• @garfaagel
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    16211 days ago

    cal≠kcal

    1 gallon gasoline contains 31 million small calories, while the human caloric requirements are given in large calories. 1000 small calories = 1 large calorie. So the calculations are off by a factor of 1000. The confusion stems from the fact that both are commonly referred to as “calories”, for some stupid reason.

    So in reality you would have to drink another gallon in just 2-3 weeks.

  • @[email protected]
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    5011 days ago

    Obviously a good joke, and of course obligatory cal/kcal discrepancy here. This just seems like a good place to put this info:

    Calories on labels are for calories absorbed, not for calories in the food (same with the 4/9/4 rule). So it’d be much less for gasoline, if it were possible to label with nutritional info.

      • Cethin
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        11 days ago

        I’m assuming 31k kcal, which confusingly everyone calls a calorie. There’s no way it’s only 31kcal.

        • @[email protected]
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          511 days ago

          This is correct. Everyone in the US calls a kcal a calorie. I learned to distinguish them with big “C” and little “c”, but I’ve just looked it up and this is apparently not so common. I guess ppl who are aware of these things just go with the SI unit of kJ.

  • @[email protected]
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    11 days ago

    Gasoline has the energy content comparable to cooking oil (biodiesel among other things is made from used frying oil from restaurants at least where i live)

  • @[email protected]
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    1210 days ago

    People here talk so much shit about reddit, but post shit from reddit, copy reddit, and talk like redditors.

  • @[email protected]OP
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    712 days ago

    I didn’t do the math, but a person’s got to do more lifting in those 34 years than a car traveling 30 miles at 60 mph carrying 4000 lbs, right?

    • @[email protected]
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      1111 days ago

      Without a doubt! Humans and life in general is uber efficient in terms of energy use. Most of the energy of a car is not directly spent for the work. Work is done when moving mass from a lower to a higher place and accelerating it to a higher speed. But once you have accelerated the mass to the cruise speed, it actually does not require any energy to maintain. Rather, the energy is spent by the car to heat up the air, move it around, wear the road and the tires, and make noise.

      We use cars because they are muuuch more powerful than humans, at the cost of wasing a lot of energy. Try to push a car uphill, you won’t ever succeed without pullies which makes it even slower. Doesn’t matter how efficient you are if you cannot output the minimum power required to overcome friction etc.

      • @[email protected]
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        911 days ago

        On the other hand a human on a bicycle is way more effective at moving around than a human on foot. Somehow the bicycle has created a lot of efficiency.

        • Tarquinn2049
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          611 days ago

          A bicycle allows us to use our strength to go faster, rather than having to move our muscles faster, we can just push harder. It also more directly converts the energy we are consuming into forward momentum than our walking style does. We are pretty efficient at processing the energy out of what we eat and into work done by our muscles, but beyond that, there are certainly locomotion styles that haven’t naturally evolved yet that would singnificantly improve how fast we could travel using that energy. Until then, we got smart instead, which really helped.

          There are technically types of wheels in nature, but not in animals, the way alot of bacterial flagella operate is basically a wheel. Or more accurately a biological chemical/electric motor, but it spins anyway. And some of them can rotate either direction by engaging a protein cluster that effectively acts as a “reverse gear” like a transmission.

    • @[email protected]
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      1411 days ago

      Got you fam -

      “Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life.”

  • @[email protected]
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    511 days ago

    So apparently they’re starting to create machines with biological parts. I wonder how long until we get artificial stomachs capable of using anything not explodey or caustic for fuel?

    • @BlueMagma
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      511 days ago

      We used to have self driving vehicles running on water and hay.

    • @[email protected]
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      411 days ago

      It would already be awesome if we could hack or genetically engineer our gut biome to produce all needed vitamins and proteins out of carbohydrates and fats. Theoretically then we could live just off of sugar or oil. Plus some minerals.

      • @[email protected]
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        111 days ago

        Right? And can we get some kind of metering system so we don’t pack on extra fat?

        People are afraid of a cybernetic future but I’m sitting here wondering just how healthy we can make the human body.

        • @[email protected]
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          311 days ago

          That too! I think that has more to do with fat cells and hormonal balances. But hopefully we will make medical advances soon that allow us more control over our own bodies instead of cybernetics.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 days ago

      In order of worst to best case scenario the human body will reject, wear down, or scar around any and all implanted foreign materials or objects. Implants of every type have a shelf life, some long enough to never worry about removal. The best method to secure implants are to bones, but the only nearby bones for the stomach are the hips and spine, with organ cavity linings being problematically in the way for most attachments. For the digestive system it would need to be extremely resistant to corrosion and it would also need to be nontoxic as it would inevitably enter the bloodstream. Even teeth fillings are only rated for about a decade at most.

      So, to be blunt, no such technology exists on this earth nor any speculation on how it ever might.

      • @[email protected]
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        411 days ago

        I think the commenter mean using artificial stomach for machinery to convert food into energy that the machine can use

        • @[email protected]
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          311 days ago

          Oh that makes a little more sense, but not entirely sure why you would do that. We have Anaerobic Digestor Machinery already but they always lead into a combustion engine rather than making an artificial stomach keep an artificial heart pumping.

          • @[email protected]
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            111 days ago

            Well, ease of use I suppose. Just look at us capable of using basically anything as an energy source. Imagine a machine that is not finicky on how they got their energy. The problem for any such machine will always be efficiency. You cannot do more work than the energy that you put in a system. Such machines will need a stomach that is capable of processing “food” at the same/greater speed that it is spending its energy. Not to mention we usually use machine for heavy, energy intensive task, so I doubt such stomach will be useful for any meaningful machine.

    • nifty
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      211 days ago

      What news are you referring to, specifically?

    • @[email protected]
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      111 days ago

      Sorry did you mean powering a machine with food? We have those, there is a university somewhere that throws copious amounts of expired mayo into an Anaerobic Digestor which produces fuel for a combustion engine.