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
Abysmal.
Nearly all of the chemical energy you consume is “wasted” keeping you warm or making sure Rick Astley’s greatest hit is replaying in your biological supercomputer brain.
Your body expends something like 30% of its metabolic energy on the brain. Critical for human life of course, but useless for brute work.
An internal combustion engine will run around 30% efficiency with the rest being lost as heat.
A human would be somewhere below 5% most of the time, having wasted nearly all the energy input on nonsense like “brains” and “homeostasis”
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