Ignoring the blatant ethical issues associated with this question, I’m genuinely curious from a scientific standpoint how efficient the human body is at generating energy. I’m a chemical engineering major and after learning about combustion engines and steam generation, there’s a great deal of inefficiency. After taking an intro to biochemistry course it seems like the human body is incredibly efficient at energy efficiency, using food as the fuel. I was also made curious by that one black mirror episode where people rode those standing bikes as their job, I think it was for power generation but I can’t really remember. Would it actually be a good substitute in terms of equivalent power and clean energy? Again, a horrible hypothetical given the history and current use of people in such dehumanizing ways, and if this really isn’t something to be discussed, I apologize.
In: Engineering
The human body is incredibly efficient at converting food into energy for its own use, but for outputting/ transferring raw power, we are extremely inefficient.
Take a look at some of the attempts at human-powered flight. A lot of engineering had to go into the designs and they still are not an effective mode of transportation.
A small, solar powered, electric motor could theoretically sustain that machine in flight at a steady pace for a much longer amount of time with far less input requirements.
To supplement the extra energy needed to create machine work from humans, the caloric intake would need to increase, which would mean an increase in need for food supplies, which would likely offset emissions from wasted electrical energy in the form of heat: and to be clear here, I don’t have numbers to support this, just a hypothetical statement. But then one could argue that the processes to make the solar panels and wires and motor are also environmentally harmful. It’s a tall order to ask that anyone be able to solve this mathematically taking into all possible factors.
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