Using people to generate electricity.

[ShawnD1]

I was watching the matrix and I realized that using people to generate electricity would work if done right. Normally we use a heat source like burning coal to boil water then that boiling water drives turbines. Instead of coal, we could use people. Instead of water, we could use a liquid with a boiling point around 30 degrees C. The body heat from the humans boils the liquid and that is what drives the turbines. The efficiency of the system can be increased by injecting the humans with amphetamine. The amphetamine will make them generate a lot more body heat and that would generate more power.

Thoughts?

 

[highland145]

Meth? Then all of the women would look like this.

No thanks.

 

[DominionSeraph]

I was watching the matrix and I realized that using people to generate electricity would work if done right. Normally we use a heat source like burning coal to boil water then that boiling water drives turbines. Instead of coal, we could use people. Instead of water, we could use a liquid with a boiling point around 30 degrees C. The body heat from the humans boils the liquid and that is what drives the turbines. The efficiency of the system can be increased by injecting the humans with amphetamine. The amphetamine will make them generate a lot more body heat and that would generate more power.

Thoughts?

Retarded. Much better to just burn the food that you were going to feed the people.
Even better to just directly use the energy source that grew the food.

 

[bignateyk]

Wat

 

[Slick5150]

You should just have people manually turn the turbines.

 

[FoBoT]

what DominionSeraph said. more conversions at less than 100% efficiency means more losses

so the most effective system would be direct from the source fuel to the needed form (electricity) with as close to 100% efficiency as possible

sticking a bunch of meth heads in a swimming pool ain't goin' to cut it

 

[Rubycon]

They have turnstiles and revolving doors that are connected to dynamos that generate power to charge batteries to power various things like exit lights, wireless networking hardware, and security systems.

Far from effectively subsidizing utility grid sources but at least it's not wasted.

 

[Macamus Prime]

Meth mouth makes me sick to my stomach.

 

[HardcoreRobot]

would be better to harvest excess energy we create anyway. rubys example is good, another one i have heard of is compression of ground tiles by walking.

 

[96Firebird]

If we can test the prototype with you...

 

[ShawnD1]

Retarded. Much better to just burn the food that you were going to feed the people.
Even better to just directly use the energy source that grew the food.

It's actually quite hard to burn food because of all the water. Food is not combustible until most of the water is removed. Humans are great for heat generation because they burn wet fuel. You can eat wet food and still generate heat.

You should just have people manually turn the turbines.

This would be inefficient because a lot of extra energy would be lost as heat. It would be inefficient like a gas engine.

If we can test the prototype with you...

I say we outsource it to China. They have millions of people to throw at this project.

 

[PingSpike]

would be better to harvest excess energy we create anyway. rubys example is good, another one i have heard of is compression of ground tiles by walking.

That's socialism.

 

[halik]

Meth? Then all of the women would look like this.

No thanks.

 

[coldmeat]

If it boils at 30C, why not just use the sun?

 

[highland145]

@halik, and probably a lot lower standards for giving head.



Sad thing.

 

[IcePickFreak]

I was watching the matrix and I realized that using people to generate electricity would work if done right. Normally we use a heat source like burning coal to boil water then that boiling water drives turbines. Instead of coal, we could use people. Instead of water, we could use a liquid with a boiling point around 30 degrees C. The body heat from the humans boils the liquid and that is what drives the turbines. The efficiency of the system can be increased by injecting the humans with amphetamine. The amphetamine will make them generate a lot more body heat and that would generate more power.

Thoughts?

You didn't "realize" anything. Steam turbines extract the thermal energy from steam. Having a medium with much lower thermal energy means it's much less efficient. You can't get more power from less energy magically, it's all about efficiency of the energy consumed to produce work - remember you convert kW to hp (ie work performed.) You can't just expend less energy and expect some obscure loophole in physics to magically increase your efficiency 200%.

 

[arcenite]

I thought about opening a gym based on this exact principle. Whoops I've said too much.

 

[LordMorpheus]

You can generate power from any temperature differential. So you can absolutely feed a human and use the body heat to generate power.

However, you'd be much MUCH better off just burning the food and using that heat instead. The matrix makes no sense (although if you just accept the battery thing it's a pretty great movie).

It would have been more fun if the machines were using the big clump of humans to perform some ridiculous calculations, because the human body isn't a great way to turn food into heat but the human brain is an amazing machine that could in theory be useful to our robot overlords.

 

[Blitzvogel]

I'm surprised you can't buy exercise bikes that turn generators that can charge batteries or send energy back into the grid.

 

[IcePickFreak]

I'm surprised you can't buy exercise bikes that turn generators that can charge batteries or send energy back into the grid.

http://news.discovery.com/tech/human-powered-gyms-do-double-duty.html

 

[Blitzvogel]

That's pretty awesome. Now I just need an efficient and cheap energy storage system for the home!

 

[ShawnD1]

http://news.discovery.com/tech/human-powered-gyms-do-double-duty.html

Wow, humans are such useless pieces of shit. Look at this quote:

At another gym, the Green Microgym, a 3,000-square-foot facility in Portland, Ore., the average workout generates 37.5 watt hours

So it makes enough power to light a fluorescent bulb for an hour. Hooray! Even with meth addicts pumping out 100 watts 24/7 it would still suck.

 

[Blitzvogel]

Wow, humans are such useless pieces of shit. Look at this quote:

So it makes enough power to light a fluorescent bulb for an hour. Hooray! Even with meth addicts pumping out 100 watts 24/7 it would still suck.

Just think, you could maintain a laptop in low power mode.......

 

[rcpratt]

You didn't "realize" anything. Steam turbines extract the thermal energy from steam. Having a medium with much lower thermal energy means it's much less efficient. You can't get more power from less energy magically, it's all about efficiency of the energy consumed to produce work - remember you convert kW to hp (ie work performed.) You can't just expend less energy and expect some obscure loophole in physics to magically increase your efficiency 200%.

I never realized that turbines converted SI units to English units!

 

[Juddog]

The original concept of the Matrix was something that nerds could understand but regular people couldn't - it was basically a distributed computing grid, made from human brains all interlinked together.

Unfortunately that concept was too hard to understand for most people so they dumbed it down to a battery to make it so simple that even an redneck could understand.