SCIENTISTS CREATE ARTIFICIAL BACTERIA: IS THIS THE END OF THE ERA OF ARAB DOMINANCE?

Auroroa over at The Midnight Sun has an interesting article up (from the Economist) entitled
"Engineering Arab Dominance" which postulates that there has never been a real threat of an energy shortage. Instead, manipulations in the energy market has been Machiavellian maneuverings aimed at maintaining Arab dominance in the world's energy markets:

Wake up call: It’s never been about an oil shortage but always about control
of the world’s hottest commodity and the politics of that. For some years now,
‘experts’ have been predicting the decline of the oil supplies of the world.
Frantic talk of ‘peak oil’ has pushed oil prices through the roof. In
the 1970’s OPEC set off a global recession by driving oil prices past an amount
equal to $100 a barrel in today’s terms.

As a
response, Western countries feverishly developed technology to reduce their oil
dependence. Subsequently, demand eased up and the oil companies were left with
large amounts of excess oil.

To avoid a price crash
OPEC slowed down production while big Western firms gladly supplied the
increasing demand out of their smaller oil reserves. Now the smaller reserves of
the West are running out and Western firms are forced to look at extremely
expensive projects such as coaxing crude from under the icy oceans of the
Arctic.

Meanwhile OPEC is fast heading for a monopoly. Oil
prices have already tripled since the beginning of this decade to between $60
and $80 per barrel, and OPEC will probably opt to do all they can to keep supply
low and prices ever higher.

Advocates of biofuel will scream
for subsidies and sales of fuel efficient cars and hybrids will skyrocket. While
our governments may rail at Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Iran for their greed,
OPEC is gaining the upper hand. Why would they stop now?

The answer is, they won't stop.

However, consider Arab civilization. It is distinctly lacking in education, literacy, and as a result, technological innovation of any kind.

Truth is, oil will not always be the leading source of energy. Man is too restless and creative a creature to continue doing the same thing forever. Of course, restlessness and creativity are rewarded in Western countries, whereas they aren't in Arab countries. Hence, our dominance in the field of technological innovations.

Today, Craig Venter and his team of scientists announced that they had created the world's first entirely synthetic bacteria molecule:

WASHINGTON - It's another step in the quest to create artificial organisms:
Scientists have synthesized the complete DNA of a type of bacteria. The
experiment, published online Thursday by the journal Science, isn't a living
germ, just its genetic structure.

Ok, so what's the big deal, Pastorius? Some egghead has created an artificial organism which is little more than gunk in the primordial soup of science.

Well, kind of. But, what is the goal of the Venter Institute?

... scientists from Maryland's J. Craig Venter Institute called it the largest
manmade stretch of DNA to date, and therefore a logical step in the fledgling
field of "synthetic biology" that aims to build new organisms that work
differently than nature intended, such as producing new fuels.

The
Venter group started with some off-the-shelf laboratory-made DNA fragments. They
overlapped and joined these stretches to make ever-larger chunks of genetic
material until they finally had a manmade copy of the entire genome of a small
bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium, a genital germ.

Last year,
Venter's team performed a "genome transplant": Researchers transplanted all of
the genes from one species of Mycoplasma into another, switching a goat germ
into a cattle germ. Somehow, the transplant itself sparked the donor genes to
start working; Venter uses a computer analogy to say it "booted up."

Now
he must test if this new artificial Mycoplasma genome can boot up, too — by
putting the DNA into a living cell to see if takes over and becomes a synthetic
organism.

"I don't view that we're creating life," Venter told The
Associated Press last year in describing this series of experiments. "I view
that we're modifying life to come up with new life forms by designing and
synthetically constructing chromosomes."

From Wikipedia:

In a recent interview with New Scientist
when asked "Assuming you can make synthetic
bacteria, what will you do with them?", Venter replied

Over the next 20 years, synthetic genomics is going to become the
standard for making anything. The chemical industry will depend on it.
Hopefully, a large part of the energy industry will depend on it. We really need
to find an alternative to taking carbon out of the ground, burning it, and
putting it into the atmosphere. That is the single biggest contribution I could
make.

Furthermore it suggests that one of the main purposes for
creating synthetic bacteria would be to reduce the dependence on fossil
fuels.

It looks like we'll be able to say goodbye to Arab dominance in the energy sector, and with that we will be able to stop worrying about Islamic civilization.

What will the Muslims of the world do when Allah lets them down like that?