Tom the Dancing Bug: The Futuristic World of 2010

• [Jen]

  lmao. indeed.

• [Ito Kagehisa]

  It’s amazing to watch the BP knuckleheads brag about the leaky cup they’ve precariously balanced on top of a flange ringed with bolt heads.

  That flange is rated for the full pipe pressure. Those ROVs have socket wrench arms that can unbolt it, and could bolt on a big ‘ol valve which could then be closed. You could bolt on a whole new BOP if you wanted to.

  One thing that has become abundantly clear about BP, though, is that technical direction is being set by non-technical people.

• [ill lich]

  “Wait just a gosh dang second. . . are you sayin there will be a colored negro President in the future!?”

• [Anonymous]

  Just nuke the damn thing…
  Russians have been solving oil spills that way since the 60′s
  Everybody’s playing dumb, i wonder who benefits from this ridiculous thing going on?

  • [Anonymous]

    Yes, NUKE the oil spill and all of our prblems will be solved. I mean of course RUSSIA nukes oil spills, so we should too, right? The government is so dumb the answer has been right in front of us THIS WHOLE TIME!

  • [Anonymous]

    “THEY DRINK OUR MILKSHAKE” (“There Will Be Oil”)

    Just to let you know, we here in New Orleans (listen to WWL Radio 87.0 AM) and you may hear conversations about

    1. They want our land. The invasion and land grab of south Louisiana, esp. those areas close to offshore drilling rigs;

    2. They want our land. They’ve been wanting our land for ages…why do you think Congress has NEVER approved our numerous requests to help us STOP LOSING THE MARSHLANDS?

    3. They want our land. They (BP, EXXON, CHEVRON, SHELL)
    DON’T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT PELICANS, FISH, TURTLES, PORPOISES, OYSTERS, CRABS, SHRIMP OR HUMAN BEINGS.

    If they ruin our land – smear it out with the oil — kill everybody and everything — they win and they take our land.

    THEY DRINK OUR MILKSHAKE!!!

• [Anonymous]

  IT’s all too true!!!

• [Anonymous]

  Buck FP…
  Reverse that.

  Why leave it to BP?
  Why isnt there a massive global response? It will surely have global consequence.
  Why isnt the American goverment out there overseeing the problem and helping with the effort?
  From the first day I knew this was going to be the worst thing that happened in my lifetime. I was positive this would have extremely long lasting effects, some of which wont even be known for 10-20 years. Expect everything from disease, lung problems, and cancer, to death, extinction of animals, plants, etc.

• [Glenn Fleishman]

  So real, it makes me cry. Can I have the world of the past, please? DDT and the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation?

• [jamiethehutt]

  I’d vote Space Obama.

  • [benher]

    Oh give me a break! You really believe him when he says he’s going to close Earth’s secret detention centers on the far side of the moon?

    Don’t worry, I promise I’m not one of those future-Republicans from 2010 – the N.E.O.Cons.

• [skepticaloptimist]

  hmmmm could it be…? Asphalt volcano http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asphalt_volcano

• [Anonymous]

  Hilarious. Ultra-modern futuristic war against a bunch of guys who live in caves and fight with knives, rocks and tnt, indeed. And don’t forget that these cave dwellers number no more than 400, and we spend 12 billion a month to fight them.

• [spill]

  Ya know. If I had a time machine, I would totally spam the past with this comic.

• [Jonathan Badger]

  The funny thing is not only is “BP” a “futuristic” renaming of British Petroleum, before British Petroleum the company was named “Anglo-Iranian Oil” and before that “Anglo-Persian Oil”. Quite the chameleon is BP.

  • [Anonymous]

    …before British Petroleum the company was named “Anglo-Iranian Oil” and before that “Anglo-Persian Oil”.

    Wait, you mean maybe they were involved in that whole destruction-of-popular-democracy-in-Iran thing that eventually resulted in that Shiite-revolutionary-Islamic-theocracy thing? Because of that putting-profits-before-basic-morality-or-common-sense thing?

    Say it ain’t so, Jo!

  • [bobhughes]

    Yeah, it’s so cute how the nastier corporations do that when they’ve utterly failed, yet still have enough cash hoarded away to survive for years. I forsee BP making a sudden and quiet change of brand with a new name, colors and anything they can find to change. Kinda how Phillip Morris magically went away and Altria appeared, and Blackwater similarly became Xe. In BP’s case I’d expect a name along the lines of “Gaia’s Pride” or “EthicOil”, or something else that’s excessively greenwashed and obnoxiously ironic.

• [dculberson]

  I would say that the problem is exactly “rebellious talking apes.” Unfortunately we gave those apes the highest level positions in a multinational oil company.

  • [Anonymous]

    Spot on Ruben, and dculberson. Take three steps back, and it looks like a simple plumbing problem…, plug up the pipe squirting liquid. Space age plumbers with a big cork stopper? It sometimes amazes me anything works at all…

• [BritSwedeGuy]

  Also BP merged with US oil giant Amoco – of Amoco Cadiz Disaster infamy.
  For which the American company compensated their French victims for about 1/4 of the damage.
  “Yeah, those damned Yanks!” none of you cried.

  • [spill]

    If I had been old enough to make the utterance, I surely would have, as would others.

• [Anonymous]

  bp is doing this shit on purpose.”and a third of the worlds waters were turned to blood”

• [Rayonic]

  This is the perfect disaster for satirists and political wags — it seems so simple to fix on the surface. So you can score easy points complaining about all those incompetent politicians/employees/scientists/etc.

  The latest analysis that I read indicated that if they simply close the pipe at the top, it’ll rupture well below the sea floor, making the situation worse and the oil even harder to catch.

  But hey, don’t let me rain on your parade.

  • [Anonymous]

    Well to be fair, if that is the case, then WHY THE HELL DIDN’T BP HAVE MEASURES IN PLACE IN CASE OF THIS ‘RISK’ HAPPENING!

    I don’t think BP should be solely to blame for this, nor solely responsible to clean it up, but someone should get a bloody move on, and if there is no way to fix this they shouldn’t be drilling any more wells!

• [forgeweld]

  Spot on, Ruben. It’s fascinating that NASA can send out remotely controlled devices to the far reaches of the solar system with great precision and have them carry out complex tasks, and then when it comes to the ocean,all our mighty technological organs come up with is, ‘gorsh, that thing is a whole mile down, dontcha know-it’s like doing open heart surgery from a mile away. How very pathetic. Don’t we have a fleet of deep water submarines that could be down there doing any number of tasks and assessment to help get the gusher under control?

  • [jgs]

    “‘gorsh, that thing is a whole mile down”

    … which works out to be about 150 atmospheres of pressure differential your robots have to cope with. As opposed to 1 atmosphere for space probes.

    • [forgeweld]

      So, there are different technological challenges for space and undersea. Space exploration involves extreme heat and cold and g-forces for instance. I get it. My intended point is that if we can focus an agency on solving the daunting problems involved in space exploration, why don’t we have an equivalent capability to respond to recurring and inevitable problems in our ocean?

      And Peterbruels,you’re right about subs, I had no idea. But do you really think the telemetry problem in the sea is that much more of an impediment compared to space? Holy crap, they have all kinds of equipment down there that they are meant to be able to control, like the blowout preventer, which as I understand lacked an ‘acoustic switch’, required by law in more advanced countries to activate shutoff rams.

      I just think the whole terrible incident points up the disparity between our abilities in space and underwater, and how massively useful it would be to have the kind of money and effort put into deep sea capabilities that we put into space capabilities.

      • [jco]

        The astronauts on the ISS just have duct tape and a set of wrenches. They wouldn’t have much luck capping a 15000 PSI blowout either. This is a really hard engineering problem. If you want an aerospace-style solution, then the smart approach would be a requirement for well-heads that don’t explode, because fixing them after the fact is basically impossible.

      • [jgs]

        “how massively useful it would be to have the kind of money and effort put into deep sea capabilities that we put into space capabilities”

        Do you actually know that more has been spent on space than deep sea? Absent evidence, I wouldn’t be confident in betting on either one. I would guess that there’s proportionally more public money in space than deep ocean, but considering that there’s easy money [*] to be made underwater, I would expect substantial private money has been spent on that.

        If you have actual numbers to share, that would be interesting.

        [*] Relatively speaking.

  • [peterbruells]

    Actually, the well is aboud 1.500 m deep – normal military submarine are made to withstand a depth of about 600, 700 m. And it’s far easier to send a electromagnetic signal through vacuum than to a mile of water.

• [newtomato]

  Snazzy futuristic suits.

• [Anonymous]

  When you dig an oil well, you drill a big hole, insert well casing pipe, and cement that pipe to the bedrock. This happens in successive layers down the hole, to the point where the casing at the bottom is only 9 or so inches in diameter. The structure of the well is strongly suspected to be very weak… i.e., “they” think the casing cement job was screwed up.
  That means there is a strong risk of high pressure oil and gas flowing around all the casing to the surface should a cap be slammed shut at the top of the well. That could lead to the entire structure being forced out of the hole, greatly increasing flow.
  “Nuking” the well didn’t work every time for the Russians. It’s not foolproof and would do a lot of damage to the thousands (look it up) of other drilling platforms still in the Gulf Of Mexico.
  A lot of questions need to be answered… like why the any of the BOP rams didn’t work, why BP didn’t call for a remedial cement job (they were warned) why no one monitored the flow rates just before blowout, why BOPs are not rated to cut through tool joints (where the drill rod sections screw into each other). There’s a lot of tech detail in the Congressional testimony.

• [Anonymous]

  Hate to point this out, But…..

  The poor yanks’ own dumb laws prevent non-US flagged vessels (and more importantly, self-propelled seagoing equipment) from being staged out of US ports for extended periods of time. If this hadn’t been the case, then BP could have shipped in kit from the North Sea, or Arabian Gulf oilfields, where the necessary equipment is already on hand…instead of having to have it specially built from scratch in the US to satisfy your politicos…the same politicos that are now whineing about the length of time it is taking.

  oops.

  Since it makes the US look bad, I bet this little nugget of info doesn’t make the front page anywhere…

• [Ito Kagehisa]

  “We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.”

  Perhaps the problem is that highly intelligent and creative people are unlikely to be involved in anything as fundamentally retarded as deep-sea oil drilling.

• [Nash Rambler]

  Mmmmmm, that’s good sarcasm.