09-29-2003, 04:20 PM
Hi,
I really don't care enough about this issue to check your numbers, so I'll just pick up where you left off.
so it would take 797,222,222 days for an electric lightbulb to use that much energy, or 2,182,675.5 years. Unless they have a way of pumping over 2 million lightbulb years of energy into the lake in a short time, I don't think we can worry about the temerature change much.
Let's look at a typical office building filled with typical office workers: Say 10,000 sq ft per floor, 6 floors. Not too big, not too small. Usual allocation is about 35 sq ft per person, but that doesn't include the public areas, etc. So let's use 50 sq ft per person as more typical. That's 1200 people in that one building.. Now, each person has about one light, one computer and person themselves. That's (very roughly) about 3 light bulbs. That gives us about 3600 light bulbs in that one office building. So, taking the ratio gives us 600 years for that one degree change. Now, consider twenty such buildings in each of ten cities around one lake and we're down to 3 years and the problem is real.
There was a bad SciFi movie once where a microscopic organism was consuming energy. The scenes flashed from the lab where it was being studied to a view of the city's lights dimming and back to the lab. White coat says, "Wow. Ten billion ergs." I bust out laughing. Ten billion, yep that's a big number. And ten million ergs is about one peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Hardly enough to dim a city :)
--Pete
I really don't care enough about this issue to check your numbers, so I'll just pick up where you left off.
so it would take 797,222,222 days for an electric lightbulb to use that much energy, or 2,182,675.5 years. Unless they have a way of pumping over 2 million lightbulb years of energy into the lake in a short time, I don't think we can worry about the temerature change much.
Let's look at a typical office building filled with typical office workers: Say 10,000 sq ft per floor, 6 floors. Not too big, not too small. Usual allocation is about 35 sq ft per person, but that doesn't include the public areas, etc. So let's use 50 sq ft per person as more typical. That's 1200 people in that one building.. Now, each person has about one light, one computer and person themselves. That's (very roughly) about 3 light bulbs. That gives us about 3600 light bulbs in that one office building. So, taking the ratio gives us 600 years for that one degree change. Now, consider twenty such buildings in each of ten cities around one lake and we're down to 3 years and the problem is real.
There was a bad SciFi movie once where a microscopic organism was consuming energy. The scenes flashed from the lab where it was being studied to a view of the city's lights dimming and back to the lab. White coat says, "Wow. Ten billion ergs." I bust out laughing. Ten billion, yep that's a big number. And ten million ergs is about one peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Hardly enough to dim a city :)
--Pete
How big was the aquarium in Noah's ark?