[npo9]

Or maybe there was a whole lot more fossil fuel in the past.

[marcosdumay]

We have some very good explanations for the distribution of fossil fuels, with a lot of predictive power. They would all be trash of some thinking being decided to take some of it our.

[AnimalMuppet]

But if some being had decided to take some of it, we could still have explanations that seemed good to us and that fit the distribution of what we found. And we would use the match between the theory and the actual distribution to confirm that the explanations were correct.

[marcosdumay]

They would take the easy to extract fuels first. But it was still there, distributed the same way as the hard to extract stuff.

If somebody got it before us, they must have got very little of it.