It’s very silly i know, but I have no idea why petroleum (or other substances) is so important for our industries to work. Why/how can it give us “energy” ?
And why coudn’t “flowers” or “sounds” or “colors” (or anything else) give us energy instead ? I don’t understand how “energy” works at all…
Edit: i don’t even know what flair to put… ( Chemistry ? Ingeeniring ? Biology ?)
In: Technology
Flowers sounds and colors can give you energy.
Energy is just the ability to do work stored in some way.
You pick a stone up from the ground and hold it at about chest height and the stone now contains some potential energy, from the work you di by lifting it up. if you drop the stone the potential energy will be transformed into kinetic energy as it falls, and the kinetic energy can perform work by deforming whatever it is the stone hits when it lands and by making a sound and by heating up a bit.
Oil is just a complicated molecule that you can add oxygen too to turn into different molecules. The resulting molecules will hold slightly less chemical energy than the stuff going in and the difference gets emitted as heat and light.
You can do the same thing with flowers. Pick a flower, set it on fire and watch it burn. Oil and coal is just plant stuff that has been dead for a really long time.
The flower and the original plant stuff that became the oil and coal got their energy from the sun.
Sound is just air moving around in a pattern. You can try to turn that into different more useable types of energy. This is how microphones work. turning sounds into electric signals.
Colors are just different wavelengths of light. They are very much energy and we can totally turn light into other forms of energy like electricity.
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