Think about this! Energy Transfers

jimmychung

jimmychung

Active member
All energy transfers are inefficient, and some energy is inevitably lost as heat. Any kind of transfer from gasoline being burned to fuel your car or proteins breaking down macromolecules in your stomach to fuel your body, some of the energy released from any of those reactions will not be captured for the work it is intended, but it will escape as heat. This explains why the hood of your car is hot after being driven and why we all have a body heat of 98.6*F. Once that energy is converted to heat energy, it cannot be changed back to any kind of energy useful to us (at least as far as our current technology will allow us). This heat energy simply escapes off into space. SO, if all energy transfers inevitable lose some energy as heat energy that cannot be converted back to usable energy, will we eventually run out of energy? And since the foundation of life itself is all reliant of energy, will all living things on this planet cease to exist as a result (assuming nothing else catastrophic occurs before that point)?

My opinion is yes.

Discuss.
 
i have a response, you have forgoten about the sun, it provides energy to the plants that are converterd over time to other energys. so unless the sun burns out, no we wont run out of energy
 
ah fucking brilliant! didn't think about that. i'll have to bring that up in my bio class. the question came up and the overall opinion was 'yes'. i thought about it for awhile and eventually also landed with 'yes', but you sir have got something there. bravo!
 
Also, I am fairly sure all of the heat energy doesn't go into space. Much of it stays on earth.
 
this is true, however it is still of no use to us because we cannot convert it into workable energy. it just remains within the atmosphere as heat (with more and more of it being trapped by increasing CO2 emissions).
 
Haha, I thought about this the other day, and I came up with the sun after 5 seconds of thinking.
 
the opposite is happening the energy is not escaping fast enough so the temperature rises because of the sun. this is all just a cycle that we are accelerating with our co2 and such.
 
You didn't think about this enough. Energy escapes us, heats the air, air rises, condenses, it rains, plants use the nutrients, we eat the plants or animals, and the cycle restarts, or, the sun heats plants, blah blah blah. Only a small amount of heat is ever lost to space. The only thing we ever have to worry about is turning energy into an inorganic substance that won't break down such as styrofoam, because it takes water and heat to make that work, and it never breaks down, so essentially we have lost it for our use, but the energy is still there, just in a different form. Law of conservation of energy

 
How about this concept:

If something frozen such as frozen jus, the container begins to form ice. Its because the energy under heat is being sucked from the container and put in the liquid. the air becomes so cold the humidity condenses on the container as ice

 
yeah, the energy is conserved into heat we can't use, so no energy actually disappears, it's just converted into an unusable phase. even if it does rain, if there's no more energy left to do anything with the nutrients in the water, then the plant can't metabolize so the rain goes to waste. energy is needed to catabolize the nutrients, and if all the energy is gone as heat, this can't be done.

i've actually thought about this more, and i'm not so sure if the sun could indeed replenish all the energy that we lose. so it supplies us with heat. great, but that's just what the lost energy is converting to, so that won't help us. the only thing the sun can provide us that can keep giving us energy is it's sunlight. the sunlight itself pumps energy into plants by exciting the chlorophyll electrons and kick starting the metabolic process with ATP molecules. and then the plants grow and other organisms eat them and convert the plants to their own energy in their own bodies, etc. so really, everything depends on sunlight and plants.....amazing.

they say that plants are the reason why this planet is livable. billions of years ago before plants were in existence only anaerobic bacteria existed, but then some of them evolved to use sunlight to create energy (the start of photosynthesis). this primitive photosynthesis from this new strain of bacteria started pumping oxygen into the atmosphere that hadn't existed there before. some of the oxygen molecules bonded together to form ozone, and that small event changed the landscape of our planet from harsh and barren, to rich and fertile.

sorry for that, i just had to spill my thoughts to make sure i had them straight.
 
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