Ok, so if you remove the word "oil" and replace it with any other mass produced product (liquid or otherwise), you will never get buy-in for the business structure the oil companies currently enjoy. Where else can you increase the price at the consumer immediately as the the the cost of the raw material goes up? Where else can you regularly charge a fraction of a cent for the end product? Where else can you increase the cost by 100% or more within the range of a year and still sell the product? Irregardless of the endemic problem stemming from pollution (no, not just exhaust - been to the gulf lately? or Alaska? or anywhere near a refinery?), we are hooked like crack-addicts on this stuff and new technologies that would replace it have had their development hampered for decades. And still these guys are posting profits never before seen by any product. How much indeed will we take?

...might then have actually wiped out all life on earth. Then one of these comets that would have been populated with some of these "organic compounds" could have crash landed somewhere off in the deep ocean and those little critters found the warm waters quite nice and thrived.

D'oh! We're all aliens after all :P

I've seen several types of circuit boards similarly lathed in a resinous substance on later model cars. The substance was hard enough to prevent any real tampering of the board without potentially damaging the entire component. I hadn't considered at the time that this was a thermal insulation method, but these boards (being under the hood of a vehicle) would be exposed to higher temperatures than the typical desktop or laptop system.