A burning human body releases net heat rather than consuming any. The problem is to initially cook away the water in the bodies, which takes some external fuel and makes burning single corpses inefficient. But once you have dried the first corpses in a larger pile and gotten them to burn, the process becomes mostly self-sustaining, you only need to provide ventilation.
The first sentence sounds like a violation of the first law of thermodynamics, although I might not be understanding what Oystein is saying.
You probably do misunderstand.
The rest of what he says is nonsense. Boiling off the water in our bodies will not leave a fuel source that can create a self-sustaining fire for burning more bodies.
Wrong. If you had looked at my full posts that Saggy wanted to stundy, including references, you would know that this is the entire point of my argument: The body contains more fuel than necessary to cook off water, and therefore, once you cooked of the water, there will be fuel left.
Theoretically, if there is sufficient wicking material, a burning body could consume itself except for the bones and teeth.
In the real world you'll need an external fuel source to create a very hot fire to completely consume a body.
Exactly. Theoretically. In practice, as I already posted myself before Saggy came along, you'd probably need a little extra fuel to account for inefficencies, and that's why the indented quote above contains the word "
mostly self-sustaining"
There are no economies of scale. You will never create a fire from burning corpses that will sustain itself to burn more corpses.
Wrong. There are economies of scale.
Saggy's mistake was presenting this quote from Oystein as an answer to a holocaust denier. Pretend Oystein said this in support of spontaneous human combustion and you'll see the problems.
No. There will be no spontaneous combustion because you initially need external fuel to cook away the water. Again, that was the basic premise of my argument, and you managed to miss it. Human tissue is not easily set aflame without prior drying.
Slowly, again, for you: The body, being wet, doesn't burn by itself, as evaporating body water will keep temperatures too low to sustain a fire. So for the first body (or bodies), you need external fuel to cook away enough water. Once you have accomplished this, the body will continue burning on its own, and release more energy in the process than you put in externally to cook away the water. Now that you got your first body (or bodies) burning, you can use the heat of their fire to cook away the water of additional bodies,
without adding any more (or at least much) additional external fuel. The process becomes (
mostly) self-sustaining after you dried your first layer of bodies sufficiently to make them flammable.
Why is this? Because the fuels of the body (fat, dry organic tissues) release about 10 times as much energy by burning than you need to cook away (evaporate) the 40kg of water in an average body.
Could you please acknowledge that you got it now?
