Read the Tao Te Ching to be enlightened.

http://taoteching.org/

The hell? That seems random.

I will read that later, but as for the hydrocarbons in Titan I thought those were methane, which is known to result from simply joining hydrogen and carbon.

Not all hydrocarbons are necessarily biological in nature, that has been known for a long time.

Also... I thought I read somewhere that virtually all the oil that has been found contains biological signatures.

Great. They better hurry b4 Gore and pals do a DOS attack on that article

@vagabond

The Tao Te ching enlightened me so whenever I see the word enlightened I think of it.

Natural gas and methane are the same thing (CH4).

I hadn't heard about biological signatures, do you have more information on that?

It has been a long time since I read about the "abiotic oil" theories, but I'll try to find some sources later on.

But think about it... if oil and natural gas were truly being formed abiotically in significant quantities, why are they harder and harder to find?

I love the Dao De Jing.  Its whole philosophy basically boils down to not whatever you're thinking.

My thoughts would be that they aren't occuring naturally in significant quantities quickly. We're looking at processes that may take a long time to build up in sizable deposits.

As for why deposits are harder and harder to find - it's entirely dependant on the technology of finding deposits. Every year, we develop new technologies to extract deposits from areas that were initially impossible to drill in, or detect. Oil shale is a great example. America has billions of barrels in reserve of it, but doesn't choose to (or wants to) extract it due to economic and environmental reasons.

I think we should advance to nuclear fusion. I think it deserves a lot more funding than it gets.