Earth has just so much space and you gotta figure that at some point we'll run out of things, like petroleum.
BP says proven reserves will last 53.3 years. But that doesn't mean the grandkids will be sheltering against rocks.
Proven reserves are the stuff that's easy to get and already known. But there are all kinds of oil fields, from shale fields to those that are hard to get at but not impossible.
Plus, estimates are historically wrong. Oil was supposed to run out in 1970, 1995, 2013, and 2015. Predictions for 2015 had it that there would be a 10 million barrel per day shortfall that year. Instead, in 2018, there was a 2-3 million barrel per day surplus.
New reserves are being found and new technologies have emerged to make oil production clean and economical, according to JTC Energy Research Associates, LLC. Some say for 1,000 years.
Maybe that's true or maybe that's false. In the meantime, there are lots of new energy initiatives.
* Fusion. Clean, limitless energy from nuclear fusion is possible, thanks to China, whose Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak in 2018 reached a core plasma temperature of 100 million degrees celsius, hotter than the sun. The landmark proves that it is possible to reach temperatures required for nuclear fusion, according to New Atlas.
* Spherical wind turbines. A turbine shaped like a crooked ball. It's designed to dangle off skyscrapers and use wind blowing in any direction, using rotating energy to generate electricity. People living in high rises could generate their own electricity.
* Bio-electric. They probably won't fly an airplane, but could little patches of mushrooms power your house? A New Jersey technical group took an ordinary mushroom, attached graphene nanoribbons of ink to it and produced electricity. The idea is that arrangements of bacteria could one day do bioluminescent lighting.