All you need to do is look around at just about everything we use on a day to day basis to see how the world would be different. Almost everything we use is derived from oil.

Most modern technologies are based around cheap light weight plastics, which is made from oil. Just look around you right now, and think about how much oil you're surrounded by. The computer you're typing on. The cell phone you're talking on. The car you're driving. The t.v. you're watching. etc...

Replacing oil as a fuel is easy. Replacing it in everything we manufacture would be impossible. Unless we want to go back in time 70 years, or cut down every tree on the planet.

With geothermal or solar plants, desalination for water would be a snap, and purification. There are many ways with increased energy to grow food, and plants for business, for greenhouses could be multiered, and underground then. Not to mention, building things to last, where fixing them is less money than replacing them. Where an upgrade would be a mod.

Hemp makes wonderful paper, and insulation, and mixed with sand makes wonderful papercrete homes, and furniture. There are countless solutions and they don't involve cutting down the forrests either.

[edit on 24-7-2010 by Unity_99]

Things would be a lot different without oil. Natural gas and oil fueled the industrial revolution. It also drove technology advances (good and bad). A lot of pharmaceuticals have their roots in petrochemicals. Zantac comes to mind... I know there are others but my coffee hasn't kicked in.

Think pre-industiral revolution, maybe older. As minute2midnight already stated pretty much everything we have today we have because of oil in general. We wouldn't be using computers, lives wouldn't be saved in operating rooms with nearly the same frequency. International travel would be something only the insanely rich could afford. There would be no digital cameras, portable music players, cell phones, smart and hybrid cars, etc. Without these fuels chances are most of the world wouldn't even have electricity or heat in their homes.

Without petroleum based fuels we wouldn't be anywhere near as advanced as we are today because we would have never realized all these possibilities. Its abundance and versatility combined with human ingenuity brought the world to its current level of technology; without that I dare say we might still be living in houses with no running water cutting wood for heat and praying we didn't catch a simple cold because it could be the death of us.

Originally posted by MarkusMaximus

Originally posted by AwakeinNM
You'd still have to have a job to pay taxes.. ah yes, taxes. Can't escape those, can you.

Taxes serve two purposes:
1. "Infrastructure building"
2. To keep you a part of the system. Even if you don't have income, you've got taxes.

Not quite true. In America almost 40% of people don't pay taxes...... and I'm not talking about the so-called "Evil Rich", the top ten percent of which pay 90% of our taxes.

Originally posted by hotpinkurinalmint
The implications would be profound if we did not have oil. Here are a few items I can think of. By no means is this an exhaustive list and I tried to exclude obvious items like people not driving SUV's.

REPLY: Odd that you chose to leave that out. Did you know that from design to scrap, the Prius produces more pollution than a mid-sized Hummer?

1. No Suburbs.
The growth and existence of suburbs in the US (an other parts of the world) depends on the automobile and fuel. Take fuel out of the equation and people will no longer live in the suburbs in large numbers. People would be concentrated in cities.

REPLY: Look at the Amish And Mennonites, who travel to and from local towns on horses and buggies. We'd all be doing more of it rather than choose to live in populated and crime-ridden areas.

This is all I could think of for the moment..

REPLY: For those interested (and those who still believe that oil is a fossil fuel), consider this: Oil has, pound for pound, more BTU's than any other fuel, except nuclear. A modern oil well, when producing, takes an area of about 50 by 50 feet. To equal the energy produced by just one well, it would take 35,000 square miles of solar panels, and just a bit over 40,000 square miles of wind turbines. So, those of you who believe that wind and solar are the answer.... do you really think it's going to happen?

Interesting OP. In truth its very hard to predict. Necessity is the mother of invention and without oil we would likely be missing lots we take for granted yet have things we've not invented now !!

However, I can confidently predict:

We'd have fought wars over control of the worlds coal deposits.

Nobody would give a toss about the middle east.

If this happens ,i think maybe we will not live in a fast speed society and the air is really fresh,hehe ,without pollution.But everything will not be so convenient as well.