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
First, I think it might be good to define what energy actually is. Energy isn’t an actual, tangible thing – it’s a quantity of something that allows it to perform work. In other words, in order for something to move or change temperature for example, it needs energy. Let’s say you have a box on the floor and you want to pick it up. The box isn’t going to move by itself, right? You need to do work on it (pick it up) and that requires energy. Energy is a conserved quantity, meaning it can never be created from nowhere or destroyed, it can only change forms.
We can get energy from all kinds of places. First, let’s talk about fossil fuels. These are things like oil, gas, and coal (although really anything that you can burn, like wood, works the same way). These are complex molecules held together by bonds. When we burn wood or oil or coal or gas, we break those bonds, releasing that energy, which we can then use. You could certainly use flowers, because you can burn them, but it wouldn’t be very efficient. Nuclear power comes from splitting the nucleus of a large atom, like uranium. The amount of energy released is far more than the amount of energy released by burning gas or coal. Then there’s renewable energy, like wind, geothermal, solar, and, hydroelectric. These are all just directly converting the energy of something else, like the wind or heat from the sun, into a form we can use.
Sound is also energy. It’s vibrations in the air. That’s called kinetic energy. We could theoretically use that, but it would be extremely inefficient and wasteful, so there’s no reason to. Color is not really a thing. It’s just how our eyes perceive different wavelengths of light. We can and do use light as energy (that’s what solar power is), but color isn’t a thing that has energy. Remember, you can only get energy from something that already has it by changing its form.
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