Just as any other job, we make alot of people push different kinds of dynamos or any other device capable of generating energy out of movement, like a stationary bike attached to a battery and instead of per-hour making we pay them as they generate energy? how would this work in our society?
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Isn’t this the second episode of Black Mirror?
The energy still has to come from a finite resource, the food that people eat. Compared to fuel burned in a furnace, where anything can be thrown in, people have high demands for their food and might throw it out for small imperfections. As as machine, a human requires relatively expensive upkeep to repair injuries and boost mood. It’s a no brainer to bypass humans and burn the food directly.
Get on a stationary bike and see how much energy you expend to keep it at 100 Watts.
Humans and animals pushing things is the original stone-age power plant, but it’s hilariously inefficient by modern standards.
If you could make everyone on earth pedal up 100W all day every day with no sleep or rest you’d get about twice the annual electricity usage of the US.
Really bad. A good estimate of an average continuous power output of someone a bike might be about 100w unless they’re a trained endurance athlete. Even if you could recover that with perfect efficiency, at a rate of 15 cents or so per kWh of electricity, that’s a gross revenue of about 1.5 cents per hour of activity.
If you’re paying them minimum wage for that, that’s still a horribly cost efficient electricity source.
The amount of energy a human produces per-hour doing this is wayyyyyy lower than the amount of money a human would want as pay for an hour’s work. 1 horsepower is nearly 1kW or 1kWh per hour. Electricity is like $0.15 per kWh so assuming the average human is not a literal workhorse the value of the energy a human could produce per hour is like $0.04
Also, you need to feed people for them to exercise which requires energy and other resources to produce the food and bring it to them… likely more energy would be consumed keeping humans pedaling than they generate by pedaling.
The amount of power a human typically consumes to keep their lights on, electronics running, house heated/cooled etc, is also huge compared to what a human could produce by pedaling a dynamo. So you’d take humans *away* from useful necessary work like producing and transporting food and building houses and other things that pay money… to have them produce *less power than they need to live*, which isn’t worth much economically, so they need to rely on other people to provide them with food and electricity beyond what they can produce themselves, but they also are not making a significant amount of *money* to pay for those things.
If you want to pay people to do something not-very-useful to keep them busy and give them a paycheck, this is a valid form of economic stimulus that has been done in the past. I guess some people might see this as better than handing out checks or lending money at lower rates when the economy needs a boost. But as actual work that helps society function? Not a good idea. If you really wanted to pay people just to keep them busy and make sure they get a paycheck, repairing old roads and bridges and things is the more popular way for governments to “hand out money to workers” while also getting something useful in return.
Treadmills used to be a human-based source of power, and also a criminal punishment. I think that says enough about how much you’d need to pay people to do it all day every day.
You might be able to get an hour a day on an exercise bike out of someone without paying them for it. Call it 1MJ of energy. You know what else will generate ~1MJ of energy a day without asking to be paid? A $100 solar panel.
The bike itself would also cost more than a regular exercise bike.
You’re also not going to generate enough power to satisfy even a single person’s energy usage, you’d need a team of 20 people with several bikes just to air condition a house.
I’ll skip the ethics as OP flair engineering.
We put a human on a bile to make electricity. Good.
We are converting food to calories to electricity. Then a average human can produce just enough for a lightbulb.
We’ll need to maintain hundreds of thousands of bikes and their rigs.
very inefficient.
A human pushing/pulling something to create energy could provide enough electricity to power the few lightbulbs that are lighting the room they are in.
To run the computer that is keeping track of all of the data for this experiment, you’d need an additional 8 humans pushing/pulling constantly for the computer and monitor to be on.
We have virtually infinite energy in the sun; the only reason to go as far as harvest humans for energy would be world robot domination or something similarly bold
That is only infinite energy if the human peddling the stationary bike continues to pedal infinitely. Unfortunately, it’s a fairly well-known fact that humans need to sleep sometimes, and they will eventually die.
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