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
In that black mirror episode, half the point was just to occupy the population with something that seems useful, and half the point was that it’s a metaphor for some boring work that isn’t really that necessary, at least from worker pov. It was not about energy efficiency. It would likely be cheaper to literally burn the same amount of calories they feed the workers than make them into food and then electrical energy.
Latest Answers