The German chemist Caspar Neumann coined the term “fossil fuel” in 1759, and opened the door for the false belief that petroleum was formed from the remains of dinosaurs. Today, the consensus is that petroleum and natural gas are actually formed from biomass – mostly plankton, decaying marine organisms and single celled bacteria. Petroleum was around for billions of years before the age of dinosaurs and, probably, continues to be formed today.
When oil began to be heavily used, particularly to power automobiles, predictions began to appear that oil supplies would soon be depleted. Every few years some government agency, chemist, geologist, Nobel laureate or other intellectual would conclude that the age of “fossil fuels” was at an end – that within a few decades, there would be no more petroleum. All the predictions have proven to be false as new oil deposits and more efficient techniques for the discovery and uses for oil are continually developed.
Petroleum is abundant on multiple continents. The issue today is that the deposits are difficult to access. But technology continues to make advances in location and extraction processes ensuring a constant supply. The reason so many predictions of depletion have failed to come to pass is that they are mostly based on calculations of known deposits. Its like people looking at a giant apple tree and assuming that once all the apples that have already fallen to ground are collected, there will be no more fruit. They fail to take into account that the tree itself is filled to the top with apples.
Scientists are mostly atheists and, thus, don’t acknowledge a profound spiritual truth – we live in an abundant Universe, on a planet of abundance.
Once people started looking at the sky with telescopes it did not take them long to start calculating just how many stars there were in the universe. They eventually concluded that there were about 100 billion stars. A big number, but still limited. Then in 1924 with a more advanced telescope, Edwin Hubble came to the astounding conclusion that many of the so-called stars out there were actually entire OTHER galaxies. It soon became apparent that the Universe was far larger than anyone had ever believed possible. Current estimates are of 400 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy alone, with, perhaps, hundreds of billions of other galaxies filled with billions of stars of their own. There are possibly trillions of stars in the Universe.
The Universe is abundant.
Until recently, people thought the Earth was unique in the Universe. Today, however, we believe that almost all the stars in the Universe have planetary systems of their own. And based on the vast number of stars, there could be billions and billions of Earth-like planets.
The Universe is abundant.
We also used to believe that water and a breathable atmosphere were unique to the Earth. It now appears that some form of air and water and other natural resources exist not just throughout our solar system but throughout the whole Universe. And with so many Earth-like planets out there, the possibility of life – even intelligent life – might also exist on millions of worlds.
The Universe is abundant.
We live on a planet of abundance. Our Earth will continue to supply all the needs of life as long as we manage our resources. While we require them, oil and petroleum products will continue to be found and found in profusion. Oil will not run out. Perhaps, there will come a time when we simply no longer need oil or want to use it – that, however, is a different issue.