What If: Crude Oil is Unformed Shoggoths?

[Corvus 501]

Exactly what it says on the tin. Are oil companies desperately trying to save Earth from an endless horde of shoggoths bursting from oil fields once they are seeded with shoggoth bio matter? Is the very existence of oil fields the plot of the remaining Old Ones to take back the Earth with an endless army?

[Iroscato]

...wat?

Are you worried about Archinist muscling in on your turf?

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Exactly what it says on the tin. Are oil companies desperately trying to save Earth from an endless horde of shoggoths bursting from oil fields once they are seeded with shoggoth bio matter? Is the very existence of oil fields the plot of the remaining Old Ones to take back the Earth with an endless army?

Dude?! Seriously?!

Between you and Achinist, Zor's RARs are starting to look less and less half-baked.

[madd0ct0r]

Can someone fill me in on mythos regenerating shoggoths?

[streetad]

Giant amorphous blob things genetically engineered as beasts of burden by an ancient alien race. Very strong and resilient, and possessing at least some level of intelligence in that they were able to rebel against their masters, but apart from that pretty unquantified and unquantifiable. The only encounter with one in Lovecraft's works was in 'At the Mountains of Madness', where they chased off the protagonists and were described with the customary 'unknowable and horrifying' flourishes.

[FaxModem1]

So, instead of millions of years dead dinosaurs that we burn for fuel, we burn scary monsters for fuel instead?

If that became public knowledge, the Green Energy movement would be hampered due to the public making sure to kill off the monsters first.

[Zixinus]

It depends entirely on how controllable it is.

If it isn't, then we have a problem.

If it is, well, we juts found out that the oil our civilization depends on may be renewable by feeding the shogoth. Which is good news if we want to extend our supply of it.

[Simon_Jester]

Exactly what it says on the tin. Are oil companies desperately trying to save Earth from an endless horde of shoggoths bursting from oil fields once they are seeded with shoggoth bio matter? Is the very existence of oil fields the plot of the remaining Old Ones to take back the Earth with an endless army?

If this were true, the Old Ones would already have done this in the distant past, well before humans began extracting oil, because the Old Ones are, ah...

Old.

[NecronLord]

I think he may mean Elder Things, and not Great Old Ones there, as they're also called that. But... we'd know, because a Shoggoth is immensely powerful physically and not passive at all, so yeeeah. Dumb question.

[Borgholio]

Wouldn't a Shoggoth simply re-form itself eventually from the combustion exhaust that is spewed into the air? Or does the act of burning it in a combustion engine (fire) kill it for good?

[Elheru Aran]

Wouldn't a Shoggoth simply re-form itself eventually from the combustion exhaust that is spewed into the air? Or does the act of burning it in a combustion engine (fire) kill it for good?

Nobody quite knows. Freezing seems to be the only thing that really slows down a shoggoth. Fire might could do the job, but we don't know if the Elder Race got that far.

[Simon_Jester]

We have no reason to think Shoggoths are not beings made of atoms. In which case, being dispersed into a fine mist and then set on fire, or being run through a catalytic cracking plant, or better yet both at once, would kill them quite effectively.

Honestly I've always taken a page from Charles Stross's book and interpreted Shoggoths as big blobs of configurable nanotechnology. That would explain both how they could be so useful to the Elder Things (an industrial civilization that presumably had the ability to create vehicles and so on), and how they could be so dangerous and mindlessly destructive when uncontrolled.

I think he may mean Elder Things, and not Great Old Ones there, as they're also called that. But... we'd know, because a Shoggoth is immensely powerful physically and not passive at all, so yeeeah. Dumb question.

The Elder Things also predate humanity, and for that matter the extinction of the dinosaurs, and for that matter the dinosaurs themselves. They're old enough to have seeded oil on our planet, but if their doing so were part of a long range plan, they would have put that plan into action before going extinct themselves- and even that was something like thirty million years ago.

[NecronLord]

Yeah, but they're nearly extinct re: elder things, and not in a position to stop humans doing much of anything.

And weapons of atomic vibration were effective against Shoggoths, so they are indeed made of atoms. Agreed that there's no reason to think they're not made of regular matter, as composition from other forms of matter was supposed to be an advantage their enemies had over them.