Uh, would you happen to know where I can get some really, really sharp chunks of obsidian?

DaveMart, according to the link you provide, the Mayan royal household in question was massacred by another royal household, not by disgruntled hoi polloi.

Even so, perhaps we can learn some lessons from the Maya collapse. First, it was slow, taking over a century before the highland cities were abandoned, and much longer in the Yucatan. Second, Mayan culture didn't disappear - in fact, now that the hieroglyphs have largely been translated, we've discovered that several modern Mayan rituals are depicted in Classic-period monuments. There was still a literate class when the Spanish arrived.

Village life was much the same before and after the collapse. What disappeared was the institution of kingship, the building of cities, massive agricultural projects, and wide-scale trade.

Oh, and the population density dropped to a fraction of what it had been during the Classic period - perhaps to as little as a tenth of peak population - despite the fact that even Classic Maya civilization was primarily stone-age. After the collapse, there were no institutions with the power or authority to concentrate social capital on large-scale agriculture.

If what you mean is that alternatives cannot come on line fast enough to maintain past exponential growth or even to replace dwindling crude oil supplies and keep fuel prices from escalating, then I certainly agree with you.

However if what you mean is that once oil production slides the world will slip back to plowing with animals like some sort of prehistoric lifestyle, then I adamantly disagree with you. The higher energy prices will cause investment in new renewable technologies, and while these technologies will not be as efficient as crude oil in terms of energy realized per energy inputted, they certainly are sufficiently efficient to run our economies, which will be much more efficient than what we have now. I study renewable fuel technologies and I am very encouraged by what I am seeing. It will, however, take decades for these renewable technologies to come on line.

Oil came from biological material originally and while it will take more processing to make it into usable fuels (we will no longer solely rely on the bonanza of what Mother Earth has provided to us), the great knowledge and innovation that we posess will allow us to continue functioning with a highly technological society.

Retsel

I'm not so sure that Russia and Venezuela haven't come to that same conclusion also.

ceiii2000...Saudi Arabia is not a country that depends on 'our TV/internet/etc' for their information and research into alternative energy sources. To the contrary, the Saudi's have conducted many large and small scale experiments to determine the potential of alternative energy sources, including solar powered salt to fresh water conversion. Some of the experiments in SA have been done independently, some in concert with other countries. Contrary to what many Americans believe the 'rest of the world' is not a huge teeming mass of ignorance...although some parts of it are...just as are some parts of the US.

Here is a site that explains alternative energy experiments and actual applications in SA. It appears to me that SA has a great desire to find out what works in the real world, not what some idiot politicians and lobbyists demand be implemented regardless of practicality. It appears that the 21 projects in SA in the link below only list projects completed or underway by 1997. I have read of other projects underway in the KSA since '97 and they could be found by a Google search. As you can see at the link solar testing has been going on in SA since at least 1981. I have an interest in salt to fresh water solar conversion so listed one from SA link below...

'Solar Powered Water Desalination Projects. A solar thermal seawater desalination pilot plant was completed by SOLERAS in 1984 in Yanbu. It uses an indirect contact heat transfer freeze process to produce 200 m3 of potable water per day. The operation, maintenance, and performance results enabled collector component manufacturers to use the project as test bed for new concepts. A glass manufacturer investigated solution to mirror edge protection against environment. Other organizations learned more about the freeze desalination process and developed new commercial equipment. This plant, however, was closed down for economic reasons (Huraib 1989).

A PV powered brackish water desalination plant was installed in 1994 at Sadous Village in collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), USA. The plant has two separate PV fields. One (980 Wp) is to energize a submersible pump for pumping water from a well, and the other (10.08 kWp) is to provide power to a reverse osmosis unit (R.O.U) and to other accessories and equipment. The preliminary investigation has shown an excellent overall performance of PV plant for water pumping and desalination, however, the potable water recovery rate is only about 30%. Further work is underway in order to increase this recovery rate. Simultaneously, a separate study also seeks to incorporate a solar thermal desalination system (probably a pilot plant of solar stills) with the existing PV powered R.O.U in order to use the high rejection rate of brine (70% of input water to R.O.U) for water distillation.'

http://www.un.int/saudiarabia/solar1

I think this is a GREAT sign - because the more fossil fuels we burn now, the longer BAU continues, the more population grows and thus the more humans will suffer. Ironically the sooner civilization is forced to cope with the finiteness of our sphere via high prices, etc., the less the amount of suffering will be in the future. Because we add 70 MILLION people to the planet each year, and who here can honestly forecast a wonderful life for them with the way the biosphere is crumbling under the constraints of human overpopulation already?

Time for a little game of football .

I would guess that they are heavily mined with just that eventuality in mind.

Probably with those pesky Iraqi WMD's...

On a serious note, I've heard that there are plans to have the wells remotely detonated in case TSHTF in the KSA.

'I would guess'? Please, enough with the guessing. The list of reasons that SA might retard oil production is as long as one with a normal imagination would care to construct.

Are the fields mined? I don't know...you don't know. Why guess?

The idiots Cheney/Blair/Bush guessed that wmd existed in Iraq based on cooked intelligence. That has certainly worked out well, has it not?

Alternative Guesses regarding the motivations of the KSA:

SA is unhappy with the one sided stance of the US in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and has decided to apply slow pressure to the US, via oil constraint, possibly in covert cooperation with Nigeria and Venesuela, untill the US shows that it is willing to take a more balanced approach to the issue.

SA is unhappy with the hard line stance of US foreign policy toward Iran and wishes for a negotiated settlement between the US/Iran...especially since the SA has announced that it too wishes to build nuke power plants.

SA is unhappy about the devaluation of the US dollar by the Fed and resulting inflation that is being imported into SA and other ME countries. In fact, the SA has already stated that for every 1% drop in the value of the dollar against the euro that crude on the spot market would increase about one dollar a bbl. The SA does not control the oil/dollar price directly but they can certainly effect it through oil production constraints...absent demand destruction.

I could continue all day with more guesses...to what purpose?

Please do not take this post as a personal insult for it was meant to show how fruitless guesses are...and, I am as guilty of anyone of an occasional guess. A great deal is riding on western intelligence services getting the real, unvarnished facts before we in the west enter into another debacle like Iraq...and, my guess :) is that intelligence in the west is just as bad as prior to Iraq. Best hopes for good intel.