A World Without Oil

Quick history lesson: When Earth was very, very, very, very young, its atmosphere was mostly full of carbon dioxide.  The massive oceans were full of single-cell life. Those organisms used photosynthesis, where they would take the sun's energy and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and made food for itself. Because both of those were in massive abundance, these organism multiplied colossally. They greatly thinned out the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, ran out of food, then died and sank to the bottom of the seas, congealing into a black goop. We know this goop as crude oil. (For the record, just because they are called fossil fuels, that does not mean that they came from dinosaurs.)

Humanity has made incredible progress in technology over its relatively short time on earth, but it has incomprehensibly exploded in the last 100 or so years. This is due entirely on the discovery of crude oil. It is a substance which provides incomprehensible amount of stored energy. And this is literally hundreds of millions of years worth of stored energy.  What is insane is that we will have burned through hundreds of millions of years of stored energy in about 2 centuries.

If you imagine a fictional world, it is almost impossible to have one without cars and plastics and all sorts of products that come from or run on oil. If you do try to make a fictional world without oil, it always sounds like you're making a medieval fantasy.

As an exercise, I really do enjoy trying to envision a world that didn't have oil. t forces you to think about what is available and how much. It forces you to think about sustainability. It really allows you to understand why things changed very slowly before oil was discovered. Everything is different in a world without oil, down to core principles and philosophies.

I challenge you to try imagining a world where crude oil never existed. How advanced could we ultimately get? How long might it take humans to reach that level? How close could we come to a world like ours today?