Critical

Every Monday we have a seminar by School of Earth Sciences. The main attraction of seminar: Free cookies and sodas. The TA for the seminar this year is a very good friend of mine. So every week I try to go there in order to help her out. Oh ok, I go there for the food. Anyway, that's beside the point.

Yesterday, there was a presentation by GCEP (Global Climate and Energy Project) director. The GCEP is an organization within Stanford that fund different interdisciplinary research projects. The organization main research focus is on alternative fuels and reducing the carbon foot print (Hence Energy and Climate).

So yesterday's presentation was discussing different ways they are trying to reduce the carbon footprint. May be due to a repeated stress on the things we(we as in human race) are running out of and the way those things are dangerous for us or may be some other reason, my brain started doing a very weird thing. Every time she will mention a possible solution they are doing research on, my mind kept coming with questions like:

What if we run out of that too?
Or what if, that experimentation proved to be more dangerous in longer run even though it seems like a good solution now?
What if they ignore some factor and it comes back to bite us? It's not like that it hasn't happen before.
What if we are making everything worse by trying to fix it?

The epitome of this was when she offered a possible solution for decreasing the CO2 emission by burning the fuels in Oxygen rich environment. The process involved extracting oxygen from the air and my mind went:

What if we run out of oxygen?

Scary thought, isn't it? Suddenly, I didn't care about CO2 emmision anymore. Life is no fun without O2. C can wait. Don't you think?

P.S.: Don't worry, it was just my mind playing tricks with me. We won't run out of oxygen, at least till we have plant kingdom on this planet. That's our very own Oxygen factory. We just have to make sure that supply can meet the demand at all time. That's all.