X-Message-Number: 24624
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2004 09:24:49 -0400
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: 10 years is plenty of time

Hi everyone, particularly Peter Merel:

If oil resources are low enough then substitutes will be used. If you're
talking about periods of a decade (10 years or longer) then finding
substitutes will be easy.

As a matter of fact, if you like oil, there is a company Suncor which
has devised a way to get good quality oil from shale sands, at a price
per barrel just as low as that of companies which take the oil from 
the ground directly. The amount of oil in oil sands in Canada dwarfs
the holdings of ALL the companies which own oil companies.

Not only this, but you may be also interested in the efforts to 
devise vehicles which run on hydrogen using fuel cells. This is 
coming along nicely. One company, Ballard, has advanced fuel cells
which its already selling to run trucks and buses. Some people
suggest that with fuel cells the entire power distribution system
will change: you'll get hydrogen piped in to run your house and
your car(s), storing it not in pressurized tanks but in solutions
of chemicals which reversibly contain lots of hydrogen.

Finally, I will point out that there IS an active cryonics society
in Australia. They're the one place where cooperation between CI
people and Alcor people has gone on for some time. Currently we
realize how small we are and organize our efforts to help get 
members to their US society or bring a suspension team from a 
US society here. I refer to CAA.

Certainly any SUDDEN change, which is exactly what the rise in 
the price of oil was, will be hard to adapt to. But if you want to
think about what might happen in the next 10 years, it's very 
unlikely that we'll have no alternatives to oil --- at least
oil from the Middle East.

               Best wishes and long long life,

                   Thomas Donaldson

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