How likely is it that petroleum is produced without life?
It is my understanding that there are markers in the petroleum that insinuate it was once organic life, but now a few people in my group of friends are convinced about abiogenesis. Just curious if any of you have any experience with these hypotheses.
How the fuck else would it be formed?
>>7587257
A few people in your group of friends are uneducated morons.
They send me shit like this. I looked it up on wiki too, according to there the possibility cant be completely ruled out
>>7587350
No. Really. Why are you paying any attention to them?
>>7587257
i bet you none of these people have jobs in the O&G industry.
Yeah, there might be some evidence that would lead you down this road. My dad knew a few geologists that worked for the coal company he was with that personally believed things of this nature. We can't know for sure either way right now. Even if we found a lifeless planet orbiting nothing and it was filled with oil, we could never rule out that once life flourished there and turned into hydrocarbons. Science always ends up with interesting hypotheses that are near impossible to test, but what are you going to Do?
We know that some deposits of organics, like methane clathrates in the ocean, are modern (but mostly not abiogenic) in origin.
Others, however, are clearly derived from ancient life. How do we know that? First, we can tell the age of the rock in which we find the stuff. Second, we can look at isotopic composition and compare with what we know of the early formation of the planet versus later atmospheric compositions. Finally, we just plain find a fuckton of fossils while digging for the stuff.
>>7587350
The quicksand statement is funny. It's as though bodies of water don't exist....
>>7587394
>"here's why oil is clearly not abiogenic"
>lists reasons pointing to its old age
>"we just plain find a fuckton of fossils while digging for the stuff"
>implying an inherent correlation
i don't even know anything about the subject or have any stake in it by the way. your arguments just sound flawed to a really silly extent.
>>7587257
Is this actual 21st century lysenkoism?
>>7587418
>i don't even know anything about the subject
And there you go.
The point is not that it is old. It is that it is a *specific* age, and that that age is not the age one would expect if it were formed abiogenically. It is exactly the age we would expect if it were formed from biological processes.
>>7587257
>carbon balance in the Earth's core
wat
>>7587276
http://oilismastery(smallcircle)blogspot(smallcircle)com/search/label/Abiotic%20Oil
get more educated in geomythology
