What an achievement! We're well on the the way to killing every living thing that swims in or flies over the Gulf of Mexico. Hey, ducks, how long do you think that human life can go on with dead oceans? I'll tell you how long: NOT VERY FREAKIN LONG AT ALL. And instead, what we get is a giant science experiment. Earlier I proposed the Paul Bunyan Condom as a cure, which would have been basically a giant Kevlar prophylactic lowered over the well head.
Michio Kaku says the reason why that wouldn't work (and didn't work when an equivalent version was tried) was because of frozen methane hydrate. I guess this is a gas at normal atmosphere pressure, but under the pressure of 5,000 feet of water, it becomes a solid. But, get this: when you drill a hole in the bottom of the ocean into methane hydrate, and stick a big pipe in there to go to the surface, guess what: the methane hydrate expands as it rises through the pipe (see, the pressure's getting less, consult your 10th grade science book for how this works) and EXPLODES!
Kahblooie! One giant oil rig down, 11 people dead, and a huge underwater oil gusher! Now, theoretically, you could do things to prevent this from happening, but let's face it, obviously there's no sure thing here.
I'm way beyond blaming BP because this is gonna destroy BP. BP can't clean up a whole ocean. Do some math here. The oil field is oil field is thought to contain some 50 million barrels of oil. Assuming conservatively that only 20,000 barrels per day are gushing out, that would mean there will be 2,500 more days of this!
Oh, and by the way, how much IS 50 million barrels of oil? That's about 2.5 days of U.S consumption (figuring on 20 million barrels per day).
Now, here's how stupid and greedy we are (per Wikipedia, source of all knowledge):
Between 1995 and 2005, U.S. consumption grew from 17.7 million barrels a day to 20.7 million barrels a day, a 3 million barrel a day increase.
If this increase had never been allowed to occur, so that our country used 3 million LESS barrels of oil per day, in approximately 16 days we'd have completely matched the ENTIRE FREAKIN' AMOUNT OF OIL in the goddamn oil volcano.
It's been 40 days since the oil rig sank. Had conservation measures been in place in this country we would have saved 120 million barrels of oil in that time. Instead we chose to kill the Gulf of Mexico.