Ah, the true meaning of fossil fuels

biomass produces construction materials that is used to build protection. Of course if you didn't harvest it it became a dense cover for dangerous creatures like velociraptors.

Listen up, these are the most important gardening tips of your life!

velociraptors were desert-dwelling creatures. It's like saying foliage is a natural hiding place for a fenneck fox

@@Ptaku93 Are you suggesting that foliage is instead a synthetic hiding place for a fenneck fox? The foliage is natural. Any hiding place for any creature created by the foliage is natural. Naturality is a transitive property.

No, it's a webcomic.

Meatspace :D That makes me happy

Fear not, what you see in this video is merely the three-dimensional projection of his true two-dimensional body.

That's merely the 3D projection of a 2D cartoon, don't be fooled.

honestly I'm not convinced it even IS the worst idea in that book

@@Josh-ks7co it's more silly than the average person can possibly conceive! It brings into play ontological questions of what the word "sillyness" means (which is pretty damn silly). It takes a brain the size of a planet... oh, never mind!

But it only will take 36million years to pay for itself!

Not nearly as expensive OR destructive as the Earth-Moon fire pole.

Earth not destroyed. Disappointed.

well, that was a reader question... it's not *his* most silly idea

Nah, that's the worst idea in a _different_ book of his.

.....but can you use a near light speed baseball to power your house? Would it have enough energy?

@@thomasboys7216 It _would_ have enough energy to power your house for years. Unfortunately, your house could not coexist on the same lot with a near-lightspeed baseball, and would be consumed by said baseball's expanding sphere of incandescent plasma.

The baseball game at least makes for a handy weapon in a total war (of annihilation).

It's a valid statement. They just are even less efficient than our own crappy solar collectors

@@nickbrutanna9973 Can you give me a link to solar panels that grow on ground. I tried to google them, but i failed.

@@skyrask1948 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis perhaps?

@@skyrask1948 I got u fam middle.pngfans.com/20190502/z/solar-plant-drawing-png-solar-power-solar-energy-c-367cae9eaf9cd4b6.jpg

Clearly means they're like solar panels in that they collect energy from the sun.. and they just happen to sit on the ground....

He is, they used CGI for this video to make him look more normal.

He is. This is a stick figure wearing a skinsuit.

Alas, we now have no more budget for the rest of the year.

I like to think they use the same GFX company they used in the MCU for Michael Douglas and Sam Jackson

@@uss_04 🤫

Well your property only extends a little underground so you wouldn’t be able to do that

Me too, it's in his book though

In the US at least, most land is owned “to the center of the Earth.”

@@gregoryc29 No, not even close - that heavily depends on the state. In many the property and underground rights are sold separately. Even where not there are many other limitations in place. This can be as bad as an mineral-company showing up and start creating tunnels just 5m under.

@@ABaumstumpf Technically, the land isn't even owned. In the states, we are tenants. Check the abstract, we technically rent the land from the U.S. government, as with everywhere in the world. I do believe in the US, we usually possess most mineral rights though, but that also depends on state.

How much did you pay for the panels? Around $15,000?

@@MantasXVIII I have 7kW panels with 5kW inverter, paid about 7k$. ROI in 4-5 years even though electricity is cheap where I live.

Cool that you’re using good sources of energy

@@CemKalyoncu and how fast does their efficiency drop off, 10% every year?

@@MantasXVIII They are guaranteed to have I think 80% (or 70, not sure) efficiency up to 25 years!

Wait! There's a comma in the title! Randall is safe!

Haven't you watched the matrix?

But most athletes only produce 100-400W. And ... drawing cartoons is not particularly metabolically stimulating. Anyway, you'd have to feed Randal if you want him to keep your giant mouse-wheel going, so you're back to biomass, but less efficient.

You could get about 100-200W out of his body heat, or you could drop him in a geothermal vent, and use the heat to burn his body and get all of the caloric energy from his body without the expenses of cremation.

Yup, you can purchase his books to use as fuel. Just.. be aware that is one of the books turn out to be cursed, it may not burn. (if you don't get it, read the How-to book)

It doesn't stay there, though, and you have to stay in your lot.

I'm just curious one calculates how much coal, uranium, etc. is under a 0.2 acre suburban lot? It's not like we're going to run out of coal in 12 years.

@@timothyconover9805 He gives the explanation at 0:19. Your lot is assumed to have a fraction of the US's resources proportional to its size, as if all energy resources were distributed exactly evenly across the country's total area.

@@timothyconover9805 however, in 12 years, our weather is going to be so bad that anyone found to be powering anything as large as a house with coal is going to be met with a group of angry suburbanites with pitchforks. At which point it will become a "human-body-powered" house for about 10 minutes. I'm a little disappointed "witch-burning" wasn't considered as a power source. ;(

IIUC above a certain altitude space treaties kick in (google "common heritage of mankind") and you can't extract resources by default anymore.

Except biofuels are relatively common. I'd love to see the difference if growing, say, corn instead of trees.

Yeah, but at the same time, it's kind of the face you'd have imagined him to have. Which is weird, given that all you had to go on was a featureless stick figure.

Link me, when did he give a Ted talk o.o

@@CraftBasti Absolutely, here it is: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/f5xkdrShm-CUgJ8.html

Hi Frost, because of time, we weren't able to go into all the ideas Randall laid out. You can find out more of the ideas from chapter in the book here: xkcd.com/how-to/

if it's the average geothermal energy the entire world has that seems like it would not actually be a lot

No

I would expect hydro from rain (on one urban lot), to be difficult. Water needs to drop a very far to create power needed to generate the kind of power a typical house needs.

I do not know your property.... but I would assume that you do not have 390 KILO_watt_peak panels installed... 🤔 Otherwise, I would consider a 16kWh battery a bit small 2x11 MW solar generation ...

You could presumably look at plans for real wind farms to see what kind of spacing is optimal for power generation. One turbine the size of the typical suburban plot of land could power many homes, so share a bit and you’d be fine. It’d also be pretty expensive. Solar is way more cost efficient for this sort of situation, and frankly looks better, as long as you aren’t putting up a panel the size of your lot... Actually, I’d be curious to see cost vs cost for the same kW output.

He did say that you would be able to get enough energy to power your house and about half dozen of your neighbors, so your next door neighbor might not be able to get any energy because of your turbine, but you could just share the energy you worked up to make up for his loss.

Energy lost is far from negligible. You need hundreds of feet of clear air before and after it passes through your turbine if you want decent generation (you need low turbulence). Also, the turbine needs to be very tall. Wind is not practical (yet?) in urban areas like in Munroe's example.

In ALL of these cases for solar and wind, he ignores the location, seasonal, and intermittency issues buried in the problem. The sun drops pretty close to one kilowatt per square meter (see "Solar Constant"), so to provide your house with, say, 200 kw-hrs of power per day, you are talking about needing not less than 200 square meters of coverage for the whole day. Since the sun only shines about half the day, double that, to 400 sm. But really, thanks to clouds, the sun moving across the sky, etc., you really only have PART of the day's power at that level (see "Solar Insolation, Map, USA") -- which runs from 7 to 4 kwH/sm/day -- so figure out where you are, divide 200 (or 100, look at your electric bill to figure out what your max usage probably was -- call it 2x your daily usage to be "safe") by 4,5,6,or 7 and you'll get an actual idea how many sq-m panels you'll need. 25 to 50 sq meters is not huge, but it's not all that small, either -- we are talking a segment that is 25'x18' for that 200kwh instance. And it'll cost you probably something over US$10,000 -- the national average is about US$20k for 6kw, for a 2500 sq-ft home. THEN let's recall you need to store it, so you can use about half of it at night. So, more money for batteries. Did you want to sell the excess? That requires a split setup, so you can sell it to the power company. As many people in Cali have found out to their dismay, having solar hooked up to sell to the power companies does not mean it goes to your house when there's a blackout. Psych!! This requires yet another expensive setup... So when the government starts MANDATING this stuff, as Cali has, they're basically making home ownership into something impossible for most people... even in those areas where property values are not already insane. OH. Then there's CLEANING. Solar panels, with only about a 20% coverage of "stuff" -- dust, soot, etc., -- lose up to 50% of their capacity. So you need to clean them regularly. And where are we placing them? On the roof? Yeah, this is a popular place. And are you aware of what the second most common cause of accidental death in the USA is? YUP. Falls. So, you're going to be out on that roof regularly cleaning these off... even (or especially) when it's snowing. Sweeeeeeeet!

@@nickbrutanna9973 he uses average yearly production and divides it by the hours in a year to get to the average power. But even then, solar provides way more energy than a single house needs. Typical capacity factors for fixed solar in the US are 7-12%, so that still leaves you with at least double what you need for an average house. Insulate it a bit better and it's a lot less. Drive electric and you can even power your average daily direct energy consumption. The only thing you can't power is the energy associated with producing all the crap you buy, which is fairly significant.

Thanks, Stephen. For the sake of easy comparison, he assumed all resources were evenly distributed. Of course in reality, all of these resources do vary depending on where you live. So in Winnipeg, the long summer days might be great for solar, but you're correct that the winters/cloudy days/nights would be a challenge.

@@dirty_mac thanx for the laugh.

@Michael Yu: As a Winnipegger, I can agree with your statement.

@@alexkramerblogs Thank you for that!

Yes, this is part of the reason why all these different solutions have been further developed as they are. If it was one size fits all, well, no reason to keep working on the rest.

Relax, he completely fucked up the biomass calculation from the very start.

It doesn't really matter how he extracts the energy. He is turning carbon and hydrogen (from the tree) into carbon dioxide and water. I have no idea how he got his number (so it may be incorrect) but the method is immaterial to these sorts of calculations.

Do the thermophillic bacteria produce more heat than burning the biomass? Burning would get you maximum efficiency, though it is perhaps less efficient in other ways. ​@@marvinkitfox3386 could you provide better calculations for us? The problem I see with it is that he chose trees as his biomass, when he could have chosen something much faster growing (I suspect this is the reason his numbers are so low). That being said, the most efficient photosynthesis is somewhere around 1%, compared to solar panels which can regularly get something closer to 15%, so biomass is never going to be able to power an average home in this way.

@@IanXMiller His figure of 38watt, implies that his 0.2 acres of forest grows a total of 60 kg of wood per year, only. 2 tons is closer to correct. Making his calc for wood off by a FACTOR of 31. Planting pine on that 0.2 acre grows enough wood to sustain about 400watt *after conversion inefficiencies*. And Pine is about the shittiest source for biofuel you can imagine! Grow maize, it is more than twice as photosyntheticaly efficient, and produces its fuel in a much more convenient form.

@@marvinkitfox3386 but planting something like maze would rapidly deplete the nitrogen in the soil, unless you also planted nitrogen fixing legumes with them, which would offset the amount of maze you could grow. But maybe you could eat the legumes and harness your flatulence for more energy. But all in all, a solar panel topped wind harvesting tunnel would probably be the most efficient. Im being kind of silly, i should go back to work.

or fusion

His numbers are wrong for uranium. The average suburban lot (800 sq metres) to a depth of 1metre contains 3 kg of uranium. That is enough to power the house for centuries.

@@michaelvandermeer6416 That's an interesting stat, do you have a source for it?

@@spacewolfjr I calculated it using average lot size, average soil density and average uranium content. Depending on sources for the above data, I get between 3 and 8 Kg Uranium. That is enough to power a house for 1000-2000 years.

Others have pointed out that I neglected the Thorium, which is true. This means I have underestimated the number by 1000's of years.

If you mean xkcd, then yes, you're right.

If you live in the polar regions, there's no sunlight at all in winter. And when there is, your entire neighbourhood will taste the shadow of your panel once a day, unless the panel is very small. But I guess the average plot is at the average latitude of US plots of land.

Biomass is also powered by the sun.

@@vornamenachname5267 Coal, too, if you go back far enough.

Biomass uses sunlight and the sun is outside the plot.

How about thermal changes between night and day? That should be relatively easy to extract.

Johannes Halvorsen Good luck fitting one with a positive energy return on that lot.

@@pseudotasuki we haven't even made any that produce a net positive energy output

The next guy who comes around with this wishful thinking trip of the Garden of Eden Thorium reactor that has not run one year with acceptable economy and safety - will be dissolved in molten salts. :)

Yeah that's the goal

1 ton * 100m = .272kwh However if you are manually resetting it. 2 lots of 1kg * 1m , while one falls you reset the other one

the average amount of thorium under a given amount of land would be negligible, there are no rich deposits in this scenario

@@enzldavaractl8345 The video states the "average" lot has 1.5 ounces of Uranium. Thorium is 7 times as abundant as Uranium, which works out to 10.5 ounces. Nothing was said about deposits in the video. Also, a Liftr reactor can extract all of the 10.5 ounces of Thorium into power where a standard Uranium reactor can only use about 1% of the uranium in the fuel rod. Hence where the uranium only lasts for a few months a 10 ounce ball of Thorium can last several decades at least.

@@michaelmorris4515 You gonna turn your lot into a big hole in the ground for 10.5 ounces of thorium?

@@mikemhz You're being intentionally obtuse for the sake of being argumentative. The video is about energy potential - not the logistics of getting the stuff out of the ground.

Taking in that much energy in such a short period is difficult.

@@oliverspin8963 It is difficult, but is it impossible?🤔

Lightning is a bad source of power. Too infrequent, and too strong when you get it. But consider atmospheric electricity. The normal earth static field, not the nasty stuff from convection currents in thunderstorms! kzfaq.info/get/bejne/aNiGl6iZ3rO2ZnU.html

@@veryInteresting_ Currently yes. We don't have big enough batteries for that, and they can't absorb that much power in half a second without frying

@@Xencam a lot full of super capacitors maybe ?

am scientist, can't calculate. but eventually you run into the issue of the FAA being upset that they have to route airplanes around your humble abode if you build tall enough.

@@_topsy Ok, but you're thinking too small, they have to also route the ISS & Mars & many galaxies around the solar panel too :D

Hook an anchor to Moon and have it pull your generator.

@@pRahvi0 Maybe that could work, I heard that the moon moves away from earth by roughly the same speed that your nails grow...

Have a lot of that on your lot, do you?

@@Ni999 Thorium is several times more abundant than uranium, and you can use close to 100% of it as nuclear fuel without refining, versus only around 1% of uranium.

@@DenebTM Destroy your whole property and refine every ounce of dirt to access it 🤦‍♂️

@@DenebTM Thanks for the commercial but you didn't answer my question and you didn't get the point.

​@@mikemhz Do the same with any other non-renewable fuel.

"Averaged over the course of a year, this food that rots in one day has enough calories to sustain us for the entire year!" - starves to death 3 weeks later

“Averaged over the course of a week, setting fire to your car will keep it warm enough to comfortably live in it.”

You keep your thermostat at 38? C or F that's really odd...

@@robloughrey What's extra strange is adam is turning ON the heater at 38 degrees. I think he may be an alien.

Hey Corey! Randall actually covers several more energy sources in his book. For the sake of time, we only were able to cover a few with him. But he dives into nuclear energy and reactor technology in the book (as well as geothermal, hydropower, fossil fuels, and destroying the fabric of space time). If you're interested, I'd recommend checking it out.

@@Grist what abou fusion

He mentioned that covering your entire roof is already more power than you will ever need. This means solar power on every roof is fine for a whole town.

The others can be included too, except biomass

Joys of a grid - it's generally sunny somewhere!

@@tompw3141 Especially at night. A grid which could compensate day and night would have to reach around the whole globe and needs cables under the ocean.

@@tompw3141 Especially in a European Grid. And you have a lot of pumped hydro.

@@norbertfleck812 Fair enough - I should have said "it's generally sunny or windy somewhere!"

@@tompw3141 That's a very common fallacy. Even on a continent wide grid, we have whole weeks when neither sun nor wind is delivering more than a few percent of the installed capacity. And the sun sets on windless days, too. Every evening. For further details (with true, real data) see www.smard.de It's the official website of the German Federal Power Network agency.

The world has 15 million tonnes of lithium reserves, and an area of 510m km². Randall assumed a lot size of 0.2 acres, so your fair share would be 23g. That's maybe an AA battery.

@@tompw3141 15 million tons / 11 billion people. = 1.3 kg I don't know why the 510km^2 area is relevant. From wikipeida: The battery requires from 0.15 to 0.3 kg of lithium per kWh So about 5kWh.

​@@catprog The question was "how much lithium is there in an average lot?". So the number is [world lithium reserves] * [area of lot]/[area of world].

There are solar panels specifically meant to heat water, so that could work to supplement your heating system if you use classic water-based radiators for heat. Although usually these panels are used to supplement hot water consumption in something like a shower.

Live in a glass house.