Hacker News Reader

Comment by Morromist | Hacker News Reader

I'm excited to see all the nutty takes about oil prices from the same people who don't belive in vaccines.

I kinda hope they bring back the old idea that oil is actually formed out of non-biological matter and so that means its just basically infinitly seeping up from the earth, we just have to drill a bit deeper. But I think that's a little too nerdy for them

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin

View on HN

When I was a kid in the 1980s, the scientific shows and authors all agreed that petroleum was made of dinosaurs. Triceratops and Brontosaurus had died ?? MYA and got compressed into the oil we're drilling for today.

It was only about 3 years ago when I learned that petroleum comes from almost anything organic. So, ferns and trees and moss, in addition to Velociraptor and Triceratops, I guess?

Perhaps the more accurate description would be that as a kid, you misunderstood descriptions that petroleum was from decayed organic material from long ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

Yeah, that is what we get for reading headlines and pictures and magazines, rather than books and scholarly articles and paying attention in class.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED343791.pdf?utm_source=c...

Yeah, because I was told that it was mostly trilobites, around the same time (mid late 80s).

Metacarcinization https://m.xkcd.com/2418/

Capturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate s instead before they off-gas would be sufficient, I think?

You realize that vaccine hesitancy isn’t new and wasn’t a right wing thing? The right wing only has a disbelief about the covid vaccine and probably rightfully so. It went from: you can’t get it if youre vaccinated; okay you can get it but you can’t spread it; okay okay you can get it and spread but maybe the severity is reduced.

Measles was eliminated in the US by 2020. Texas had an outbreak last year with 2289 confirmed cases. They’re up to 2900 cases this year. The right-wing readily laps up all the misinformation it spews.

"Hesitancy" about heliocentricity isn't new either, and yet we've sent out a solar probe. Willfully ignoring science will never get old, it seems.

Wow, it's almost as if science works by gathering data and then forming an informed opinion. Crazy, I know!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com