Our bodies use food for energy so why can’t cars or electronics?
In: Technology
Humans eat meat and plants because it contains the things we need to keep going. What keeps us going is stuff like Fats, Carbohydrates, and Protein. These things are what our bodies are made of, and we need them to keep rebuilding our body wherever it gets weak.
Generators work by burning stuff to boil water. That water is forced through a turbine to make electricity. Just like a boiling kettle forces out a huge jet of steam, we use a giant kettle and the forced out cloud of steam to spin a big turbine. The turbine spins magnets inside a copper tube, which makes electricity. You can spin the magnet other ways, like by attaching it to a giant pinwheel, or pouring water over a turbine.
The thing about using food is that it isn’t good at directly boiling water. It’s full of stuff that doesn’t burn well. Bodies have to go through a lot of complicated stuff to get what they do out of food(energy to move, nutrition, some heat), but it also produces a lot of unusable waste(poop). Just burning food wouldn’t work, because it doesn’t get hot enough to do much and leaves a lot behind.
Things like wood and coal burn well because they have a lot of carbon, which burns well. Coal has more pure carbon than wood, wood has more pure carbon than leaves/meat(food). The purer, the better to burn and the hotter things burn. Carbon burns very well. Meat and leaves don’t contain very much carbon at all, mostly protein, fats, and carbohydrates.
Cars are different because they use small explosions to spin their turbines. Gasoline is not carbon, it burns better. In fact, it burns so well that it explodes. Not much aside from gasoline is good at making those specific explosions. Gasoline requires purifying. It starts off as thick, not very good, crude oil that you have to filter into pure gasoline.
The human brain doesn’t make a lot of electricity, about 100 watts. That will barely power an LED bulb. You’d need a lot of food to make the same amount of power an average home in the US uses in a day.
TL;DR It’s really hard and wouldn’t work as well as what we’re doing already.
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