Oystein
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Dec 9, 2009
- Messages
- 18,903
...
But I have a gruesome fact for you, jammonius: when you set people aflame with jet fuel, the burn! I would have to do some research (the kind done to figure out how they pulled off Auschwitz), but am fairly certain that the average human releases more energy simply by burning to ashed than the most advanced DEW of our time can unleash on a target!
...
Yeah, I went down that road...
I flipped a little through Wikipedia and also googled food calorie tables to come up with the following numbers for 1 human adult:
Average weight: about 70kg
Body containsm, on average, about
25% fat - 17,5kg
40% muscles - 28kg
14% bones - 9.8kg
21% rest - 14,7kg (skin, organs blood...)
57% water - 39.9kg
From a table of food calories I get the following ebergy contents, in kilo-Joules per gram:
bacon: 33kJ/g
lean meat (muscle): 5kJ/g
I made the following assumptions:
bones: 0kJ/g
rest: 3kJ/g (it's organic matter, after all)
Do the math: That's 7,62*108 Joules of energy per person
Alright, when a human body burns, you need to cook off the water first, to make it burn. How much energy must we subtract for that? Let's see...
To heat 1 gram of water by 1°C: 4.18J
Bodies are already at 36°C, so to heat body water to 100°C (boiling point), we need
64°C * 39900g * 4.18J/g/°C = 10.674.048J
In addition, we need to add energy to transition water from liquid to steam, and need for that
40.657 kJ/mol or, since 1mol of water is 18g, 2.259kJ/g
That's 39900g * 2.259kJ/g = 90.134.100J
To boil off the water of an average adult, that's a total of 10.674.048J + 90.134.100 J = 100.808.148J
This gives us a net chemical energy per human body of
7,62*108J - 1.01*108J = 6,61*108 Joules
Compare this to the capacities and capabilities of the most advanced high-energy DEW in the arsenal of the MIC today:
Power: on the order of 5MW
Can shoot pulses of 5s duration
= Releases energy amount of 5.000.000W * 5s = 2.5*107 Joules
(1J = 1W*s)
jammonius: Your best DEW can direct an amount of energy at a target that is about 4% of the energy you get from burning 1 human body.
But there were more than 2000 people who burnt to bones in the event!
This alone released 50.000 times as much energy as the most advanced high-energy DEW can!
Last edited:
