The Cybernetic News Service

[Voltaire]

Originally posted by Drogue
Maniac: Like a plant takes up Nitrates, Phosphates and another one I can't remember to feed themselves, the idea was that those plant structures did that, thus not needed the sun's energy, and converting nutrients into heat, so they could use it. I can't remember how it worked, I just read it somewhere. Might not be right

It's called chemosynthesis, it was discovered in certain microbes in the depths of the ocean where the sun does not penetrate; the microbes make energy by facilitating certain chemical reactions. Essentially heat is produced from the chemical reactions thus enabling the microbes to carry out their metabolic processes without using the sun as a source of energy. The microbes, simply put, substitute solar energy for energy released by exothermic reactions.

On another note, this entire discussion regarding using some sort of bioenergy plant for energy production is absurd. You need to put energy into an organism to get something out of it, and the energy input far exceeds the energy output.

[Haon]

Technically, energy input equals energy output, no energy is lost and it can never be destroyed. What happens though is that a large ammount of energy is wasted and often get transfered into something undersierable. So you dont need ot put more energy in to get a little out, you are gettiing equal out its just that a lot of it is wasted. For example when a car uses is energy, it uses it not only to move, but also to create sound and heat. No energy is lost, its just transfered into a ddifferent form.

[Drogue]

Voltaire: You obviously know a lot more about it than I do. However, as Haon said, conservation of energy. What would the waste be as? Heat mostly, I would have thought, which is what they can harness. However, even being inefficient, if you cannot use the energy form you are putting in, then changing it, however inefficiently, to something you can use is a good thing, no?

[Maniac]

I presume most of the energy used by humans is simply from staying alive: supplying your brains with blood, using your muscles (breathing, heartbeats). My guess is only a relatively small part is used for producing body warmth, making humans very inefficient warmth and electrity centrals/transformers.

[Drogue]

However the kinetic energy has to go somewhere, usually wasted as friction, turned into heat IIRC. Moreover, heat is a very wasteful energy state, for instance, in a lightbulb, most of the energy is lost as heat, not light IIRC.

[Voltaire]

@Maniac Actually it's vice versa. Relatively little energy is used in the maintenance of bodily functions, the majority of food energy goes to maintaining our temperature, the remainder is let off as excess heat.

@Haon As for the conservation of energy, sorry I forgot, what I meant to say was that the usable energy is always lower than the initial input energy. That being that most of the energy is left off as waste heat energy in any energy conversion.

@Drogue But we're talking electricity production here, heat is no electricity and would have to be converted to electrical flow via some method. Currently we do this by using superheated steam to turn turbines thus creating electron flow and thus electricity. Even if there was 100% efficiency in the collection of the heat energy produced by humans (far more than possible), and even if you were using the waste heat energy of the entire human race, you'll be lucky enough to get enough energy to turn one turbine (in fact I strongly doubt that you could muster up that much energy). It simply isn't feasible.

[Drogue]

I accept it's not feasible, but with future tech methods (considering they are robots too) something near 100% could be achieved, and I thought it was quite a bit of heat? I know it's fantasy, but having 5 billion humans, producing 100 BTUs (I think that was what Morpheus said) each, that's still quite a bit. Enough to power 5 billion humans, thus maybe enough to power some robots?

[Voltaire]

average human body releases ~60W of energy, or 60joules/sec which means
~31,557,600 sec/year
which means
60Jx31,557,600=1893456000J or 1.90x10^9J
~6,000,000,000 people on the planet
1.90x10^9Jx6,000,000,000=1.14x10^19J
thus the entire human race would produce 1.14x10^19J

average human body (i.e. 175±25 cm height; 80±20 kg weight) requires ~8,640,000 joules/day
8,640,000Jx365.25days=3155760000J or 3.2x10^9J/year
3.2x10^9Jx6,000,000,000=1.92x10^19J
the entire human race would consume 1.92x10^19J

1.92x10^19J-1.14x10^19J=7.8x10^18J
7.8x10^18J of energy left for work (assuming 100% efficiency in heat collection)

the world consumes ~3.4x10^23J/year
so you come out 3.399922x10^23J short of the energy requirements
in other words the human power plant would only produce ~0.00229% of the energy requirements of the planet.

Keeping in mind the fact that these calculations were made on the assumption that you could somehow harness the waste heat energy released by humans and turn it into electrical energy; that is a rather large assumption since its not possible to perfectly recover the lost heat energy, in fact the efficiency of waste energy recovery are extremely low, ~1-2% would be a generous estimate.

[Voltaire]

Originally posted by Drogue
I accept it's not feasible, but with future tech methods (considering they are robots too) something near 100% could be achieved, and I thought it was quite a bit of heat? I know it's fantasy, but having 5 billion humans, producing 100 BTUs (I think that was what Morpheus said) each, that's still quite a bit. Enough to power 5 billion humans, thus maybe enough to power some robots?

The 100 BTUs is not the energy required to power a human body, rather it is the heat energy released by the human body per hour.

[Drogue]

I know, that was supposidly how much was released by one. Thus, hot much they produce that can be taken by the robots.

[Zero]

Originally posted by Drogue

Calc, is that a DL, or just a changed name?

changed. if u notice all posts beforehand are now "zero's"

EDIT: also look at my sig...

[Drogue]

I do now Not sure if it was their when I posted

[Corellion]

Now let's look at another method.

6 billion people on Earth...
Assume only 1% per year are used for fuel and the other 99% are breeding stock.
The average human mass is 70kg (that's on the low end).
The human body is 66% water, on average.
That means the average human has about 45kg of water.
Water consists of 11% hydrogen.
5kg of hydrogen in the water in the average human being.
That's 4900mol of hydrogen in the average human being.
Put together, that makes 2.94 * 10^11 moles of hydrogen per year with only 1% of the human population.

Now, let's throw that many people into a fusion reactor. The contaminants will decrease efficiency, so let's be outrageous and say we only get a 1% return on our investment.
4 hydrogen atoms fuse to make helium, and saying only 1% yield energy, we get 4.42617*10^32 fusion reactions.

Each fusion reaction produces 26.7MeV of energy. Now, that equates to 4.272*10^-12 joules.

Multiply everything out and you get, yearly, 1.9*10^21 J of energy. I've used conservative estimates on the efficiency (you'd get more than 1%, and there's lots more hydrogen than just in the water). In addition, the remaining 99% of humans would be feeding themselves, and going about their daily lives, with little to no maintenance.

Couple this with other energy forms (keeping in mind that human fusion is not a very efficient form), and you get lots of energy.

Not a practical solution, but just showing how much better you can do than human heat energy (and if you want, you can use the other 99% for that) .

Now the big question is, what would you do with a 60 teraWatt power plant?

Edit: An interesting point, is that, globally, .9% of the population dies every year anyways. Now, just curb that population growth to zero, keeping the population stable, and you're fusing 2.1% of the population every year. And you're helping overpopulation!

[Drogue]

Good work Function Corelli Omega- , very thorough logic. I see promotions in your future.

Originally posted by Corellion
Now the big question is, what would you do with a 60 teraWatt power plant?

I am sure TKG and Cedayon can come up with some very useful applications for such energy. Now we know what to do 01000111011101101000011001010110111000100000011101 11011001010010000001101100011010010110001001100101 01110010011000010111010001100101001000000111010001 10100001100101001000000100100001101001011101100110 0101

[FlameFlash]

That's just disturbing...

Water should be sailed upon or be part o' rum, not used in energy experiments!