Cute power density factoid, which I owe to Eric Chaisson: humans have far higher power densities than stars.
The solar luminosity is about 4.10^27 W, the mass is about 2.10^30 kg; so the power density is 2.10^-3 W/kg.
Human use ~2800 kcal/day ~ 120 W. Mass is ~80 kg, so 1.5 W/kg.
Isn't that fun?
- Log in to post comments
More like this
A few months ago, Travis Saunders wrote at the Scientific American Guest Blog about the dangers of excessive sitting. He warned that those of us who faithfully log our exercise hours might still be at an increased risk of negative health effects if we spend too many hours sitting at a desk or…
For some reason, the topic of really big rocks came up at dinner the other night, and SteelyKid declared that she wanted to find "A rock as big as the solar system." We pointed out that that was pretty much impossible, more or less by definition, rocks being sub-parts of the solar system.
"OK, how…
"There is no dark side in the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark." -Pink Floyd / Gerry O'Driscoll
It's been another fantastic week here at Starts With A Bang, where we've taken on a huge diversity of topics and run two fantastic posts from our contributing writers: Brian Koberlein and…
There is a beautiful pulsar paper coming out in Nature tomorrow, 28th of October issue (Demorest et al 467, 1081, 2010)
Green Bank Telescope measurements of PSR J1614-2230 show it to be a 3ms binary pulsar with a white dwarf companion in an orbit aligned near perfectly edge on to our line of sight…
So this means ... If we were the size of the sun we'd get *really* hot. And we'd have to eat a *lot*.
Thanks for that.
Our actual output of energy is rather low, unfortunately.
Have you tried that calculation with a B class star? Or a couch potato?