Does Oil Come from Dinosaurs?(powells.com)
powells.com
Does Oil Come from Dinosaurs?
https://www.powells.com/post/original-essays/does-oil-come-from-dinosaurs
155 comments
Thanks for the link to the previous discussion. Looking at the numbers in there, I don’t see how this conversation isn’t about overpopulation. We need such massive equivalents of land because there are too many of us, and we value living high quality lives (high standards of living with substantial consumption). The alternative is that everyone lives very constrained lives but I don’t think that is feasible or even desirable.
How do we know oil doesn't bubble up from the Earth's mantle? As far as I know, the mantle has a vast supply of carbon and water, and under the high temperatures and pressures of the mantle could form hydrocarbons that bubble up into the crust
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28106291
TL;DR: coal, oil, and gas and/or the strata in which they form contain fossils and chemical signatures of ancient plant life, and are found in zones (ancient marshes/forests for coal, ancient shallow seabeds for oil) which correspond to a biotic rather than abiotic origin.
The mantle exists at depths too great for fuel formation --- the materials would be broken down at the temperatures and pressures found. Kerogenesis is depth-limited on the same basis.
TL;DR: coal, oil, and gas and/or the strata in which they form contain fossils and chemical signatures of ancient plant life, and are found in zones (ancient marshes/forests for coal, ancient shallow seabeds for oil) which correspond to a biotic rather than abiotic origin.
The mantle exists at depths too great for fuel formation --- the materials would be broken down at the temperatures and pressures found. Kerogenesis is depth-limited on the same basis.
it needs to be turned into a flashy webpage with lots of JS animation. pretty tough to get lots of traffic on a pdf file.
I’m on a phone and I simply can’t read it.
I can see that as a factor.
Do you not have a desktop / laptop on which you could read the article later?
Do you not have a desktop / laptop on which you could read the article later?
I do, but I’m not going to go get it out just to read a pdf. It needs to be mobile responsive if there is a desire for people to read it on the devices they probably are usually on.
Thanks.
Just my own view, but I find that highly-recommended PDFs are often vastly more worthwhile reading than much of what is easily found in HTML format.
My preferred platform is generally an e-ink reader or tablet. At 8" or larger, they're quite good for reading most print-oriented material. My own is a 13.3" Onyx device, and I'm loving it.
They're much better for reading, and tend to reduce distractions.
Just my own view, but I find that highly-recommended PDFs are often vastly more worthwhile reading than much of what is easily found in HTML format.
My preferred platform is generally an e-ink reader or tablet. At 8" or larger, they're quite good for reading most print-oriented material. My own is a 13.3" Onyx device, and I'm loving it.
They're much better for reading, and tend to reduce distractions.
Also worth to point out Earth needed millions of years to sequester that CO2 we release to atmosphere each year.
The values from Dukes's paper are illuminating.
- The fossil fuels burned in a year represent about 400 years' worth of accumulated ancient biomass. That is, you'd need to capture all the biomass grown for four centuries to give the fuel we consume in one year.
- But conversion and preservation aren't perfect. So it took five million years to form just the oil we consume annually (or did in 1997, though values have remained reasonably constant since). That is, only about 0.008% of ancient biomass was stored as petroleum.
I don't know the figures for carbon-cycle sequester and release rates, though at best we're looking at centuries to remove what we've put into the atmosphere in decades, if not longer.
- The fossil fuels burned in a year represent about 400 years' worth of accumulated ancient biomass. That is, you'd need to capture all the biomass grown for four centuries to give the fuel we consume in one year.
- But conversion and preservation aren't perfect. So it took five million years to form just the oil we consume annually (or did in 1997, though values have remained reasonably constant since). That is, only about 0.008% of ancient biomass was stored as petroleum.
I don't know the figures for carbon-cycle sequester and release rates, though at best we're looking at centuries to remove what we've put into the atmosphere in decades, if not longer.
I would also point out that today it is not possible to form new large scale coal/oil deposits.
Coal/oil deposits that we are using up now formed because at the time there was no bacteria that could digest dead plant/plankton matter.
This is also why all coal/oil deposits are very old. There is very little deposits after bacteria has evolved.
Nowadays there needs to be special circumstances for a piece of biological matter to not be digested by bacteria. For example it would have to be covered by permafrost or drown in oxygen-deficient lake for a very, very long time and then covered by soil.
Coal/oil deposits that we are using up now formed because at the time there was no bacteria that could digest dead plant/plankton matter.
This is also why all coal/oil deposits are very old. There is very little deposits after bacteria has evolved.
Nowadays there needs to be special circumstances for a piece of biological matter to not be digested by bacteria. For example it would have to be covered by permafrost or drown in oxygen-deficient lake for a very, very long time and then covered by soil.
I’ve heard this several times, but I looked into it in more detail, and it seems that there’s some controversy: e.g. https://www.pnas.org/content/113/9/2442, https://academic.oup.com/femsre/article/41/6/941/4569254?log...
So at least once we send ourselves extinct through fossil-fuel driven climate change, any intelligent life that comes after us won't have the resources to do the same.
Interesting thought.
I think energy is least of problems. At the beginning forests provide a lot of energy and would be enough to bridge to industrial times (at least for us).
The real issue, I think, is lack of easily available raw materials like iron, tin, copper, etc. We have depended A LOT on iron practically lying on the ground.
Without having some iron easily available any startup civilization wouldn't know to look deeper and even if they wanted, they would not have any tools to do so.
At least with energy there is multiple ways to acquire it.
I think energy is least of problems. At the beginning forests provide a lot of energy and would be enough to bridge to industrial times (at least for us).
The real issue, I think, is lack of easily available raw materials like iron, tin, copper, etc. We have depended A LOT on iron practically lying on the ground.
Without having some iron easily available any startup civilization wouldn't know to look deeper and even if they wanted, they would not have any tools to do so.
At least with energy there is multiple ways to acquire it.
On the other hand there’s a lot of already processed and extracted iron and steel we’ve conveniently dug up and left around for future societies to maybe harvest.
You are right, I haven't thought of it.
I think it still works out to a net difficulty increase to any group trying to restart an industrialized civilization because of how much easy energy reserves have been permanently extracted. There’s basically no surface level coal/oil/gas that could be tapped into and finding the remaining reserves from scratch might be prohibitively difficult.
Then there’s the question of how much of the steel will still be usable when it’s time to extract it. That’s a variable problem depending on how long the ‘dark age’ is before people are rebuilding I suppose. It could be like Doctorow’s Walkaway where there’s abundant enough discarded resources you can almost achieve post-scarcity (but that world never wen through a hard crash it was more building a parallel society than a whole new one). Or it could be centuries later when a lot of the steel will be rust. Hard to say.
Then there’s the question of how much of the steel will still be usable when it’s time to extract it. That’s a variable problem depending on how long the ‘dark age’ is before people are rebuilding I suppose. It could be like Doctorow’s Walkaway where there’s abundant enough discarded resources you can almost achieve post-scarcity (but that world never wen through a hard crash it was more building a parallel society than a whole new one). Or it could be centuries later when a lot of the steel will be rust. Hard to say.
Most of it is exposed to weather - which means it'll oxidize and decay to uselessness rather quickly, and eventually dissolve and become diluted. With ores, we had it all in convenient form.
A lot of it yeah but large thick things like bridges will probably survive for quite a while in usable sized chunks. Copper too will be pretty available and protected in wires. It really depends on what timescale we're talking about though in the end. If we talking about humans rebooting there could still be usable bits around depending on how long it takes to begin rebuilding. If we're talking about a whole new intelligent species I agree they'll have vanishingly little to work with.
So it becomes ore again? It won't just go away.
Yes, but it will get blown by the wind and thus diluted to homeopathic concentrations.
"Ore genesis" is the term of art in geology for how various mineral ores form. Typically this involves a source, transport, and trap. Biological processes can play a major role (iron, limestone).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ore_genesis
Useful ore deposits tend to be vast, with absoutely immense amounts (many trillions tons) of paydirt. The value of ores are that the minerals of interest are concentrated, sometimes to very high levels (50% or more of total material), though increasingly lower-grade ores (1% concentration or lower) are utilised. This means that you've got to move 99 units of mass for every unit of primary mineral extracted (overburden).
Even very large human formations are small by geological standards. The World Trade Centre towers contained about 200,000 tonnes of steel. That's a lot for humans, but a minuscule amount on a geological scale. (https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2004/EricChen.shtml)
Current iron ore extraction is on the order of about 2.5 billion tons/year. That's roughly 1/3 ton per person on Earth.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-worlds-metals-and-m...
Vaclav Smil's Making the Modern World goes into depth on material use in contemporary civilisation:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/making-the-modern-world-mater...
(After water and oil, sand and gravel are our most-used material, then concrete and iron/steel.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ore_genesis
Useful ore deposits tend to be vast, with absoutely immense amounts (many trillions tons) of paydirt. The value of ores are that the minerals of interest are concentrated, sometimes to very high levels (50% or more of total material), though increasingly lower-grade ores (1% concentration or lower) are utilised. This means that you've got to move 99 units of mass for every unit of primary mineral extracted (overburden).
Even very large human formations are small by geological standards. The World Trade Centre towers contained about 200,000 tonnes of steel. That's a lot for humans, but a minuscule amount on a geological scale. (https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2004/EricChen.shtml)
Current iron ore extraction is on the order of about 2.5 billion tons/year. That's roughly 1/3 ton per person on Earth.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-worlds-metals-and-m...
Vaclav Smil's Making the Modern World goes into depth on material use in contemporary civilisation:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/making-the-modern-world-mater...
(After water and oil, sand and gravel are our most-used material, then concrete and iron/steel.)
Without the easy energy source to bootstrap their tech, they may not get anywhere near having to consider that problem. They might not even make it to figuring out steel.
Is it possible for intelligent alien life to arise on a world without any oil/gas/coal reserves (maybe they don’t have the equivalent of plankton, or maybe they do, but bacteria that could eat the plankton evolved much earlier)? If so, would they be forever trapped on their planet, never able to go through an Industrial Age and eventually achieve rocket flight? Maybe this is one explanation for why no aliens, so far.
This was the most interesting thing I learned when studying geology. More people should know about it.
It's a controversial claim and probably false, definitely don't repeat it unless you've personally verified with an expert.
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CO2 is mostly sequestered by reaction to form carbonates, not by reduction to biomass, but yes it will take a long time. In the intermediate it will dissolve into the deep ocean (mostly), but even that takes a while.
This reaction can also be accelerated by crushing basalts and other readily-available rocks to a fine sand/dust, and exposing that to the open air by spreading it over large areas of ground, such as fields or beaches. The process is not cheaper than other kinds of carbon sequestration, but it's definitely comparable and long-term sequestration of the carbon seems especially likely, since we're simply enhancing the existing geological carbon cycle.
Peridotites, in particular, with lots of olivine. Olivine weathers particularly quickly because its silicon atoms are in SiO4(4-) tetrahedra that are not covalently linked to each other (a "nesosilicate").
A problem with just spreading this out on beaches and the like is that these rocks are also often enriched in nickel vs. the average crustal rock, and this would release many millions of tonnes of nickel into the environment. There is some evidence that nickel release was part of the terrible events at the Permian-Triassic extinction. Nickel is crucial to the enzymes in the metabolic pathways leading to the production of methane in anaerobic environments. There's an idea that nickel injection into the oceans by fallout from the PT megaeruption in Siberia led to massive methane production.
A problem with just spreading this out on beaches and the like is that these rocks are also often enriched in nickel vs. the average crustal rock, and this would release many millions of tonnes of nickel into the environment. There is some evidence that nickel release was part of the terrible events at the Permian-Triassic extinction. Nickel is crucial to the enzymes in the metabolic pathways leading to the production of methane in anaerobic environments. There's an idea that nickel injection into the oceans by fallout from the PT megaeruption in Siberia led to massive methane production.
So projectvesta.org (if it ever comes to pass) might actually end up inadvertently releasing methane?
By chemical / geological processes, or as organic limestone (mostly shellfish / plankton skeleton) deposits?
Both? The calcium to make the limestone has to come from somewhere.
I'd consider that biological origin, if not primarily then through an obligate mechanism.
Also worth to point out Earthly life existed for millions of years with that CO2 unsequestered ;)
Is it really worth pointing this out? Why?
This is (mostly) a non-sequitur to any modern discussion about climate, the atmosphere, and its effects on human life and civilization.
Life, at this point is used to a particular equilibrium. Sure, life has existed at different equilibriums. But we also know when those equilibriums are massively disturbed (via a great oxygenation event, massive asteroid, major volcanic eruptions, etc.) much of the life dies out (obviously depends on the intensity of the disruption) and it takes many years for life to adjust to and make a new equilibrium.
Humanity should be deeply concerned with how deeply we have disrupted the equilibrium, as this disrupts the world and biosphere that sustains us.
It might be useful if you're building an argument that humanity will be better off after the current mass extinction event is over. However, I tend to find this point more often leads to a George Carlin-esque cynicism and nihilism about earth being better off without humans (or human civilization) anyways.
This is (mostly) a non-sequitur to any modern discussion about climate, the atmosphere, and its effects on human life and civilization.
Life, at this point is used to a particular equilibrium. Sure, life has existed at different equilibriums. But we also know when those equilibriums are massively disturbed (via a great oxygenation event, massive asteroid, major volcanic eruptions, etc.) much of the life dies out (obviously depends on the intensity of the disruption) and it takes many years for life to adjust to and make a new equilibrium.
Humanity should be deeply concerned with how deeply we have disrupted the equilibrium, as this disrupts the world and biosphere that sustains us.
It might be useful if you're building an argument that humanity will be better off after the current mass extinction event is over. However, I tend to find this point more often leads to a George Carlin-esque cynicism and nihilism about earth being better off without humans (or human civilization) anyways.
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The atmospheric CO2 is not a that slow sequestering process. It has varied considerably over much shorter time periods than “millions of years”.
“Carbon dioxide concentrations have varied widely over the Earth's 4.54 billion year history.”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_...
“Carbon dioxide concentrations have varied widely over the Earth's 4.54 billion year history.”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_...
I guess you don't understand what "sequestering" means.
Sequestering is a process where carbon becomes unavailable for biological processes.
So you have carbon circulating (present in biomass, returned to atmosphere, then back to biomass, etc.) and you have carbon that is not available for circulation.
Carbon in atmosphere is part of circulation. When a supervolcano erupts and emits a bunch of CO2, this adds carbon to atmosphere but then that carbon may very quickly be bound in biomass (for example algae, forests, etc.) This doesn't mean it is sequestered. The algae can die and ferment and forests can burn, releasing CO2 back to atmosphere.
Earth has ability to very quickly bind large amounts of CO2 from atmosphere, true.
But it does not have ability to sequester it, because as long as the carbon is present in biomass, that biomass can burn or rot and change to methane/CO2.
Current coal, oil and gas deposits are due to the fact that at early stages of evolution there was no bacteria that could process some parts of biomass. For example, plants rather than rot would just be covered with more plants and become coal deposits.
Today, it is not possible to form new coal or oil deposits, because any biomass would be quickly digested/fermented/rotted before it could be sequestered.
Sequestering is a process where carbon becomes unavailable for biological processes.
So you have carbon circulating (present in biomass, returned to atmosphere, then back to biomass, etc.) and you have carbon that is not available for circulation.
Carbon in atmosphere is part of circulation. When a supervolcano erupts and emits a bunch of CO2, this adds carbon to atmosphere but then that carbon may very quickly be bound in biomass (for example algae, forests, etc.) This doesn't mean it is sequestered. The algae can die and ferment and forests can burn, releasing CO2 back to atmosphere.
Earth has ability to very quickly bind large amounts of CO2 from atmosphere, true.
But it does not have ability to sequester it, because as long as the carbon is present in biomass, that biomass can burn or rot and change to methane/CO2.
Current coal, oil and gas deposits are due to the fact that at early stages of evolution there was no bacteria that could process some parts of biomass. For example, plants rather than rot would just be covered with more plants and become coal deposits.
Today, it is not possible to form new coal or oil deposits, because any biomass would be quickly digested/fermented/rotted before it could be sequestered.
The pre-bacteria theory is pretty shaky fyi. There is evidence for relevant biomass-degrading bacteria being ubiquitous at the times of coal/oil formation. A more plausible theory imo is that geological conditions in the paleozoec/mesozoeic era lent themselves to greater fossil fuel formation - greater tectonic activity alone would produce the flooding and interment processes necessary to push significant volumes of biomass down to fuel the process.
For a significant mass of biomass to be pushed down it first needs to be present.
Have you ever been in a coal mine?
Coal deposits can be very thick and can consist of practically pure coal with very little anything else.
Our densest forests if suddenly "pushed" (I guess covered by ash or anything else, without loosing carbon) would be millimeters in width.
Have you ever been in a coal mine?
Coal deposits can be very thick and can consist of practically pure coal with very little anything else.
Our densest forests if suddenly "pushed" (I guess covered by ash or anything else, without loosing carbon) would be millimeters in width.
So why can't peat deposits turn into coal under the right conditions? Those form all the time under certain conditions, but they can sequester a fair amount of biomass.
AFAIU they can, but it takes a very long time, as well as depth, pressure, and temperature.
(Not my area of expertise.)
(Not my area of expertise.)
I'm unclear on how this supports a theory of pre-bacterial formation.
Yes I've been in a coal mine. What a strange stat check.
Yes I've been in a coal mine. What a strange stat check.
There's a fairly large amount of biomass that does get sequestered. Bogs, swamps, and tundra are particularly prone to this, and peat is effectively a low-grade coal (it played a major role in the development of Holland as well).
There is a huge amount of sequestered carbon in such landforms. I don't know how that compares with primordial carbon formations.
One factor that seems to have been significant in the formation of the coal belt that runs from the present-day Czech republic through Germany, France, northern Spain, England, and the Apallachians is that this was a region of forest and/or swampland adjacent to mountains (the Appalachians, which are literally older than dirt), with the swamps sinking rapidly into a shallow seabed. That may also have played a major role in depriving the biomass of oxygen which would permit it to rot.
My own rampant speculation: even given decomposers capable of breaking down woody plant tissue, it's possible that these were insufficiently numerous, or inefficient, or otherwise limited, in ways that aren't currently relevant, such that decomposition is more efficient and rapid today.
Interesting questions. Unlikely to be answered by any of us here soon.
There is a huge amount of sequestered carbon in such landforms. I don't know how that compares with primordial carbon formations.
One factor that seems to have been significant in the formation of the coal belt that runs from the present-day Czech republic through Germany, France, northern Spain, England, and the Apallachians is that this was a region of forest and/or swampland adjacent to mountains (the Appalachians, which are literally older than dirt), with the swamps sinking rapidly into a shallow seabed. That may also have played a major role in depriving the biomass of oxygen which would permit it to rot.
My own rampant speculation: even given decomposers capable of breaking down woody plant tissue, it's possible that these were insufficiently numerous, or inefficient, or otherwise limited, in ways that aren't currently relevant, such that decomposition is more efficient and rapid today.
Interesting questions. Unlikely to be answered by any of us here soon.
Ok, I’ll acknowledge for a minute the hard reality that oil doesn’t come from dinosaurs.
Then I’ll continue to live my life like I still believe oil comes from dinosaurs.
Then I’ll continue to live my life like I still believe oil comes from dinosaurs.
Well, it does come from dinosaurs in a sense, in so far as the word stands for the ancient - which TFA acknowledges.
I think saying that oil comes from dinosaurs gets the relevant point across despite being technically incorrect. I'm not sure if there's a better way to communicate the same knowledge in such a succinct way to a child.
I think saying that oil comes from dinosaurs gets the relevant point across despite being technically incorrect. I'm not sure if there's a better way to communicate the same knowledge in such a succinct way to a child.
Is this actually a widespread belief held by adults? I think the first time I came across it expressed was in Airplane II - “Well, let's see: First, the Earth cooled. And then the dinosaurs came, but they got too big and fat, so they all died and they turned into oil.” - where, like, the naïveté of the statement is the joke, right?
So then when Pixar movies have an oil company called ‘Dinoco’ in them, I’d always assumed that’s as part of that same kind of knowing ‘obviously only a child believes oil comes from dinosaurs’ reference.
The idea that oil could be made from dinosaurs is just.. on its face, it’s not plausible, right? It can’t be something people are actually taught. Please.
So then when Pixar movies have an oil company called ‘Dinoco’ in them, I’d always assumed that’s as part of that same kind of knowing ‘obviously only a child believes oil comes from dinosaurs’ reference.
The idea that oil could be made from dinosaurs is just.. on its face, it’s not plausible, right? It can’t be something people are actually taught. Please.
I know I thought oil was decomposed+compressed dinosaur, though I have no idea where that belief came from. Memes are powerful.
I've always thought oil came from dinosaurs, and had no idea about the plankton connection until this article.
In other words, I woke up this morning "knowing" that oil came from dinosaurs, and I will go to bed tonight knowing it came from plankton.
I'm 63.
In other words, I woke up this morning "knowing" that oil came from dinosaurs, and I will go to bed tonight knowing it came from plankton.
I'm 63.
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If you ever come to doubt the power of advertising, just remember Sinclair.
I suspect it's a combination of advertising and marketing materials (e.g., educational videos, comic books), many produced by the oil industry itself, which promoted the meme.
Sinclair Oil's mascot, dating to 1932, was a factor. I looked through Google Books with some date-ranged searches for "dinosaur" and "oil" or "petroleum". That excludes the video and comic-book evidence, but what seems to show up, even in congressional testimony, are references (mostly tongue-in-cheek) beginning in the 1970s. Given the archive's limited scope, I suspect that the concept could have been picking up in the 1960s or 1950s. Note that this corresponds largely with the widespread adoption of television, which goes in hand with simplified and infantalised messaging through both advertising and mainstream programming.
But the notion was definitely "in the air" as of the early 1970s.
Airplane II was released (or escaped) in 1982.
Sinclair Oil's mascot, dating to 1932, was a factor. I looked through Google Books with some date-ranged searches for "dinosaur" and "oil" or "petroleum". That excludes the video and comic-book evidence, but what seems to show up, even in congressional testimony, are references (mostly tongue-in-cheek) beginning in the 1970s. Given the archive's limited scope, I suspect that the concept could have been picking up in the 1960s or 1950s. Note that this corresponds largely with the widespread adoption of television, which goes in hand with simplified and infantalised messaging through both advertising and mainstream programming.
But the notion was definitely "in the air" as of the early 1970s.
Airplane II was released (or escaped) in 1982.
I think it is less about the myth being taught, and more about the truth not being taught.
I know I assumed Fossil Fuel = meant the fuel came from fossils, and the first thing that comes to mind when I hear "fossils" is dinosaurs.
I just never thought to look further than that.
I know I assumed Fossil Fuel = meant the fuel came from fossils, and the first thing that comes to mind when I hear "fossils" is dinosaurs.
I just never thought to look further than that.
It turns out that a fossil isn't "a thing turned to stone", but rather, "a thing dug up". I'd not realised this until earlier today myself.
Fossil fuels are fuels that are dug from the ground, rather than harvested from plants (as with wood or olive oil ... itself the original "oil") or animals (as with animal fats and oils).
https://www.etymonline.com/word/fossil
Oil indeed comes from olive: https://www.etymonline.com/word/oil
Coal is a piece of wood: https://www.etymonline.com/word/coal
Carbon is from coal: https://www.etymonline.com/word/carbon
Effectively, the word fossil has done something of an orbit such that an attribute used to describe an object ("dug up" -> petrified remains of plants and animals) came to be ascribed to the word itself, such that "fossil fuels" comes to be popularly interpreted as "remains of ancient plants ... or animals" rather than "dug up fuels".
Fossil fuels are fuels that are dug from the ground, rather than harvested from plants (as with wood or olive oil ... itself the original "oil") or animals (as with animal fats and oils).
https://www.etymonline.com/word/fossil
Oil indeed comes from olive: https://www.etymonline.com/word/oil
Coal is a piece of wood: https://www.etymonline.com/word/coal
Carbon is from coal: https://www.etymonline.com/word/carbon
Effectively, the word fossil has done something of an orbit such that an attribute used to describe an object ("dug up" -> petrified remains of plants and animals) came to be ascribed to the word itself, such that "fossil fuels" comes to be popularly interpreted as "remains of ancient plants ... or animals" rather than "dug up fuels".
I wonder if this is it - kids making logical inferences to connect ideas in school, and not being given quite enough information to realize there’s a gap there. And then they think that that’s ‘what they were taught’, even if no teacher or textbook ever actually joined those dots up.
Similarly, I think a lot of people think dinosaur fossils are all dinosaurs who died when they went extinct, because if fossils are dead dinosaurs, and dinosaurs are famous for dying out, those must be connected, right?
Whereas of course dinosaurs had actually been dying (and starting on their way to being fossils) for millions of years before the extinction event which… actually stopped them from dying any more.
Similarly, I think a lot of people think dinosaur fossils are all dinosaurs who died when they went extinct, because if fossils are dead dinosaurs, and dinosaurs are famous for dying out, those must be connected, right?
Whereas of course dinosaurs had actually been dying (and starting on their way to being fossils) for millions of years before the extinction event which… actually stopped them from dying any more.
I mean, even the simplified answer of coal coming from ancient plant matter and oil from ancient animal matter doesn't do much to dispel the myth.
I hadn't given it much thought before, but when I saw the title on hacker news I clicked on it in order to learn what the answer was, haha. I'm generally good at math / physics / engineering, but much worse at chem / bio / wherever-you-learn-about-oil (i guess geology?). All this to say that I bet there are many adults who "believe" it, but maybe they just haven't thought much about oil.
I think your message was truly sincere surprise and I didn't find it rude, but it reminds me a bit of this article which I've found very useful in my personal life: https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/04/27/no-feigning-surprise/
I think your message was truly sincere surprise and I didn't find it rude, but it reminds me a bit of this article which I've found very useful in my personal life: https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/04/27/no-feigning-surprise/
Sinclair oil has a dinosaur logo.
Is Sinclair oil a famous brand? Where I grew up there was a lot of Shell oil petrol stations but I never got the impression oil came from crustaceans.
That's because a shell isn't a crustacean, it's a mollusc.
I'm wondering the same thing. I find it incredible that anyone thinks this, but I've never actually asked an adult (or child for that matter) where they think oil comes from. I might ask the girlfriend tomorrow.
The older I get (and the more time I spend on HN), the more I realise that the world is a very different place from what I (and the majority of people - it seems), have been led to believe.
Lies (told) to children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children
Also Wittgenstein's Ladder:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein%27s_ladder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children
Also Wittgenstein's Ladder:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein%27s_ladder
Biologists were surprised to discover giant tube worms living independently of photosynthesis on the deep sea floor. There's much we don't know about the Earth's ecosystems. Particularly of interest will be the possibility of intraterrestrial ecosystems, deep within the Earth.
>"The biomass of these intraterrestrial organisms may be equal to the total weight of all marine and terrestrial plants."
These observations may not fall in line with the current Malthusian, apocalyptic rationales. The phrase "fossil fuels" seems loaded from this perspective. Our knowledge of the natural world is constantly evolving. Making all-encompassing declarative statements might make sense in some situations, but it also makes sense to question them.
https://academic.oup.com/femsle/article/185/1/9/485798
http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=5412
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riftia_pachyptila
https://phys.org/news/2019-04-rewriting-textbook-fossil-fuel...
>"The biomass of these intraterrestrial organisms may be equal to the total weight of all marine and terrestrial plants."
These observations may not fall in line with the current Malthusian, apocalyptic rationales. The phrase "fossil fuels" seems loaded from this perspective. Our knowledge of the natural world is constantly evolving. Making all-encompassing declarative statements might make sense in some situations, but it also makes sense to question them.
https://academic.oup.com/femsle/article/185/1/9/485798
http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=5412
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riftia_pachyptila
https://phys.org/news/2019-04-rewriting-textbook-fossil-fuel...
For a long time, I believed this myth - might have heard it on TV as a kid. Then one day while reading about the possibilities of intelligent life on other planets - I wondered how far we (humans) would have got technologically without oil or similar fuels, which "I thought" were a result of dead dinosaurs and a extinction level event. That is when I looked up and found the correct answer.
I always thought the term fossil fuel came from Latin fossa, or ditch, trench. Coal being an exemplar.
This probably ended up with its cognate fossil, an item, usually of historical value, dug up from a ditch. Since dinosaurs are represented by fossils, people put the two together.
This probably ended up with its cognate fossil, an item, usually of historical value, dug up from a ditch. Since dinosaurs are represented by fossils, people put the two together.
I believe some of the outer planets or their moons are made of methane of have loads of methane on them.
So if without life there they have so much hydrocarbons, why then do we need to believe that our hydrocarbons come from the remains of some dead creatures, whether plankton or dinosaurs?
So if without life there they have so much hydrocarbons, why then do we need to believe that our hydrocarbons come from the remains of some dead creatures, whether plankton or dinosaurs?
In the case of coal, we find the fossils of ancient ferns and trees in the coal itself.
In the case of oil, the sediments in which deposits are found, the fossils within those deposits, and the chemistry of the oil, all point to biotic rather than abiotic origin.
The paper I've linked in my earlier comment has far more detail and further references: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28105383
Yes, it's possible for hydrocarbons to form by other means. However there's vanishingly little physical evidence to suggest that that is what's actually happened.
Retrosplaining terrestrial hydrocarbon deposits based on remote observation, and one short-lived lander on an outer-solar-system moon (the Huygens probe on Titan, with very limited chemical sensig capabilities) in a hand-wavy attempt to invalidate several centuries of direct terrestrial experience with coal, oil, and gas geology is not exceptionally convincing.
In the case of oil, the sediments in which deposits are found, the fossils within those deposits, and the chemistry of the oil, all point to biotic rather than abiotic origin.
The paper I've linked in my earlier comment has far more detail and further references: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28105383
Yes, it's possible for hydrocarbons to form by other means. However there's vanishingly little physical evidence to suggest that that is what's actually happened.
Retrosplaining terrestrial hydrocarbon deposits based on remote observation, and one short-lived lander on an outer-solar-system moon (the Huygens probe on Titan, with very limited chemical sensig capabilities) in a hand-wavy attempt to invalidate several centuries of direct terrestrial experience with coal, oil, and gas geology is not exceptionally convincing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
Thomas Gold in the “Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels” explores the idea in depth.
It’s not quite a crank theory (I think Gold has a legit academic publication history) but it kind of teeters on the edge. It’s one of those ones I’d like to believe, because it turns much of what we think we know on it’s ear. But a sober look at the evidence makes it seem pretty unlikely.
Thomas Gold in the “Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels” explores the idea in depth.
It’s not quite a crank theory (I think Gold has a legit academic publication history) but it kind of teeters on the edge. It’s one of those ones I’d like to believe, because it turns much of what we think we know on it’s ear. But a sober look at the evidence makes it seem pretty unlikely.
I mean those other places also don't have oxygen rich environments though either that consume and destroy hydrocarbons or life forms (that we know of) to catalyze and consume it. If they both existed in the same environment with any abundance they would quickly (geologically) destroy each other until one was nearly depleted. If hydrocarbons on earth weren't buried under tons of rock to keep oxygen and life away it wouldn't exist in meaningful amounts, and much of it got buried in oxygenless enviroments because of life itself. Keep in mind the Earth has had atleast a billion years of time just oxidizing all the elements and chemicals anywhere near or on the surface of the earth or oceans.
Cui bono? Perhaps there are political motives?
Of course it does. When was the last time you heard a squeaky dinosaur?
Just for anyone else scanning for the TLDR reminder of what I probably should have remembered from 8th grade science... Im totally going to take the author's advice and buy my kid some plastic plankton toys :^p
> But if fossil fuel does not come from dinosaurs, then where does it come from? Plankton. That’s right. Petroleum does not originate with the Earth’s largest organisms; it begins with its smallest. Most of the biomass in any ecosystem is contained within the bodies of its humblest members, the ones way down near the base of the food chain. In the oceans, that’s phytoplankton, also known as microalgae. These microscopic organisms, mostly diatoms and dinoflagellates, are wondrously able to turn starlight into food. Through photosynthesis, they produce proteins, fats, and carbohydrates — complex carbon-based molecules. Like most tiny organisms, their generations turn over rapidly. When they expire, their minuscule bodies rain down upon the sea floor, where they form organic oozes that may be miles thick. If these biogenic deposits are buried by younger sediments, and cooked by heat and pressure in just the right way, oil and natural gas may form.
> Taking the long view, petroleum is really a type of solar energy. That may sound nice, but it’s not innocuous. When we burn it, we take carbon from another age, sequestered by ancient plankton, and dump it into today’s atmosphere. There, it traps heat, causes global warming, and acidifies the oceans. In a sense, we’re adding the power of the ancient Mesozoic Sun to today’s Sun, and it’s overheating our planet.
> I’m sure this won’t come as a shock, but don’t believe everything you read on the Internet. Dinosaur toys are not made from dinos, but they are made from dinoflagellates that used starlight from another era to stitch together the carbon-based molecules that today we turn into plastic. A quick search revealed that there are actually plastic plankton toys available online, plastic plankton toys made of — plankton.
> But if fossil fuel does not come from dinosaurs, then where does it come from? Plankton. That’s right. Petroleum does not originate with the Earth’s largest organisms; it begins with its smallest. Most of the biomass in any ecosystem is contained within the bodies of its humblest members, the ones way down near the base of the food chain. In the oceans, that’s phytoplankton, also known as microalgae. These microscopic organisms, mostly diatoms and dinoflagellates, are wondrously able to turn starlight into food. Through photosynthesis, they produce proteins, fats, and carbohydrates — complex carbon-based molecules. Like most tiny organisms, their generations turn over rapidly. When they expire, their minuscule bodies rain down upon the sea floor, where they form organic oozes that may be miles thick. If these biogenic deposits are buried by younger sediments, and cooked by heat and pressure in just the right way, oil and natural gas may form.
> Taking the long view, petroleum is really a type of solar energy. That may sound nice, but it’s not innocuous. When we burn it, we take carbon from another age, sequestered by ancient plankton, and dump it into today’s atmosphere. There, it traps heat, causes global warming, and acidifies the oceans. In a sense, we’re adding the power of the ancient Mesozoic Sun to today’s Sun, and it’s overheating our planet.
> I’m sure this won’t come as a shock, but don’t believe everything you read on the Internet. Dinosaur toys are not made from dinos, but they are made from dinoflagellates that used starlight from another era to stitch together the carbon-based molecules that today we turn into plastic. A quick search revealed that there are actually plastic plankton toys available online, plastic plankton toys made of — plankton.
There's a great XKCD "What If" about this. It answers the question "As plastic is made from oil and oil is made from dead dinosaurs, how much actual real dinosaur is there in a plastic dinosaur?"
https://what-if.xkcd.com/101/
https://what-if.xkcd.com/101/
This is the most striking proof that fossil fuels are causing global warming I have ever read: simple energy conservation thermodynamics principal. The fossil fuels store energy from the sun of ancient times. Think of them as batteries with high energy density. Combustion releases that energy in form of carbon that prevents a proportion from the energy coming from the sun from being reflected back into space as infrared waves. Basically it’s like releasing the heat (the energy) from the sun of ancient times and preventing it from escaping into space at the same time. Basically the earth has become a pressure cooker.
That’s not evidence of global warming, you’d have to prove the energy released is large enough and not radiated away / stored back in some other way.
Unfortunately global warming is real and there’s plenty of evidence for it. Your mechanism isn’t really the issue though, it’s the greenhouse gases trapping new energy from the sun which is the basic root cause.
Unfortunately global warming is real and there’s plenty of evidence for it. Your mechanism isn’t really the issue though, it’s the greenhouse gases trapping new energy from the sun which is the basic root cause.
It is interesting to consider just how much excess energy it would take to directly upset Earth's thermal balance. In 3001: The Final Odyssey, Arthur C Clarke predicted a thermal crisis caused by abundant free energy. Is it plausible?
Total solar insolation is in the region of 1.8x10^17 W, which is some 10,000 times greater than the total energy use of humanity. This is not so far out when you consider our exponential energy use over the past few centuries! If growth does not slow (which it must), we could expect to use that much energy in about 4 more centuries.
But we could expect to hit problems before then. What percentage of disruption to Earth's energy budget leads to visible effect? Our current imbalance due to greenhouse gases amounts to roughly 1 Watt per square meter, or 0.1%. At our current rate of growth we'll reach that in a mere century! So even if we switch entirely over to nuclear power starting today, and continue along our merry way safe in the knowledge that we're producing no greenhouse gases, in 100 years we'll have a similar warming problem from energy alone.
Total solar insolation is in the region of 1.8x10^17 W, which is some 10,000 times greater than the total energy use of humanity. This is not so far out when you consider our exponential energy use over the past few centuries! If growth does not slow (which it must), we could expect to use that much energy in about 4 more centuries.
But we could expect to hit problems before then. What percentage of disruption to Earth's energy budget leads to visible effect? Our current imbalance due to greenhouse gases amounts to roughly 1 Watt per square meter, or 0.1%. At our current rate of growth we'll reach that in a mere century! So even if we switch entirely over to nuclear power starting today, and continue along our merry way safe in the knowledge that we're producing no greenhouse gases, in 100 years we'll have a similar warming problem from energy alone.
Isaac Arthur on YouTube talks about this quite a bit.
Given limitless cheap energy like nuclear fusion, the ultimate limit on human population is not land or water but the waste heat that we generate. We're very far from that being an issue today, but in some dystopian future where we turn earth into Coruscant, that could be a thing.
I hope instead we stabilize our population or move to settlements in orbit. I'd like to see the land we currently use for food to be rewilded in a world where we can grow food in orbit and in vertical farms / artificial food factories. It would be nice if future humans mostly lived in cities or space habitats and the earth mostly went back to nature.
Given limitless cheap energy like nuclear fusion, the ultimate limit on human population is not land or water but the waste heat that we generate. We're very far from that being an issue today, but in some dystopian future where we turn earth into Coruscant, that could be a thing.
I hope instead we stabilize our population or move to settlements in orbit. I'd like to see the land we currently use for food to be rewilded in a world where we can grow food in orbit and in vertical farms / artificial food factories. It would be nice if future humans mostly lived in cities or space habitats and the earth mostly went back to nature.
You might be interested in the book “ethnobotany: people, plants, and culture” to learn why leaving nature alone is not the best option, that biodiversity and rich ecosystems can come from human interference - weeding plants that are taking over, spreading seeds of food and medicine, intentionally building the soil - after a few thousand years you end up with the Amazon rain forest. It doesn’t happen on its own, humans are a part of it. To have this mind of leaving earth alone and even leaving it behind is leaving a lot of good food on the table, I wouldn’t want to live among the factory farms in space.
I don't buy that the Amazon is meaningfully a consequence of human activity. The sheer biodiversity on display is not something I can imagine evolving in just a few thousand years.
The Amazon is much older than humans in South America. I don't buy this theory either.
I’m probably being misleading since it’s not my field, but a quick Google suggests that the forest has changed over the past few thousand years - I didn’t mean to suggest that the forest wouldn’t be there without us, but that the ecosystem is richer and more complex because of our interference.
Just one source that talks about the changes over the past couple thousand years:
"These indigenous systems were highly sophisticated...There are over 80 domesticated or semi-domesticated crops in the Amazon," he said. "In Europe at the time they were working with about six."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-amazon-idUSKB...
Just one source that talks about the changes over the past couple thousand years:
"These indigenous systems were highly sophisticated...There are over 80 domesticated or semi-domesticated crops in the Amazon," he said. "In Europe at the time they were working with about six."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-amazon-idUSKB...
Melanesians actually sort of farmed wild plants contemporary to the invention of agriculture elsewhere
I don't know if 100 years is "very far". It's not implausible that someone develops a practical fusion plant this decade, and at that point we're well on our way. We don't even need to turn the planet into Coruscant - by the maths I just spelled out, we're only a factor of 10 away from noticeable warming! A bit more population growth, a few lifestyle upgrades for the global south, and we're there.
Yes, that's closer than I thought.
We may well need to deploy configurable sunshade at the earth - sun Lagrange point or something similarly drastic to keep the climate in a hospitable band.
We may well need to deploy configurable sunshade at the earth - sun Lagrange point or something similarly drastic to keep the climate in a hospitable band.
Im skeptical that fusion will be a silver bullet for our problems. While I agree that producing lots of clean energy is the solution we need for many things, im not sure fusion is going to scale very easy when it is becomes practical for power generation. The sun is only producing thermal power per volume equivalent to a pile of manure, so even if we manage to increase that an order of magnitude, we will need an astronomical amount of plants and infrastructure to make it a primary energy source. And with such scales needed, we could have already done the same thing using other sources including fission.
Right, the point was simply to provide a plausible mechanism by which we could continue to increase our energy consumption exponentially, for the sake of argument. The thought experiment of "global warming from pure energy expenditure" doesn't work if the energy source is solar, because that energy offsets insolation.
I'm not particularly bullish on fusion power, though we can dream.
I'm not particularly bullish on fusion power, though we can dream.
True .. but if we could just shoot excessive heat off into space no? Like a few city scale central heating / cooling systems that radiated into space.
Unfortunately not. All waste heat is already radiated into space, and there's no way to make it go faster. Heat always flows from hot places to cold places, unless you put energy in - so we can't gather all of our waste heat into one place for disposal, without creating more waste heat. It's the second law of thermodynamics, I'm afraid.
Even though GP's mechanism doesn't explain global warming, it does explain the nigh-impossibility of developing technology that can carbon-capture us out of this mess.
Biomass is basically solar-powered carbon sequestration.
If each year of fossil fuel consumption corresponds to the energy of 400 years of biomass, and we've been burning "too many" fossil fuels for 50 years, then to get out of this mess we would have to cover 50x400 = 20,000 Earth's with solar panels hooked up to carbon capture machines.
It's way worse, if course, because photosynthesis is more efficient than solar panels, and there's inefficiencies in carbon capture, but you get the idea!
We've used up way, way, WAY too much energy making tiny explosions and now we have to undo each and every one of them.
Biomass is basically solar-powered carbon sequestration.
If each year of fossil fuel consumption corresponds to the energy of 400 years of biomass, and we've been burning "too many" fossil fuels for 50 years, then to get out of this mess we would have to cover 50x400 = 20,000 Earth's with solar panels hooked up to carbon capture machines.
It's way worse, if course, because photosynthesis is more efficient than solar panels, and there's inefficiencies in carbon capture, but you get the idea!
We've used up way, way, WAY too much energy making tiny explosions and now we have to undo each and every one of them.
Your example incorrectly assumes the entire solar constant went toward carbon sequestration and this is obviously not the case.
The overall energy efficiency of the natural photosynthesis to sequestered carbon process is not inherently more efficient than man-made alternatives. The efficiency of the PV cell is just one small factor.
A much more accurate way to calculate sequestration potentials is to measure their energy cost and multiply by available energy.
The overall energy efficiency of the natural photosynthesis to sequestered carbon process is not inherently more efficient than man-made alternatives. The efficiency of the PV cell is just one small factor.
A much more accurate way to calculate sequestration potentials is to measure their energy cost and multiply by available energy.
It's just a Fermi estimate. Feel free to multiply/divide by ten (or even 100!) in either direction. The main point is that we're not going to carbon capture our way out of this--at least not with anything resembling modern technology.
But your estimate is demonstrably off by at least a factor of ten thousand.
The thrust of this paper is that it takes 90 tons of ancient biomass to result in 1 gallon of gasoline. This is a reduction of 30,000 to 1. This is the opposite of an efficient system. The vast majority of solar input and related carbon captured from the atmosphere by ancient plant matter is not being utilized by modern fossil fuel systems.
The point of this paper is that the ancient photosynthesis to fossil fuels process is incredibly inefficient. The "400 years" isn't indicative of the energy we're consuming today -- it's indicative of the extremely low percentage of solar energy that ends up captured inside fossil fuels.
We absolutely can carbon capture our way out of this. Again, you can do some pretty basic math on known sequestration techniques to disprove your conclusion.
The thrust of this paper is that it takes 90 tons of ancient biomass to result in 1 gallon of gasoline. This is a reduction of 30,000 to 1. This is the opposite of an efficient system. The vast majority of solar input and related carbon captured from the atmosphere by ancient plant matter is not being utilized by modern fossil fuel systems.
The point of this paper is that the ancient photosynthesis to fossil fuels process is incredibly inefficient. The "400 years" isn't indicative of the energy we're consuming today -- it's indicative of the extremely low percentage of solar energy that ends up captured inside fossil fuels.
We absolutely can carbon capture our way out of this. Again, you can do some pretty basic math on known sequestration techniques to disprove your conclusion.
I'd put my money on directly modulating incoming solar radiation instead
From the first time I saw the animations of the planned Starlink fleet, I started wondering if one could use a satelite fleet to manage incoming solar radiation.
I've commented about it a few times before.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18474244
From the first time I saw the animations of the planned Starlink fleet, I started wondering if one could use a satelite fleet to manage incoming solar radiation.
I've commented about it a few times before.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18474244
Exactly what I was saying. Some of the those greenhouse gases is coming from fossil fuel combustion.
The direct heat contribution from combustion is minuscule.
There are some regulators at play too. Higher carbon+heat leads to better conditions for plant, which absorbs carbon and generates swamp... Which will be pulled underground to make more oil. We have overwhelmed such systems but they can correct our actions if given time.
Also higher carbon and heat seem to cause the ice caps and the glaciers to melt down faster than plants can absorb the excess heat. You could also say that it’s a regulator but I’m not sure it’s good the humanity in any way.
And more and warmer oceans provide more space for plankton to eat carbon. Nature almost always a regulatory process at the ready. The question is only its capacity.
Sure life will adapt or change or not. But I am not sure we will. We have now reached the point where we can stop using fossil fuels and dumping carbon into the atmosphere.
I am sure the earth will have time to adjust but not « us ». That was my understanding of the phenomenon at play. I may be wrong but it don’t understand the downvote. My comment wasn’t political.
Definitely a myth in English speaking countries, that's the first time I read that :-o
How sleep
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Wow! I never knew this
Another similar myth is that the air we breathe comes from trees.
2/3 of the air we breath also comes from plankton.
Trees are mostly net zero in regards to oxygen. What they release during their lifetime they take back when they die and decay.
2/3 of the air we breath also comes from plankton.
Trees are mostly net zero in regards to oxygen. What they release during their lifetime they take back when they die and decay.
I think it's a bit odd to call this "net zero".
If there are more trees, there's more oxygen.
Sure, if a tree dies this is eventually reverted but it also makes room for a new tree (unless humanity claims the land).
If there are more trees, there's more oxygen.
Sure, if a tree dies this is eventually reverted but it also makes room for a new tree (unless humanity claims the land).
All of these myths I learned in school make me think it was an even bigger waste of time than I originally though.
Our public education in the U.S. is a travesty. There's really no incentive to remain up-to-date on information, and it seems to be getting worse.
An educator suggests[1], in the context of preK science education, that students have a human right to make sense of their world "now". That's very not the focus of current science education content. PreK-13. But what if were? What might that look like?
Status quo is students being told the Sun is yellow, from preK on through to the most common intro astronomy college textbooks, with only a few of them getting an "oops, nope, our bad" decades later, in astronomy graduate school discussion of common misconceptions in astronomy education. We've known Sun color for a century, had detailed limb darkening and tint numbers for decades, and now years of intensive effort on stellar atmospheres in support of occultation and exoplanet work. Also years of hemispherical-camera daytime-sky surveys. And science education content manages to remain decoupled from all of that.
A startup pivoted from supporting learning of English in Japan, because the market there turned out to be for performance on English proficiency exams, not for English fluency. And a teacher remarked that it seemed the societal objective was English accessibility for work, while avoiding the fluency which could contaminate culture. Similarly, an truly excellent briefing on biology would necessarily be pervasively steeped in evolution... and thus be less than entirely welcome in the US. Not that Europe or Russia, or China, India, or Brasil, have incentivized its creation either. It seems neither the science research nor science education communities are set up to pursue it.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Larimore+Vision+2020
Status quo is students being told the Sun is yellow, from preK on through to the most common intro astronomy college textbooks, with only a few of them getting an "oops, nope, our bad" decades later, in astronomy graduate school discussion of common misconceptions in astronomy education. We've known Sun color for a century, had detailed limb darkening and tint numbers for decades, and now years of intensive effort on stellar atmospheres in support of occultation and exoplanet work. Also years of hemispherical-camera daytime-sky surveys. And science education content manages to remain decoupled from all of that.
A startup pivoted from supporting learning of English in Japan, because the market there turned out to be for performance on English proficiency exams, not for English fluency. And a teacher remarked that it seemed the societal objective was English accessibility for work, while avoiding the fluency which could contaminate culture. Similarly, an truly excellent briefing on biology would necessarily be pervasively steeped in evolution... and thus be less than entirely welcome in the US. Not that Europe or Russia, or China, India, or Brasil, have incentivized its creation either. It seems neither the science research nor science education communities are set up to pursue it.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Larimore+Vision+2020
This is precisely my thoughts, as I scroll through the comments - jaw on the floor.
The roles played by education are ... an interesting topic. It's not a complete waste, but motives must be understood. True education belongs when you become self-motivated to learn (and hopefully don't fall prey to the numerous other pitfalls which exist).
First, the universities were given the task of providing an unceasing supply of ideologically correct candidates for vital positions in government, church, and business. The state was able to make the faculties of the "venerable institutions" of higher education, or rather indoctrination, assume this duty because it controlled appointments and held the purse from which "emoluments" flowed into the coffers of academics. Hence the members of the university "hierarchy" made it their "business, the business for which they ... [were] paid," to "uphold certain political as well as religious opinions," namely those of the "ruling powers of the state" (J.S. Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays, p. 429 (1981), J.S. Mill, Journals and Debating Speeches, p. 350. (1988) ). Thus the universities pursued with vigor their assignment to inculcate in their students those political and ideological views that were cherished by the power elite. The graduates of the ancient universities were, therefore, well prepared for employment in, and by, those institutions that were instrumental in perpetuating the existing maldistribution of income. All of this might come to naught, however, if the masses of the underclass should achieve anything approaching success in potential attempts at throwing off their fetters.
The state devised a second educational strategy in order to prevent such a calamity from occurring. According to Mill, the "elementary schools for children of the working classes" were given the task of ensuring that the poor would continue to accept docilely their dismal station in life. It was very easy for the state to force the public schools to assume this role. It did so simply by failing malignantly to allocate sufficient funds for the operations of what Mill identified contemptuously as "places called schools" (J.S. Mill, Essays on England, Ireland, and the Empire, p.200; emphasis in original).
See: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00346760110081599
I've discussed this earlier and in more depth here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x7u6a/on_the_...
First, the universities were given the task of providing an unceasing supply of ideologically correct candidates for vital positions in government, church, and business. The state was able to make the faculties of the "venerable institutions" of higher education, or rather indoctrination, assume this duty because it controlled appointments and held the purse from which "emoluments" flowed into the coffers of academics. Hence the members of the university "hierarchy" made it their "business, the business for which they ... [were] paid," to "uphold certain political as well as religious opinions," namely those of the "ruling powers of the state" (J.S. Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays, p. 429 (1981), J.S. Mill, Journals and Debating Speeches, p. 350. (1988) ). Thus the universities pursued with vigor their assignment to inculcate in their students those political and ideological views that were cherished by the power elite. The graduates of the ancient universities were, therefore, well prepared for employment in, and by, those institutions that were instrumental in perpetuating the existing maldistribution of income. All of this might come to naught, however, if the masses of the underclass should achieve anything approaching success in potential attempts at throwing off their fetters.
The state devised a second educational strategy in order to prevent such a calamity from occurring. According to Mill, the "elementary schools for children of the working classes" were given the task of ensuring that the poor would continue to accept docilely their dismal station in life. It was very easy for the state to force the public schools to assume this role. It did so simply by failing malignantly to allocate sufficient funds for the operations of what Mill identified contemptuously as "places called schools" (J.S. Mill, Essays on England, Ireland, and the Empire, p.200; emphasis in original).
See: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00346760110081599
I've discussed this earlier and in more depth here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x7u6a/on_the_...
If by air you mean (di)oxygen, it kinda does come from the plants, but prehistoric ones rather than modern ones.
E.g. see [1] "The growth of these forests removed huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, leading to a surplus of oxygen."
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/carbonife...
E.g. see [1] "The growth of these forests removed huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, leading to a surplus of oxygen."
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/carbonife...
The timescale for O2 to be stripped from the atmosphere (by reaction with reduced chemicals exposed by erosion, weathering, and emitted from volcanoes) is only about 10 million years, so the current composition of the atmosphere is due to recent conditions, not ancient conditions.
There is an open question of why atmospheric O2 has been relatively stable (varied by a factor of several) in the Phanerozoic. This may just be anthropic selection: if it ever fell too far, higher life would have been wiped out, and we wouldn't be here. This has implications for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence: it might be that most life-bearing worlds suffocate themselves before ETs can evolve.
There is an open question of why atmospheric O2 has been relatively stable (varied by a factor of several) in the Phanerozoic. This may just be anthropic selection: if it ever fell too far, higher life would have been wiped out, and we wouldn't be here. This has implications for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence: it might be that most life-bearing worlds suffocate themselves before ETs can evolve.
Hum, I'd like to read more about this. I find hard to believe that the current atmospheric conditions are completely unrelated to the rise of oxygen attributed to photosynthesis, and that they can only be explained by anthropic selection (which is always a possible explanation anyway).
Oxygen has cycled many times through the crust and back out again since the GOE (or even since the Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event) so I don't see why you think any sort of "memory" of those ancient events would remain in the system.
Ok, I'm not saying that the exact same molecules of O2 from the GOE were preserved until today, rather that the presence of O2 in the atmosphere is related to the emergence of plants and photosynthesis. This is what I meant by "O2 comes from prehistoric plants".
For the record, the "memory" if you want to call it like this, would be the (unoxidized) carbon buried underground and/or segregated in the plants body.
For the record, the "memory" if you want to call it like this, would be the (unoxidized) carbon buried underground and/or segregated in the plants body.
There is unoxidized carbon buried underground, but the bulk of the Earth has vastly more reducing capacity than relatively piddling amounts of buried organic carbon. Fully oxidized, the Earth could consume orders of magnitude more oxygen than exists in the atmosphere. Simply oxidizing all the minerals in the crust down to a couple of hundred meters would use all the atmosphere's O2, and then there's thousands of kilometers of mantle loaded with ferrous iron and sulfides, and then the iron core.
I see, it's actually a bit scary. But if oxidation doesn't happen fast enough (no matter why) the O2 surplus can still be explained somewhat indirectly by the emergence of photosynthesis billions years ago. Or maybe by something else. Anyway, I finally got your point, interesting.
The atmosphere is like a leaky boat. Oxygen leaks out when rocks are eroded and weathered and when volcanoes release reduced gases, and burial of photosynthesized material pumps it back in. The troubling part is that there's no obvious reason why these two processes have to be balanced over periods much longer than the time constant of the system.
Yep, I've read somewhere that an enormous amount of oxygen came from rocks, and the Himalayas in particular.
What? That's not what I said at all. Erosion of mountains should itself be an O2 sink, not a source (although subsequent burial of organic matter as the eroded material reaches the ocean, and fertilization of plankton in the ocean by the material, could be an O2 source).
Sorry if I misunderstood, but you wrote
> Oxygen leaks out when rocks are eroded and weathered..
which is what I reinforced.
?
> Oxygen leaks out when rocks are eroded and weathered..
which is what I reinforced.
?
Coal does, it has plant fossils and sometimes even animals -
https://theconversation.com/coals-formation-is-a-window-on-a...
"A famous site at Nyrany in the Czech Republic was discovered because the director of the natural history museum there had coal delivered to heat his room. Splitting the coal sometimes yielded well-preserved fossils of early amphibians, so he could add scientifically significant specimens to his collections without leaving his office."
I'm surprised oil is plankton, not dinosaurs/dinosaur plants as the myth goes.
https://theconversation.com/coals-formation-is-a-window-on-a...
"A famous site at Nyrany in the Czech Republic was discovered because the director of the natural history museum there had coal delivered to heat his room. Splitting the coal sometimes yielded well-preserved fossils of early amphibians, so he could add scientifically significant specimens to his collections without leaving his office."
I'm surprised oil is plankton, not dinosaurs/dinosaur plants as the myth goes.
Oil comes from plants, plankton might eat said algae (phytoplankton would not be sufficient) but trees on land probably contributed as much. The problem obviously is that the process from plant to coal, oil and gas takes a long time so we're inevitably going into a wall of energy deficit that will impact everything.
Solar and wind are not solutions as plants are a solar panel and maintenance free battery in one, without any work required.
Nuclear (1.000.000.000x higher energy density than batteries) is our only hope/despair to have any chance at preserving this way of life for 8 billion people but it requires hydrocarbons to build and maintain.
Reduce your energy consumption as much as possible: no car, small house/appartement.
Work on meaningful digital solutions that scale without too much energy.
Quit everything else.
Solar and wind are not solutions as plants are a solar panel and maintenance free battery in one, without any work required.
Nuclear (1.000.000.000x higher energy density than batteries) is our only hope/despair to have any chance at preserving this way of life for 8 billion people but it requires hydrocarbons to build and maintain.
Reduce your energy consumption as much as possible: no car, small house/appartement.
Work on meaningful digital solutions that scale without too much energy.
Quit everything else.
With a rising population, on the order of several percent a year, reduced per-person energy consumption cannot do much. It can only delay the inevitable a decade or two. The answers are clean energy or a steadily reduced population. We are biologically adverse to the later, leaving green energy as the only option.
Green/clean energy does not exist. The only thing that has somewhat +/- zero impact is (edit: small scale) hydro. But hydro also requires hydrocarbons to build and maintain (don't forget the powerlines) and freshwater fish populations are impacted.
The population will go down to 1 billion from here, that much is inevitable. The question is how fast it goes down and how much people will suffer: we peaked our growth-rate in 1968: https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth
The population will go down to 1 billion from here, that much is inevitable. The question is how fast it goes down and how much people will suffer: we peaked our growth-rate in 1968: https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth
Hydro is far from green. Dams flood forest, which no longer absorbs co2 and further rots into methane.
Solar and wind likely are the solution. They are cheaper than nuclear and are improving much faster. Nuclear faces great obstacles to reaching a level that could power civilization (for example, breeding would likely be required, and breeder reactors have proven to be even more expensive than today's thermal burner reactors; breeders are also excellent sources of super-weapon grade fissionable material.)
The energy density argument for nuclear goes nowhere. It's not something any consumer cares about, nor is energy density a showstopper for renewables (except biomass, so don't base the renewable energy system on biomass).
The energy density argument for nuclear goes nowhere. It's not something any consumer cares about, nor is energy density a showstopper for renewables (except biomass, so don't base the renewable energy system on biomass).
Oil came mostly from plant matter, buried in the time of dinosaurs and prior and subjected to time and pressure. The biomass of plants exceeds the biomass of animals by as much as two orders of magnitude.
Not even from plants, from plankton.
“But if fossil fuel does not come from dinosaurs, then where does it come from? Plankton.”
Plankton is technically a plant since it does photosynthesis.
Phytoplankton is plants. Zooplankton is animals. Plankton is anything tiny that drifts in the ocean, not a single miracle species.
No. The main difference between grouping is that phytoplankton receives most of energy by environment(usually Sun) without consuming other plankton and zooplankton does exactly that - it consumes other plankton(both phytoplankton and zooplankton).
Phytoplankton does not belong to Plant kingdom and neither do Zooplankton to Animal kingdom. Some Zooplankton are animals, which is subbranch of Eukariota to which most zooplankton belongs. Some of phytoplankton, like cyanobacteria are not considered to belong to plant kingdom, also most of plankton are supergrouped together with plants where most of them are not plants, but also belong to Eukariota. TL;TR: Animals and Plants belong to Eukariota, to which belong all plankton - even if most of them does not belong neither to Plants nor Animals.
Phytoplankton does not belong to Plant kingdom and neither do Zooplankton to Animal kingdom. Some Zooplankton are animals, which is subbranch of Eukariota to which most zooplankton belongs. Some of phytoplankton, like cyanobacteria are not considered to belong to plant kingdom, also most of plankton are supergrouped together with plants where most of them are not plants, but also belong to Eukariota. TL;TR: Animals and Plants belong to Eukariota, to which belong all plankton - even if most of them does not belong neither to Plants nor Animals.
I was hoping for single miracle species.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoes_of_Life is highly recommended for another take on the subject.
I have this silly recurring feeling that the extiction of dinosaurs and climate change of today are somehow linked. As if there is an unsolved puzzle which also provides a solution. The gigantic sizes of prehistoric living creatures is the most puzzeling.
Is this a commonly held belief? I thought it was just a joke/fake news type of headline…
I heard this too and somehow just accepted it, even though I could not imagine how this should have happened. So during this major extinction event all the big dinosaurs just gathered in giant groups, fell over, then never really decomposed but got covered with something and turned into coal, oil and gas?
Plankton is new to me too though. I thought it was plants, which could not be fully digested by anything at the time, so they just broke down a bit and formed layer after layer, until other organisms caught up and started digesting them completely - so this sort of concentrated organic matter doesn't exist in upper layers.
Plankton is new to me too though. I thought it was plants, which could not be fully digested by anything at the time, so they just broke down a bit and formed layer after layer, until other organisms caught up and started digesting them completely - so this sort of concentrated organic matter doesn't exist in upper layers.
You're thinking of coal. There was a 60 million year period between the evolution of lignin (the key ingredient of wood, which allows plants to grow very tall) and the evolution of fungi which could break it down - so dead wood just stacked up, higher and higher. We call that period the Carboniferous, and almost all coal comes from then.
That may not actually be the case. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611/
There’s direct fossil evidence of fungal rot during the period, and that much lignin production without corresponding decay would have sucked all the CO2 out of the atmosphere in a few million years.
There’s direct fossil evidence of fungal rot during the period, and that much lignin production without corresponding decay would have sucked all the CO2 out of the atmosphere in a few million years.
Well, they did suck most of CO2 out of atmosphere and many times hundred of million years ago:
https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/
At no point on that chart does it go lower than about 200ppm.
Well, look again - some of the group of points reach right to 200ppm.
Equation of line has nothing to do with reaching 200ppm, as that is average - adapted to whole timeline. Would look completely different in a different scope.
Equation of line has nothing to do with reaching 200ppm, as that is average - adapted to whole timeline. Would look completely different in a different scope.
> Despite feedbacks with weathering rates, much smaller imbalances would have resulted in the complete removal of atmospheric CO2 in less than a million years. Without evidence of such dire consequences, lignin production in the absence of lignin decay for more than 100 million years into the early Permian is untenable.
The study addresses CO2 levels closely, as well as other significant pieces of evidence. I would tend to assume the peer reviewers at one of the world’s most prestigious journals thought to Google up historical CO2 levels.
The study addresses CO2 levels closely, as well as other significant pieces of evidence. I would tend to assume the peer reviewers at one of the world’s most prestigious journals thought to Google up historical CO2 levels.
The beauty of this piece is that it breaks down just how much primordeal biomass goes into producing the oil (and coal and gas) we burn today, and how much ancient time is represented in each present year of consumption. (It's millions.)
I've submitted this numerous times to HN with little uptake, most recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27827505