(OT) Request for an answer to a difficult mathematical question

[Umbran]

Sorry to nit pick, but you cannot use Einstein's theory of relativity (E=mc^2) to calculate the energy in a human body. Einstein's theory calculated how much energy an object would have if you accelerated it to the speed of light, whereupon all the matter disintigrated into dissociated particles of energy.

That is completely incorrect.

The energy described by E=mc^2 is the "rest energy" of the mass in question. Meaning that's the energy inherent to the matter in a frame of reference where it's at rest, not moving.

 

[Feliath]

Evil Fatwizardry

I'm surprised nobody's pointed this out yet... Another cool benefit of this system is that it explains why evil wizards want sacrifices. You'd take a feat which allowed you to convert another (helpless) person's mass to spell energy, and use that in your casting. This is completely evil, of course, but that's fabutastic, we want that.

(Possibly the feat should require horribly mutilating the victim-batteries first, like Aztec heart-sacrifice or something?)

It also corrects one of my personal pet peeves with D&D, namely that I think evil should be the quick path to power and good the hard yet ultimately right path, whereas the game represents them as equal so Heroes Can Kick Butt. Now, go evil, get feat, torch other people for power!


/Feliath

 

[tarchon]

If magic converts mass into energy, chances are the universe is living on borrowed time. Eventually with all the wizards noodling around, a chain reaction will happen, and when it does, it just isn't going to stop. Allowing the extraction of the rest mass of matter as free energy is a recipe for a catastrophically unstable universe.

 

[Xeriar]

If magic converts mass into energy, chances are the universe is living on borrowed time. Eventually with all the wizards noodling around, a chain reaction will happen, and when it does, it just isn't going to stop. Allowing the extraction of the rest mass of matter as free energy is a recipe for a catastrophically unstable universe.

Why? We've been doing it for sixty years with nuclear weapons and reactors, as well as antimatter experiments. Albeit the amount of mass converted to energy is trival (save for total annihalation with Antimatter, but we've barely made milligrams of the stuff) - on the order of 2%.

The reactor in Oslo, Norway, has been working for billions of years now

Anyways, such theories were proposed for all of these things. Simply put, however, it requires a significant amount of energy to create these reactions in the first place, under 'controlled' (word used loosely for bombs, of course) circumstances.

 

[Xeriar]

Originally posted by Umbran

That is completely incorrect.

The energy described by E=mc^2 is the "rest energy" of the mass in question. Meaning that's the energy inherent to the matter in a frame of reference where it's at rest, not moving.

The proof of this is beautifully simple, by the way. It would have been discovered in short order by someone if Einstein didn't, that's for sure.

 

[fuindordm]

I side with Xeriar, in that the energy you can get from the human body would be 3,500 kcal per pound of fat, 1556 kcal per pound of muscle, and probably next to nothing for bone. In other words, a wizard's body slowly wastes away as he casts spells, much like he is starving to death.

This is a phenominally cool concept, and it makes high level spells a truly life-threatening prospect. A wizard could spend months gaining enough weight to become obese enough to survive the casting of a 9th level spell, which would leave him emaciated, possibly turning his skeleton to mush in the process.

I think it's cool, too--but in a more limited form. After all, there's so much conjuration/summoning going on it shouldn't be a problem for wizards to whistle up energy from other planes to satisfy the needs of the more powerful spells.

It lends itself well to a Feistian (i.e. Raymond Feist's Midkemia) system of magic, though--with lesser magicians (adepts?) only able to draw on their feeble corporeal resources (and therefore not getting the big bang spells) for magic and eating tons of food to keep up. Greater magicians (a prestige class?) then learn how to expend relatively little of their own energy to conjure up fireballs and meteors from the elemental planes (gaining access to conjuration and evocation schools).

--Ben

 

[Chun-tzu]

So, if Microsoft invented an artificial intelligence that waged war against humanity, and said machines decided that the best use of humans would be to hook them up to, oh, I don't know, some sort of matrix, in order to extract energy from them, how would people power compare to more conventional sources of energy?

 

[Xeriar]

So, if Microsoft invented an artificial intelligence that waged war against humanity, and said machines decided that the best use of humans would be to hook them up to, oh, I don't know, some sort of matrix, in order to extract energy from them, how would people power compare to more conventional sources of energy?

Terrible. People lying down give off about 100 watts of heat or less. Our bodies have their inefficiencies, but we have to be moving for that to really come into play.

The farm was seen in the Matrix couldn't power the lights to it, for crying out loud. Yes, it's that laughable.

 

[CRGreathouse]

As best I can tell, 185 pounds converted completely to energy would be 1,800 megatons. A small nuke, for comparison, is 20 kilotons; a huge H-bomb is 10 megatons.

(I'm going off memory for nuke power; are 20 kTons and 10 MTons accurate?)

 

[Thief of Night]

Terrible. People lying down give off about 100 watts of heat or less. Our bodies have their inefficiencies, but we have to be moving for that to really come into play.

That assumes the people were being used directly for power. What if the human hypothesis was incorrect and the farms weren't direct power plants but more like subprocessors. The people in the farms would be kept in a REM state constantly, possibly leaving a small amount of their brain's processing power open for the central computer to use and, as an added benefit, any left over bioelectrical energy could then be rerouted to a centralized hub for dispersal.

They weren't pieces of coal being burned to create energy, they were cells in a giant organism.