucking Zemeckis at the head of the research team.

Oh don't get me wrong, i don't think we should use the oil reserves. As shitty a deal as it is I am doubtless that they will find another one.
The end of fossil fuels being so far off is a bad thing. We should be spending our time looking for "oil substitutes".

"Corn + magic = fuel for cars" ~ Stephen Colbert

We don't fund ethanol cause it's shit. Seriously. It's less efficient than oil, you need way more of it, it pollutes the atmosphere just with different gases, and it is impossible to use without fucking up car engines cause its so full of bio-crap. Petrol station filters need to be changed something liek 4-5 times as much as normal with biofuels cause of all the gunk in em. it's comparable to supermarket petrol in terms of the damage it does to your cars.


Fusion, electricity, and solar power. All currently impossible to use and all current versions are laughable, but theyre the only true alternative. Gonna need a lot of work on em though.

This is like how we hear about a refinery burning down or a pipeline bursting inexplicably whenever the major travel holiday weekends come around each year causing prices to jump. Bafoons. :fuzmad:

Ethanol is much less efficient than gasoline, and the trouble with it is that it's largely 'incompatible' with certain types of neoprene and rubber; this includes fuel and oil seals in engines, rubber fuel lines, vacuum lines, etc in car engines designed to run gasoline.

The SOLUTION is to run the car off of gasoline VAPOR instead of ATOMIZED gasoline, which is what carburetion and fuel injection systems do to the gas. How does, mmmm, 120+mpg sound to you guys?

Do your part. Fuck a dude.

What really is a reliable alternative fuel? Because I have no idea.



p.s. anyone who wants on the spaceship can come on itll be a fairly (fairy) large vessel.


edit: If solar, fission, and the other one could be effective later on, why don't we dump funding into research for those thingies? I mean, these muslim killing sessions have gotten kinda old.

I was going to ask something along those lines.....

If alternative fuel isn't efficient now, keeping funding away from researching it further will never make it efficient.

*cough*

Fossil fuel should be fine if we can make it last us.... oh I don't know... 10 fold? *cough*

Ethanol CAN work, and it is only "inefficient" when compared to gasoline; naturally, this is going to be the argument for any pro-gasoline advocate. What does this matter is it can be made cheaper? Honestly. Put your brain in gear and think about this.

A downside of Ethanol is the temperature at which it burns. Running pure ethanol in an engine designed for gasoline can be done.... except we run into heat issues. An engine must be designed to handle these temperatures in order to really be practical. Same goes for hydrogen.

But back to what I was saying, burn the vapor of the gasoline (produced by agitating the liquid) instead of atomizing it (like a perfume bottle does) and *bam* there's the efficiency! :)


Hydrogen is also a promising alternative, and many people I know, just here in the valley, have built their own hydrogen generators and have cars running BASICALLY off of water. No problems, aside from the heat at which hydrogen burns; hotter than ethanol in fact.

A one mile x one mile solar panel would power the entire United States. Once again, its all a matter of cost. We have to look at things cumulatively, the cost of gas as well as the expense of maintaining and environment poisoned by emissions would be considerably less than what it would cost to build and maintain such a solar panel. This doesn't solve the fuel-efficiency issue, just the issue of energy conservation in general.

I don't think laws are going to need to be placed for human population to be curved, Mother Nature is on her way. Look at what happened in Europe circa 1400s: Black Death! It spread all the way from ASIA!

And now there's all this blab about H1N1, but meh. Nature will adapt to kill us sooner or later. :D It's okay, we need it. >.>

It will be just like that crap Shyamalan film The Happening.

Except this time not completely retarded.

You need to justify this point. How is an increasing third world population and approximately constant first world population going to destroy Planet Earth?

That's probably more to do with immigration than birthing rates.

As for the petrol thing: We're approximately 15 years from the point where the premium oil wells run out. After that, there are huge amounts of crappy resources; for instance when the oil is mixed in with mud or shale. The problem is that the processess to get the oil out of these are incredibly expensive, so either new processes need to be invented, or oil is going to get so pricey that no-one will be able to afford to run a petrol car.

Last I checked it's not keeping constant but was still growing. But I guess it could be that this generation of people don't want to have as many kids as in the old days so I'm sure there's been a decline on the graph at some point.

However we're already at a point where we're killing the planet. 7 billion of us is just to many on a small planet like this. Toxins, cutting down of trees, animals going extinct, using up all natural resources, using up a lot of space for living and putting our junk in landfills and rivers.

If you look at my first post in this thread, you'll see the list of birth rates by population.

As for killing the planet; the way to solve that is to change our industrial processes to be less polluting. Having fewer human beings on the planet will not solve that problem; if anything, it will prompt people to pollute even more (per person) until we reach about the same point.

You know, I think it's funny when people call it a "war" between man and nature. Because in my opinion, it's all nature. Species adapt to their environments just like humans. And if we cut down the trees and dry up the oceans, this planet still has 14.7 billion years left before the sun explodes if I remember correctly. Barely anything leaves and barely anything comes down here. Think about the number of civilizations that will rise and fall from the ashes of each previous society. Just like the dinosaur skeletons we find in the ground, maybe they'll find our cars and sky-scrapers. To quote that guy from Jurassic Park, "Life will find a way." My Earth science is rusty, so I don't know how badly humans could mar the possibility for future life on this planet. That seems like a better question for BM or Max.

Now, I'm not saying we should keep going down this path of destruction because what we do now just couldn't possibly ruin it for the rest of the planet's time exisiting. Since we have the knowledge of how badly we're affecting the current environment, we should be able to improve things too. I don't really associate myself with the "green" movement yet because I still use gas-powered transportation, I don't recycle religiously, and I waste electricity. But I try to walk to my destinations whenever I can, not waste much, and certainly not litter. I think if people just kept a balance we can at least give ourselves some time to prepare for a massive and drawn-out overhaul of society in a more environment friendly direction.

As for over-population, I say we go out and colonize the solar system like in Cowboy Bebop.

Earth is obviously bigger than you think it is.

Roughly every human on Earth could live in Texas.

It pisses me off that such an interesting topic got farted out like this.

Well put it into perspective. Which other mammal is currently present on the planet in numbers above 1 billion? I wasn't talking about actual space in square feet. I meant resources and stuff like that.

"Humans are not a mammal. All mammals have developed the ability to find a natural equilibrium with their environment, to coexist with it without depleting it's resources. Humans, however, arrive at an area, then they multiply and multiply, and when they have consumed everything, they move to another area. There is another organism that acts like this. A virus. Humans are a disease, a cancer eating away at this planet. A... plague, and we are the cure." ~ Agent Smith, The Matrix

Do I get concubines? Please can I have concubines.

i considered mentioning that immigration may have a factor but in my experience if you make any slightly negative comment about immigration you're called a racist xenophobe.

i think the united states should be limited to two children per household, most people seem to be able to afford two children, but there are those who have five and six...if someone has two kids and wants to have dirty protectionless sex, we can just ship them their very own gay space nigga

from what i can tell pilot shits rainbows

I've always loved that quote.

The only reason they find this "eqiuilibrium" is because they don't possess the intelligence to prosper better. Leonardo Da Vinci once said that every invention is an extension of man's arm. And who says humans are the only ones that ravage the ecosystem? Look at locusts and red tides. All life is heading towards the same goal. Humans just do it more efficiently.

You mean that all life is heading towards its own demise at one point or another? If so, I have to disagree.

Nature on its own is a slow moving process. Problems slowly arise within an area but such a problem would take so insanely long to do serious damage that nature has plenty of time to counter-balance it and fix it.

We on the other hand are doing things to the planet which nature can't counter-balance because its happening too fast. Hell I think it would take natural circumstances a good 2 million years, if not longer, to produce the amount of CO2 we're pumping into the air on a daily basis.

Who is this fast, and why doesn't he just get the fuck out of the way?

Ztop mocking zeh grammah!! >_<

No, what I mean is that the driving force for all life is to survive, procreate, and prosper. We just happen to have bigger brains leading to more efficient methods of attaining those goals.

It's ALL Nature. Humans are just ahead of the game. I'm not trying to glorify our destructive behavior, I'm just trying to point out that Nature isn't always some mystical harmony among all forms of life, it's a competition for one species to thrive over another. Kill or be killed; survival of the fittest. Fittest to master one's surroundings, that is.

Leto, I have been looking for that clip FOREVER! Thank you for finding it.

Also, if you really wanna limit two kids per household, I have a wonderful idea: dismantle Catholicism. Better yet, we need a philanthropist with a big farm to just adopt up all the orphans in the world and just let em run wild in the open space.

Also, viruses aren't organisms. They're seemingly maliciously designed particles that have no "goal" but to procreate.

Depends on tone of voice; simply saying "The population has increased, mainly due to immigration" does not imply any judgement.

Leto and Sekto: That's totally random. In case you didn't know, Snato Guaro is a famous Australian tv comedian/writer/creator of successful shows. I didn't even know he'd done that Zlad stuff.

I don't agree with that Matrix quote, I just thought it was something to think about. As I was posting it I was thinking about how rabbits eat all plant life, multiply ridiculously fast, and would end up starving to death if there wern't other things eating them and people shooting them in the face.

They are organisms, being organic. They just aren't alive. Also, Smith actually says 'animal', (or 'creature'. Or maybe 'living thing'. I'm not quite sure...) but I changed it in a vain attempt to stop this argument.

They're not technically considered organisms because they aren't alive except when they attach to their hosts and the machinery inside them starts working.

The Matrix is a load of pretty fauxophical garbage and anyone who quotes off it and means it is a dire dire victim of the postmodern condition.

Forced breeding isn't necessary in first world countries because birth rates are dropping towards a sustainable population anyway, and while greater knowledge about birthing and its consequences could help the third world move towards a more stable and sustainable population it's not necessary either, more children being born in Africa just means that more children die in Africa. Dead babies and starving infants don't use non-renewable resources.

Overpopulation and immigration are just excuses that governments and big businesses use to cloud the true threats on our planet, ironically being exactly what Havoc knocked down in his first post.