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Energy is pretty amazing! So amazing that as a species we use around 15 terawatts at any given moment!
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That’s equivalent to 15 trillion watts. Consider this average light bulb which consumes roughly 100 watts.
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One single terawatt could power 10 billion of them at the same time.
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Of the world’s energy, the US consumes about 25% , while Google alone accounts for roughly 0.013%.
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This is enough energy to continuously power 200,000 homes.
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Food also contains energy, which is measured in calories or joules. 1 Food Calorie is equal to roughly 4200 Joules of energy.
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So how long would you have to plug yourself into a wall to get a days worth of food energy?
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If we take a standard daily diet for a male of around 2500 Food Calories,
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we find that our bodies need around 10,000,000 Joules of energy each day.
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Take something like your laptop, which charges at about 50 Joules per second,
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and it would take roughly 55 hours to charge yourself.
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On the other hand, if we charged at the energy input of a microwave which is roughly 1,500 Joules per second, it would only take 1.9 hours!
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Even more amazing is the fact that this much energy would cost roughly 33 cents in North America.
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33 cents for your daily intake of energy! It’s too bad we can’t just plug in.
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But if you took all that energy, how big of an explosion could it make?
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Well, 1 Food Calorie is conveniently equal to 1 gram of the explosive TNT. So if you eat 2,500 food calories in a day,
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you’re looking at the equivalent of about 44 WW2 hand grenades.
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That’s a pretty big explosion!
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But it should be no surprise that energy can cause damage; after all we’ve all experienced an electric shock.
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But how much electricity does it take to actually kill a human?
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Surprisingly little.
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7 milliamps, for as little as 3 seconds, to be exact.
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This is equivalent to a AAA battery straight to the heart.
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You see, electricity actually kills by interrupting the heart rhythm.
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But our body has built in protection, like your skin, so it doesn’t go straight to your heart.
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However with something like lightning, all bets are off.
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In fact, a lightning bolt can hit over 1 billion volts!
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The reason some people survive lightning strikes is based on the path it takes through their body.
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If the heart goes untouched, you can come out alive.
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Which shows you just how awesome and powerful nature really is.
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What may surprise you more is that every minute, enough sunlight reaches the earth’s surface to satisfy the world’s energy demands for an entire year.
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That’s right, roughly 174 petawatts of energy hits the earth from the sun!
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Of course the biggest challenge is finding efficient ways to properly harness this solar power.
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And all this energy and heat are a major contributing factor to the creation of wind
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sometimes so powerful that we see things like hurricanes. But not only can wind turbines take advantage of the wind to create power,
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scientists have shown how they can, in high enough concentrations, help prevent hurricanes.
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Simply put, wind turbines remove some energy from the wind to generate power.
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And simulations have shown that, hypothetically,
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if you put enough wind turbines together in an at risk region,
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major wind disasters could be minimized substantially.
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But apart from this, is wind energy actually worth it? Click here to check out our AsapTHOUGHT video
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where we explore how exactly wind turbines work, how much energy they actually produce,
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and the crazy new technologies that will change our future. I mean, could the whole world be powered by wind?
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We went to the GE Global Research Centre in Germany, a leader in wind energy, to find out.
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There’s a link to it in the description below.
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And subscribe for more weekly science videos!