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Re: RE: starship-design: Infrastructure in space [was: FTLtravel...]
In a message dated 4/25/00 9:51:37 PM, lparker@cacaphony.net writes:
>>
>> Is not oil made by compression of large amounts of
>> organic matter?
>
>Well, scientists used to believe so, but recently it has been discovered
>through spectroscopic analysis that chemical compounds remarkably similar
>to
>good old crude abound in space. While it may still be true that oil on
>Earth
>originated by compressing organic matter, there is now some speculation
>that
>perhaps some of it was simply trapped here during planetary formation or
>something.
I read something that they think that might explain why oil on earth always
has a lot of helium in it. Doesn't make any sence if it was generated from
old swamps. But if its from space based debries sweept up in earth formatin
it does. Another big issue is oil companies ae seeing old used oil fields
start to refill as if the oil is being squeezed out from for deaper resivours.
Wait I have a artical someone mailed me!
Subj: Endless oil
Date: Monday, March 27, 2000 2:05:00 PM
From: kgstarks@crnotes.collins.rockwell.com
To: kellyst@aol.com
I remember this coming up in a conversation.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-11/01/102l-110199-idx.html
TOM GOLD, OIL MAN
A Scientific Heretic Says We'll Never Have to Worry About
Running Out of Gas
By Ken Ringle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 1, 1999; Page C01
Computers used to cost millions. Now they're being given
away.
The
country was rapidly going broke. Now we've got a $115
billion
budget
surplus. Butter was bad for us. Now we're not so sure. We're
being forced
to reexamine all our old assumptions on millennial eve,
right?
So maybe we should finally pay attention to Thomas Gold. He
says the
world has an endless supply of oil and gas.
Gold, a Vienna-born physicist, cosmologist and general
scientific heavy lifter,
founded and for many years directed the Cornell Center for
Radiophysics
and Space Research. In his 79 years he's authored more than
280 scholarly
papers on subjects ranging from astronomy to zoology.
He's also a full-time heretic, periodically parachuting into
some new
scientific field and infuriating academic plodders there
with
some
outlandishly bold new theory. More annoying, his theories
usually turn out to
be right. Worst of all, he thinks the orthodox have so
gummed
up the gates
of knowledge that they were more open to breakthroughs 50
years ago.
Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould has labeled Gold "one of
America's
most iconoclastic scientists." Says Gold himself: "In
choosing
a hypothesis
there is no virtue in being timid . . . [but] I clearly
would
have been burned at
the stake in another age."
In 1947, fresh from pioneering wartime work on the
development
of radar,
he used his research into high-frequency receptors to
publish
an entire new
theory of mammalian hearing. Physiologists shrugged it off
for
30 years.
Until auditory technology evolved enough to prove him
correct.
In 1959, when everybody thought the surface of the moon was
frozen lava,
Gold decided it was covered with dust from meteor impacts.
Footprints of
the Apollo astronauts will testify eternally that he was was
right about that,
too.
In 1967 astronomers trashed his suggestion that energy
pulsating in the
distant universe was the signature of collapsing stars. The
subsequent
observation of pulsars won two other scientists a Nobel
Prize.
And proved
Gold correct.
In 1992 he predicted that Martian meteorites might contain
fossilized
microbes. Four years later NASA announced the same thing.
Now in a new book, "The Deep Hot Biosphere," Gold says the
origin and
bulk of biological life is not on the surface of the Earth
where the birds and
bunnies are, but deep within it. Moreover, that microscopic
life force is
fueled by an inexhaustible supply of petroleum constantly
migrating outward
from our planet's volcanic core.
Eight years ago, when Gold was still developing his theory,
some geologists
were so incensed by it they petitioned to have the
government
remove all
mention of it from the nation's libraries.
"It was an effort at book-burning, pure and simple," Gold
says, shuffling
around a computer-buzzing, paper-littered attic study as
energetically
unkempt as he is. Most petroleum geologists, he says,
"simply
have no
concept of the laws of physics at work" beneath the Earth's
crust.
People need to understand, he says, that the long-held
assumption that oil
comes from the millennial composting of dinosaurs and
ancient
swamps has
always been dubious, whatever school science books may say.
His theory of
a deep, hot biosphere doesn't just solve its contradictions,
it sorts out in the
process such minor matters as the origin of all earthly life
and its relationship
with the rest of the universe.
Is there any wonder it makes people nervous?
Way Outside the Box
What's unique about Thomas Gold, says astronomer Steve Maran
of the
American Astronomical Society, is that unlike most
scientists
who are
content to "pursue the advancement of knowledge in small,
incremental
steps," Gold "comes up with new ideas by starting from the
original
principles" in some field where others have labored for
years.
When that happens, he's often "treated like a curiosity that
can't be taken
seriously," Maran says. "But he always shakes things up in a
useful way,
often opens up entire new areas of thought. Some denounce
him
even as
they profit from the push he's given their thinking."
"Gold's style is in turn charming, intriguing and
exasperating: short on details
(where the Devil lies) and long on fiats and suppositions,"
sighed eminent
geochemist Harmon Craig of Scripps Institution of
Oceanography, reviewing
Gold's book in Eos, the journal of the American Geophysical
Union.
But if Gold is right about subterranean microbes being the
seeds of all life,
and if they survive the Earth's next asteroid collision to
restart evolution, he
adds, "Let us hope that when new humans finally emerge and
invent science
they will have another Tom Gold to delight and exasperate
them
with his
theories."
On this particular day the heretic himself is stopping by
the
local
techno-emporium to pick up a new computer. It's a Macintosh,
and with its
blue-and-white neon tones and "Star Trek" design it looks
like
something
morphed from one of his theories. It's unclear just why his
former computer
succumbed. It was only a year old, but he may have made it
think too much.
"Supposedly all my files have been transferred into this
one,"
he says
skeptically, accepting only a modicum of help lugging it
through the garage
and up to his study. "But of course, you never really know."
Gold says his curiosity has been getting him in trouble ever
since his father
gave him a watch when he was little and he took it apart.
He's
worked at
reassembling things ever since.
One of his boldest constructs was the steady-state theory of
the universe,
which is now regarded, says Craig, as "beautiful but
untrue."
Still, as
cosmologist Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced
Study
at
Princeton says, if Gold hadn't put forward the steady-state
theory,
astronomers might not have been inspired enough to dream up
the Big Bang
theory, which replaced it.
We probably shouldn't be too hard on Gold for not quite
figuring out the
universe on his first try. After all, he rushed through
Cambridge in only two
years (there was a war on) and his degree was in
engineering.
But his mind had impressed his friend Hermann Bundi, one of
Cambridge's
famous wartime coterie of mathematical geniuses, who
suggested
Gold
would be useful on a highly classified war project. There
was
only one
problem: Gold was interned at the time as an enemy alien. He
and his
parents were Austrian citizens, and despite being refugees
from Hitler (his
father was Jewish), they had been technically classified as
Germans by the
British after war broke out in 1939.
"I was probably the first person to go right from internment
as an enemy to
work on an ultra-secret project like radar," he muses.
After the war he went back to Cambridge where, impressed
with
his
brilliance, administrators presented him with a prized
four-year fellowship to
do anything he wanted.
"I told them I would like to teach advanced physics," Gold
remembers. "They
said that was fine. But since I had never studied any
physics,
I had to learn it
myself night by night, before each lecture."
In the process, he read widely on all sides of the subject
and
became
convinced all physics was related. From that he published
his
steady-state
theory, which held that whatever had happened once in the
universe must be
occurring someplace in the universe today.
That made a big splash in scientific circles and, says Gold,
"I'm still not
entirely sure it's wrong." From there he moved on in 1953 to
become
assistant to Britain's astronomer royal, who heads the
Greenwich
Observatory and holds one of the country's most prestigious
intellectual
posts.
There he says he accidentally discovered the ultrasound
phenomenon now
used to check out unborn babies. But his boss decided it had
nothing to do
with astronomy and tore down his laboratory, so Gold left
for
the United
States.
He landed in Harvard in 1955, "either the youngest or the
second youngest
full professor on the faculty. I forget which." But he
refused
to live in Boston
and detested commuting from the suburbs, so within four
years
he had
migrated to a "much more livable" environment at Cornell.
He's been here causing trouble ever since.
Fueling Passion
Gold, who holds prestigious appointments to the National
Academy of
Sciences and the Royal Society of London, turned his
attention
to petroleum
during the energy crisis of the late 1970s. He has not been
universally
welcomed by industry geologists. Gold's hypothesis on the
origin of
petroleum amid deep hot life "is not very well defended,"
sniffed geoscientist
Alton Brown of Atlantic Richfield in a review of "The Deep
Hot
Biosphere"
in American Scientist last July. "We . . . know too much
about
the
subsurface and about petroleum geochemistry to seriously
consider these
ideas."
But Gold is used to being dissed. While scientists like
Brown
have
traditionally sought to explain petroleum by looking in the
ground, Gold says,
he developed his theory by looking in the other direction.
Far from being an earthly substance, he says, petroleum and
its component
hydrocarbons are present throughout the universe. You find
them in
meteorites. You find them in captured interplanetary dust.
You
can detect
them quite abundantly on one of the moons of Saturn. About
all
this there is
no scientific argument.
As an astronomer and geophysicist, he says, "it always
seemed
absurd to me
to see petroleum hydrocarbons on other planets, where there
was obviously
never any vegetation, even as we insist that on Earth they
must be biological
in origin."
Yet wherever earthly petroleum is found, even miles below
ground, oil
always contains biological material, such as the wreckage of
old, dead cells.
If "fossil fuel" wasn't formed from ancient plants and
animals, how did that
material get there?
Another puzzle bothered Gold, though he says it seems to
concern few
others: the gas helium. Helium is one of the essential
elements of the
universe, present in trace amounts everywhere in nature. As
a
so-called
"noble" gas, it stays chemically aloof from other elements,
never combining
like, say, hydrogen and oxygen do to form a third substance
like water. Yet
the only place on Earth helium is ever found in abundance is
with pools of
petroleum underground.
What, Gold wondered, could explain that?
Then in 1977 a tiny research submarine probing deep beneath
the Pacific
Ocean near the Galapagos Islands discovered something that
revolutionized
our understanding of life.
More than 1 1/2 miles down on an ocean floor made otherwise
barren by
darkness and crushing pressure, the sub's floodlights
revealed
entirely new
ecosystems living amid the scalding 600-degree heat and
mineral-rich
eruptions of subsea volcanic vents. On subsequent
expeditions,
scientists
were astounded to find an entire food chain at the
vents--blood red giant
tube worms, albino crabs and other creatures--thriving on
previously
unknown forms of heat-loving microbes where no possibility
of
life was
thought to exist.
That got Gold thinking.
Last year, in his book "Consilience," Harvard entomologist
E.O. Wilson, a
polymathic heretic like Gold, stirred the scientific pot by
arguing that all
forms of human knowledge are really branches of biology, and
serve an
evolutionary goal. But Gold goes further than that.
"Perhaps biology is just a branch of thermodynamics," he has
written, and
the history of life is just "a gradual systematic
development
toward more
efficient ways of degrading energy. . . . The chemical
energy
available
inside a planetary body is then more likely to have been the
first energy
source, and surface creatures--like elephants and . . .
people--which feed
indirectly on solar energy--are just a [much later]
adaptation
of that life to . .
. circumstances on the surface of our planet."
Endless Oil?
Working from that hypothesis, Gold's theory goes like this:
Oil and gas were
born out of the Big Bang and trapped in the Earth 4.5
billion
years ago in
randomly dispersed molecular form. But the intense heat of
the
Earth's
volcanic core "sweats them out" of the rocks that contain
them, sending
them migrating outward through the porous deep Earth because
they are
more fluid and weigh less. In a region between 10 and 300
kilometers deep,
the hydrocarbons nourish vast colonies of microbes where all
of earthly life
began, and where today there's a vastly greater mass of
living
things than
exists on the surface of the planet. The migrating oil and
gas
"sweep up" the
biological wreckage of this life as they percolate upward,
together with
molecules of helium, all of which eventually get trapped and
concentrated for
periods in near-surface reservoirs where oil is usually
found.
As far out as all this may sound, in the years since Gold
first noised the
outlines of his theory, researchers throughout the world
have
documented
extensively the presence of active microbes in the deep
Earth
under
conditions of heat and pressure once thought impossible to
sustain life.
Furthermore, some oil reservoirs long thought exhausted now
appear to be
mysteriously refilling. Gold considers the best proof of his
program the
extraction of 12 tons of crude oil in 1990 from a
6-kilometer-deep well drilled
in the long-presumed oil-free granite of central Sweden.
Chris Flavin of World Watch Institute says he's found many
elements of
Gold's theory "pretty persuasive" in the light of such
discoveries, and says
there's much to cheer environmentalists. If Gold is right,
he
says, the
greatest abundance of accessible hydrocarbons will be found
in
the form of
natural gas. Gas is not only the cleanest-burning energy
source right now, it
promises "to be the bridge to the hydrogen economy in the
future" which will
be cleaner still, he says.
But skeptics remain.
"We know there's carbon deep within the Earth because that's
where we
find diamonds," says Nick Woodward, a geoscience program
manager with
the Energy Department. "And we know there's water, at least
in
small
amounts, which, since it's hydrogen and oxygen, gives us the
building blocks
for petroleum hydrocarbons. . . . "But whether that
therefore
means the
source of all hydrocarbons is in the deep Earth, I think
that's highly
questionable."
Gold shrugs off such unbelievers. The scientific world,
allegedly searching
for truth, is really little more hospitable to it than when
Galileo fell afoul of
the Inquisition, he says.
"You know, I am very lucky that I received recognition and
honors early in
my career, so that by the time I started making real waves I
already had
stature," he says. "Even with my record I've had a terrible
time getting some
of these papers published. Without it nobody would touch
me. .
. .
"The problem is this system of peer review" wherein
established scholars in
a field pass judgment on new papers before publication, he
says. "That
rewards small steps but discourages bold ideas and the very
sort of
cross-discipline thinking that can provide the greatest
breakthroughs. I don't
think there's any question that we produced more great ideas
in the first half
of the 20th century than we have in the second"--when peer
review has
ruled.
Nevertheless, Gold soldiers on. He's presently writing his
memoirs of a
lifetime of heresy. Chosen title: "Getting the Back Off the
Watch."
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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From: "Kelly G Starks" <kgstarks@crnotes.collins.rockwell.com>
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Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2000 13:57:59 -0600
Subject: Endless oil
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>I should think it would be relatively easy to prove through carbon dating,
>but I haven't seen anything on it recently.
>
>Lee
I read somthing