by Suzy Charnas

Created on: July 14, 2008   Last Updated: August 22, 2008

Scientists like to play with a concept they call "the Singularity". It means an event, a shift, a change so sudden, pervasive, and extreme that people on the near side of it and all their works will appear incomprehensibly strange and mysterious to those on the far side. The original example was the replacement of human bodies and brains by virtual or technological bodies and brains, or some other form of immortality.

Humans are on the brink of a Singularity, but it's an economic change, not a biological or evolutionary one. It shows most clearly at the moment in the rising price of oil, a finite resource nearing the end of cheap and easy supply just as demand, from rapidly developing "Third World" countries, has also begun to rise rapidly.

Americans think about this in terms of the cost of transportation. This is because we forget just how basic oil is to any modern, industrialized economy.

The crisis of oil supply is not just about fuel for moving around quickly. It's about the fertilizers that have been allowing our food production to keep up with our explosive population growth. It's about the chemicals that are the basis of all sorts of products and processes, from cleaning fluids to floor tile to synthetic cloth to the preparation of vaccines, drugs and medicines of all kinds (think of a lab, a doctor's office, and everything in it that's made of plastic). From computers and their elements (plastic) to massive scientific and military installations, our world runs on plastic parts and systems.

Factories that turn out the objects that we buy in Wal-Mart or Bergdorf's are run on electricity generated by oil, their machinery - like most modern machines of every kind - lubricated by oil without which they will seize up and cease to move. Oil-derived products pave our streets, surface our homes inside and out (synthetic carpet, wall paint, asphalt shingles for the roof) and sanitize our bathrooms.

It was petroleum, a cheap and readily available fuel, that allowed the development of mass produced objects. Our pre-oil ancestors didn't stamp out belt buckles using oil-run assembly lines and plastic materials. They carved their buckles out of bone and wood, or cast them of metal, individually, in molds. An 18th century table in a museum is a beautiful object, covered in decorative details rendered in rare wood, stone, tile, and metal inlay - that table is unique.

There was no factory to turn out such things, only workshops of skilled craftsmen using tools and machines

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