The stardust is a given. As for sunlight, all the energy including somewhat arguably geothermal (using the suns gravity to help form the earth and I guess radioactive material being formed by other stars) comes from the sun and gets converted into chemical energy you eat so you’re stardust animated by sunlight (mainly).
So a coal plant is sort of running on solar power? Sure it took millions of years and a few extinction events to make that coal, but it’s technically renewable, right?
If you could make the sun go boom in a supernova, nuclear power would be renewable too.
Yes it’s converted and stored solar energy and it is renewable if you wait long enough but not on any reasonable timescales for human society. The sun isn’t big enough to become a supernova but if it did I guess you could argue if you wait long enough the material would most likely form other stars a few times until the stellar era of the universe winds down which will happen with or without any beings extracting energy to perform work.
Yeah, it seems that the sun just isn’t big enough for that sort of thing. As the universe is also expanding, the uranium we find in this system is probably locked in here until the heat death of the universe.
If you could expect the elemental cycle to continue forever, you could argue that the elements of nuclear waste would eventually end up in a star which would recycle them into new uranium. The expanding universe makes that highly unlikely, so even in extremely long time scales, nuclear power isn’t really renewable at all.
If the big crunch hypothesis turns out to be true, there would be an infinite cycle of new universes, and that would make every element renewable in extremely long time scales. However, the ultimate fate of the universe isn’t particularly clear at the moment, so who knows really. For the time being, I’ll just assume that the heat death is the most likely outcome.
Yes in the long term there’s no such thing as renewable energy since entropy always increases. It’s a misnomer that only has meaning in small human timescales.
Yeah if the big crunch is accurate and the universe is eternally expanding and contracting then all energy is renewable. Although this is way way outside the scope most normally have in mind when speaking about renewable energy.
The Sun contains approximately 99.86% of all mass in the solar system… everything else is 0.14% orbiting it. Of that 0.14%, the Earth is only a 0.22% fraction.
The Sun loses 130 billion metric tons (130 trillion kilograms) of matter to the solar wind every single day, that’s 260 times the mass of all currently living human beings every single day.
Yup it’s tossing off all that entropy and life is able to locally reverse some of it temporarily
Also we’re chemical compounds, eating chemical compounds to produce more chemical compounds fighting off other chamical compounds to prevent them from converting our chemical compounds into their chemical compounds.
This is the meaning of life BTW
I’m a bunch of wave functions increasing entropy.
Your contribution to increasing entropy is so incredibly insignificant… you could spend your entire life constructing and detonating hydrogen bombs and not contribute as much increased entropy to the galaxy as a single nano second of what the stars are doing.
Meh that entropy was going to increase anyways, maybe just a little slower…
yeah it depends on the level. we are earthdust and eat earthstuff to stay alive. Go one out and its sun. go another and its maybe black holes or at the very least the big bang which could be one more iteration. maybe membrane at that point and vibrating strings and such.
True, sometimes as a joke when I’m meeting someone for the first time I’ll say “omg it’s been so live since I’ve seen you, like nearly 13.8 billion years since we met last”.
Joke’s on you, you probably have drunk an incredible number of water molecules of that person’s recycled urine, particularly if they live anywhere nearby.
Also other organisms, i wonder if it’s safe to say all water is dinosaur piss or not
also, the continuous path from our mouth to our butthole is a glorified twisty straw
A twisty straw made out of stardust where we excrete the leftovers from our sunlight (chemical energy) extraction.
Topologically, we’re just meat donuts
great name for a grindcore/death metal band
That’s why when doing high dives and such where you jump into water from a great height, you need to cross your legs and clench your asshole; if you hit the water wrong without doing so, you’ll shoot water up your pooper and out your mouth. 😌
Not quite out your mouth, but if you’re doing actual dives - don’t face the water when you hit, it will push past your eyeballs into your nasal cavities.
Did you know that dogs cant look up?
A straw and very fine sieve
I am what i eat and i eat enchiladas de mole con queso blanco y cebolla.
I like what you eat and you are what you eat so I like you.
I don’t know how much but I’m sure at least some geothermal energy is due to tidal forces on the earth.
Which would make some of it technically lunar power.
Only when a moon orbits around a planet faster than the planet spin on its axis, then only will this moon transfers its orbital energy to the planet.
Our planet, by the means of tidal forces, transfers a small part of its rotating energy to the moon’s orbital energy.
… in this process most of the rotation energy lost by the Earth is converted to heat.so … you’re saying that earth will eventually slow down the spinning until its angular velocity equals that of the rotation of moon around earth?
That is accurate. However, there is also an effect from the Sun. I think the Sun will do it first, but I have not checked.
How did the moon get there? Would it be there if there was no sun? It’s a shit argument I know but the moon and its mass is in some form due to the existence of the sun.
“Lunar power” arguably came from the initial condensation of matter spinning into the sun - it’s the stuff that didn’t get sucked into the fusion reaction. Now - where did that kinetic energy come from? Likely supernovae nearby not too long ago…
Tidal forces on earth are a combination of the moon and the sun’s gravity
And neither are powered by the fusion of Sol - they got their energy when the solar system formed out of the ejecta from previous stellar explosions - probably not much “big bang” direct contribution to rotations in the local frame.
All of humanity is powered by a massive fusion reactor.
Humans are powered by an ecosystem that is powered by a fusion reactor.
Humanity’s power sources have been largely fossil fuels, stored by solar powered ecosystems eons ago.
Where do you think the energy in the fossil fuels came from?
I’m going to eat exclusively life from geothermal vents just to prove you wrong.
Those vent city creatures don’t get out much.
Take it further. You process energy and also also made of energy.
yeah and what’s crazy to think about is that we’re probably at a point where it took 4 billion years to go from bacteria to humans but it will probably take less than a few million years to settle most of the milky way.
But a few hundred to create our own mass extinction event
True statement. About equally true and useful as: you’re made out of shit and you eat shit to stay alive.
Dude, you eat shit to stay alive? Brother is the irl human centipede.
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