Ghawar Field

Sometime around five hundred million years ago, some trillions of tons of biota decided to die and be buried underneath the oceans of the world. Layers of rock built up around them, cooking the organic substances down to hydrocarbons. The vast majority of the liquids escaped and volatized. They did so because in those places the world cracked and changed, whether by glacier, volcano, meteorite- what have you. The places that have escaped change had trapped the most of this strange liquid hydrocarbon. Petroleum loves the dead places of the world.

The 21st century will revolve around the most dead geological formation in the human world: the Arabian plate. As petroleum is sucked out of the plate by machines and fed to our machines to move us humans from machine to machine (ostensibly to make money, which is mostly used to gather more machines), we have to wonder: what are our machines thinking?

They are thinking the same thing we were thinking when we cleared the first land to create the first farm. They want a place that looks like food. Our cars conspire: let us make this place of life into a dead place, like that desolation which feeds us.

When America looks like an asphalt version of the Ghawar field, then perhaps our machines will be happy, and let us rest.