Hi Lawry, A while ago you referred to: >> Recently, a most respected and technically qualified friend visited, and >> among the other ideas he laid on me was the following: >> Oil (petroleum) is not created by the decay of biomass over eons. It is >> created by some form of bacteria.
and I said I'd get back to you with some references. Well! It turns out the refs I had saved began with a piece about this sent to FUTUREWORK early in 1999 by Mike Hollinshead!! (He used to be there whenever needed.) He was interested in the responses to Thomas Gold's hypothesis as an example of "how science is really done". I imagine there is a thread of discussion in the FW archives, beginning with: Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 09:51:31 -0700 To: Futurework <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> From: Mike Hollinshead <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: How science is really done Mike gives this reference: Natural Gas and Oil Thomas Gold (January 1997) http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/usgs.html And Thomas Gold writes about his theory in his own book, *The Deep Hot Biosphere* (1999). Two other discussions (I haven't checked) are: D. Osborne, "The origin of petroleum," The Atlantic Monthly (February 1986), pp. 39-54. RA Kerr, "When a radical experiment goes bust," Science, 247 (1990), pp. 1177-1179. There is another discussion and an *interview* with Gold in *Wired* (July 2000): "Fuel's Paradise," WIRED: Archive (8.07 - July 2000) by Oliver Morton http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/gold.html It has an interesting intro, so here is an excerpt: 'Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA, helping to crack the genetic code; since then he has worked on biological problems from the nature of consciousness to the function of dreams to the origin of life. And through it all Crick, now 84, has been known to friends as a particularly gifted thrower of parties. Back in 1947, amid the privations of postwar Cambridge, England, two students walked into one of these parties, held in Crick's flat on Trumpington Street, and paused to scan the crowd. Crick was holding court in the middle of the room, surrounded by young women; other great-minds-in-formation were located around. In the far corner stood a clear-faced, rather stern-looking man. "That's Gold of Gold and Pumphrey," said one of the students, referring to the team then doing groundbreaking research on the workings of the ear. "No, no," his companion replied, "that's Gold of Bondi and Gold," the brilliant pair of mathematicians then rewriting the rules of cosmology. The stern face across the room, picking up on their confusion through a trick in the apartment's acoustics, broke into a smile. 'The eavesdropper, and the Gold on both scientific teams, was the same man: Thomas Gold, a physicist who has enjoyed a career broad enough in its enthusiasms to make even Francis Crick look narrow. Gold has worked in the highest reaches of Big Science - overseeing the construction and operation of the world's largest radio telescope, in Arecibo, Puerto Rico - while also excelling at the sort of research that requires nothing more than a pencil, paper, and an idea. He has reimagined the whisperings inside the ear, the universe as a whole, and, most recently, the ground beneath your feet. And he's done so with a profound indifference to the opinions of others. Gold is not just wide-ranging: He's a world-class contrarian. Very few people agree with him on everything, which suggests he's sometimes wrong. But he's also sometimes right. And he's always either interesting or infuriating, depending on where you're coming from. 'In his nineties, Gold is championing the idea that the creatures living on or near the surface of the Earth - plants, people, possums, porpoises, pneumonia bacilli - are just part of the biological story. In the depths of the Earth's crust, he believes, is a second realm, a bacterial "deep hot biosphere" that is greater in mass than all the creatures living on land and swimming in the seas. Most biologists will tell you that life is something that happens on the Earth's surface, powered by sunlight. Gold counters that most living beings reside deep in the Earth's crust at temperatures well above 100 degrees Celsius, living off methane and other hydrocarbons. 'Presented in full in his 1999 book, The Deep Hot Biosphere, Gold's theory of life below the Earth's surface is an outgrowth of his heretical theories about the origins of oil, coal, and natural gas. In the traditional view, of course, these substances are the residues of dead creatures. When organic matter from swamps and seafloors gets buried deep enough in the crust, it goes through chemical changes that distill it into hydrocarbons we can then dig up and burn. Gold believes none of this. He's convinced that the hydrocarbons we use come from chemical stocks that were incorporated into the Earth at its creation. 'Since the oil crisis of the 1970s, Gold has been saying that the Earth is hugely well endowed with these hydrocarbons - hundreds of times more so than most geologists, or oil companies, or OPEC leaders believe. The general belief in scarcity that drives up gas prices and causes fears of inflation, Gold argues, is a mirage that has served vested interests among oil producers for decades.' ..... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ There you go. Interesting stuff. I have no idea of the present state of play. I did notice a recent piece in which some Australian geologists argued that "oil-forming micro-organisms were widespread very early in the Earth's history". "Ancient oil points to 'cradle of life'," BBC News Online (4 August 2000) by Dr David Whitehouse http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/864777.stm But that may not be relevant. Stephen Straker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Vancouver, B.C. [Outgoing mail scanned by Norton AntiVirus] _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
