Its true power lies in its chemistry—because it reflects the very foundation of life itself.

At its core, petroleum is made of hydrogen and carbon—the same elements that make up the human body. Bound in Tetrahedral structures, these hydrocarbons are the ancient scaffolding of life, compressed over millions of years into dense, flammable memory. In this sense, petroleum is fossilised biology—dead life powering artificial systems. And we are no exception. Our bodies, too, are built from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and minerals. When we die, we return to the Earth—our soft tissues breaking down into organic matter, our bones releasing calcium and phosphorus, feeding the soil as ash. We are not separate from the biogeochemical cycle; we are its continuation.

But what makes petroleum so uniquely central to the Tetrahedral Artificial Reality isn’t just that it burns. It’s that its structure mirrors the biochemical codes of life, and through industrial science, it has been manipulated to replace and mimic biology itself. One of the key tools of this mimicry is methylation—the same process biology uses to regulate genes, shape neurotransmitters, and fine-tune cellular behavior. In the lab, the same principle is used synthetically.

From methane—a basic hydrocarbon and a derivative of petroleum—industries now produce synthetic methyl groups. These small chemical tags are added to thousands of consumer products: preservatives in processed food, stabilizers in cosmetics, fragrances, cleaning agents, and even medical drugs. The very waste products of petroleum are given a second industrial life through methylation, allowing capitalism not just to profit from the raw fuel, but to repurpose its leftovers into a chemical language that interacts with human biology.

This is not a coincidence. It is an engineered ecosystem—where the byproducts of energy extraction are turned into substances that enter our bodies, mimic our biochemistry, and modulate our behavior. All while creating markets that stretch across the planet: products that endure long shipping routes, survive on shelves for months, and promise convenience, stimulation, or beauty—at the cost of long-term chronic diseases.

What we’re witnessing is not just energy leaky from our biocheical energy production, by a molecular colonization of life by artificial chemistry. The petroleum economy doesn’t stop at fuel pumps or factory machines. It extends into the bloodstream, the gut, the brain—through methyl groups that imitate, replace, or override natural processes. This is the hidden foundation of modern capitalism: a system that captures the core elements of life and rebuilds them into tools of manipulation and consumption.

In the end, petroleum is powerful not because it moves machines, but because it mirrors biology—and that reflection has been weaponised into a Tetrahedral Artificial Reality.