Dan Melson: September 2014 Archives

Working the Trenches, the fourth Rediscovery novel is available to purchase in the Amazon store. Still only $2.99 on Kindle!

Working The Trenches

Graciela Juarez has been an Imperial citizen for several years. She's got a solid marriage into one of the Empire's most important families. The Empire has been very good to her. For her self-respect, she wants to spend some time with her shoulder to the wheels of the Empire. Pulling the cart of Civilization. Working the Trenches of Empire

here, among other places

Total Human Energy production (2011) 13113 Mtoe * 41.868x10^15 J/Mtoe =

(A) 549.0x10^18 Joules

1361 Watts per square meter strike Earth per second.

Earth's radius is 6371 kilometers, or 6,371,000 meters

We could do complex calculus to account for the curvature of the Earth and surface area therefrom, and the angle of incidence of what strikes, but it all reduces to being equal to a circular disc of the same radius as Earth, or pi times the radius of earth squared.

31% of the energy Earth receives is reflected, so 69% is retained

Earth's Energy received from sun = (B) 173.5x10^15 J/s, of which 69% is retained

dividing (A)/(B) and dividing again by 0.69 out we find

It takes roughly 4586 seconds, or 1 hour 16 min 26 seconds for Earth to retain as much energy from the sun as from *all* human energy sources in a year

multiply (B) by 31,536,000 seconds per year, and we get that on a 'same time period' basis = 5.471x10^24 Joules per year from the sun, of which (C) 3.775x10^24 are retained.

Divide, (C) by (A) and you see that the ratio is 6876 to 1

I did this to four significant figures because that's the limit of one of the figures I had. On that scale, human energy expenditure is just barely a rounding error.

indeed, the sun varies its output by several times this figure

Any notion that what we've been doing controls the planet is hubris