Enjoying brief popularity late last century was a television show in the United States called That's Incredible! Nicknamed "That's Incredibly Stupid" by some viewers because of the pointless antics of its participants, the show would have been far more interesting (if less coarsely entertaining) had it mined the mother lode of the incredible - global petroleum exploration and production operations - for subject matter.

It didn't, and That's Incredible! is gone, but we are here, so it falls to us to celebrate the incredible as it occurs with remarkable frequency in our industry.

This is not as easy as it sounds. Insiders have seen it all. To them, the incredible is almost routine. And outsiders have no frame of reference. Upon being informed that an offshore directional drilling operation can guide a bit vertically through 6,000 ft (1,830 m) of water and 2,000 ft (610 m) of earth, turn it to horizontal for 10,000 ft (3,050 m), then make it hit a reservoir target 5 ft by 5 ft (1.5 m by 1.5 m), your Aunt Clara might reasonably reply, well, isn't that what they're paid to do?

Still, many people have an instinct about such things. For example, seeing a photo or noting the salient dimensions of the Thunder Horse platform would certainly lead anyone to the inescapable conclusion, "Wow, that thing is pretty big."

Because it is outsiders who fail to perceive or appreciate the incredible in the industry, our job is to inform them. This task is similar in purpose to another TV show, Industry on Parade, a series of how-do-they-do-it short subjects broadcast in the mid-1950s. Although that parade seems comically out of step with the current era of the corporate perp walk, you have to admire the show's efforts to reveal to the public the mysteries of mass production.

It is in this spirit that we arm you with a few eyebrow-raising conversational tidbits geared to the outsider. The next time you are chatting up someone at a non-industry social gathering, these could make you the life of the party:

• High accuracy at great distances may not impress Aunt Clara, but anyone who has drilled a not-quite-perpendicular hole in a two-by-four with their 3/8-in. Craftsman can easily imagine the result of that error compounded over 5 miles (8 km). And this is not the limit. "Ultra ER" (extended reach) wells may eventually stretch 12 miles (19.3 km) from the surface location.

• Looking at seismic squiggles and seeing a potential reservoir 4 miles (6.4 km) underground makes the pharmacist's ability to read your doctor's scrawled handwriting a little less impressive. Direct hydrocarbon detection technology now under development promises to make those squiggles reveal whether the reservoir contains oil, gas or water, and even what kind of oil. It's almost like reading the prescription handwriting and being able to determine what color shirt the doctor was wearing when it was written.

• Try this: Pour a cup of oil and a cup of water into a colander at the same time and see if you can make only the oil flow out of it. Impossible? The industry can do it. Relative permeability modifiers block water and let only oil pass into the well bore. This new technology also reduces water production and disposal, until now a large and persistent problem.

• Those forests of wooden derricks seen in antique photos were clear-cut a long time ago, and surface footprints continue to shrink. Multilateral wells now send up to five lateral well bores from one vertical hole. Imagine a straw that lets you drink five chocolate malts at once - from the house across the street.

• Like video games? Controlling the deployment of a wireline tool in a well in Asia from a laptop in a Houston parking lot makes destroying cartoon spaceships in the video arcade a lot less exciting. And the process is not much harder than pressing buttons on your Game Boy. It's all in a day's work for the petroleum industry, which routinely employs large-scale, remotely controlled devices and processes.

• Do you complain that the office thermostat is set too warm or cold? In deepwater operations, tools and fluids must pass through temperatures near 32?F (0?C) at the sea floor and then into reservoir temperatures of 400?F (200?C) or more. It's like the joke about having one hand in ice and the other in boiling water and being comfortable on average. The reality is that either environment is extremely difficult, and the industry has overcome the problem of working in both of them at the same time.

• Finally, the consensus favorite: The more we use, the more we have. This has made the price of oil the greatest energy bargain, and even today it remains that way (and not out of line with historical prices) when the price is adjusted for inflation. This may not go on forever, but it has gone on for a really long time. This incredible accomplishment - long-term energy affordability - is arguably one of the foundations of our society.

Makes you feel sorry for That's Incredible! All they had to work with were subjects like a guy who could put multiple billiard balls in his mouth. Compared to the industry's accomplishments, those billiard balls were a piece of cake.