20 ms·

Could We Run Modern Society on Human Power Alone?

69 points by MaurizioPz 9y ago

apsec112 9y ago
This will never, ever make economic sense. Human labor is orders of magnitude too valuable to waste on power generation. A fit man can, in an hour, produce about 400 watt-hours of electricity, worth about $0.05; his labor would be worth at least $10 in a developed country. In the unlikely event that all modern technology ceased to exist, we would revert to using animals and wood for power, like they did in the 1700s.
- brohee 9y ago
  Someone producing 400W for an hour is not a fit man, it's a star endurance athlete. It's the kind of power top performer in tour de France can provide.
  - ptaipale 9y ago
    Indeed. At a local nuclear power station there's a visitor center where one can experiment how to generate electricity with an exercise bike. With moderate power you can power a tablet computer or an incandescent light bulb, but the water kettle comes on only with actual athletes, and even then, the small light bulb goes off, and even a professional cyclist can't sustain that power for longer than a brief moment. It's just pointless to generate electricity by human power. It's not pointless to ride a bike.
    - diziet 9y ago
      Yes, as a benchmark an 80kg male rider that's an athlete but not a pro (say cat1 or cat2) can produce maybe 1200-1300 watts for 10 seconds, and maybe 400 watts or so for 5 minutes.
  - pipio21 9y ago
    Not to mention that a Tour de France Athlete is consumed during the Tour. You need to accumulate reserves for at least three months in order to last 23 days of effort.
    - jackmott 9y ago
      they could do 400 watts for one hour a day indefinitely though.
      - thrownblown 9y ago
        Bradley Wiggins in the most recent hour record attempt averaged 440 for an hour. 440 watts for a world hour record. 350 watts for one hour, once a day, would be challenging to maintain for one week.
  - workerIbe 9y ago
    On a good day my house uses 8kwh, I suppose I'd qualify as an endurance athelete after pedaling 20hrs a day for a bit.
  - dmurdoch 9y ago
    It takes an Olympic Cyclist mashing until he has to lie down just to make a piece of toast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ
- Asooka 9y ago
  Not to mention that muscle is really really bad at energy conversion. We would be better off designing bacteria to turn plant matter into gas.
- masklinn 9y ago
  > A fit man can, in an hour, produce about 400 watt-hours of electricity That's not "a fit man" that's a trained and fit cyclist, good marathon runners (2h15) were measured at an average 300W over the run[0], a fit adult might reach 200W.h over an hour or two, over long periods of time (e.g. an entire workday) you won't get much more than 100W.h if even that, an average fit labourer would be around 75W.h. And that's mechanical in all cases, not electrical, you then have to factor in conversion losses. While a large rotary generator is ridiculously efficient (98~99%) it doesn't scale down that well (you'll be at about 80~90% at the generator output) following which you still need to remove the losses from the voltage regulator, battery, and possibly AC converter. And then you still have the issue that your base energy sources (people) is not really efficient at converting food to mechanical energy in the first place. Frankly, you'd be better off with a team of draft animals powering a big crank/wheel (with a flywheel for regulation), the average draft horse can produce ~740W (1hp) sustained. There's a reason why they (and oxen and other beasts of burden) have been used until engines became a thing. [0] http://running.competitor.com/2016/11/photos/understanding-running-power-marathon-via-stryd-data_158787 http://running.competitor.com/2016/11/photos/understanding-r...
  - baddox 9y ago
    Yeah, I was humbled by the claim that a fit man can produce 400 watt hours in an hour. I was recently struggling to hit 550 watts PEAK doing row machine intervals for 10 minutes.
    - Someone 9y ago
      That's not surprising. If you do 550W consistently during 6 minutes, you do 500m splits of 1:26 (http://www.concept2.com/indoor-rowers/training/calculators/watts-calculator http://www.concept2.com/indoor-rowers/training/calculators/w...), or a 2000m in 5:44, which is 'only' 6 seconds from the world record (http://www.concept2.com/indoor-rowers/racing/records/world/2000 http://www.concept2.com/indoor-rowers/racing/records/world/2...), and would probably draw the attention of most Olympic rowing teams, even if you can't row at all currently (for the larger boats, it is easier to learn a strong man who is willing to do a 2k that fast to row than to make someone who can row that strong and/or that motivated to compete) ('Only' because you need to do 580W to gain those six seconds. 2% faster = 6% more power)
- mowenz 9y ago
  This is True, but just for genetating and selling electricity on a market. By contrast, Cycling or taking stairs can still make great economic sense, or even much better sense, than driving, when deciding to produce or purchase energy.
  - photojosh 9y ago
    I sold our 2nd car, and just ride to work now. But if we just compare human fuel aka food with vehicle fuel, it's actually more expensive to ride! But it's all the other costs of owning a car that make it so much more expensive: depreciation, licensing, registration, maintenance, blah, blah.
    - mowenz 9y ago
      Hmm depends on which fuel you choose to fill up with. Assuming we choose the cheapest option, a litre of clean burning canola oil can carry you 91km assuming 30 calories/km and 2750 calories/litre @ <$2/L that's a lot better than a car even before ownership and other per mile costs. But most people are in an unwanted caloric surplus so it's really even better than this for those people.
      - photojosh 9y ago
        I'm in Australia, and in our car it works out to about A$0.13/km in fuel. So yeah, you're right there. I choose not to drink pure canola oil because reasons. But if I did, my ride to work would be fueled by 30mL - so I could maybe just start taking a shot in the morning and a shot in the evening. Yummy.
        mowenz 9y ago
        Haha - well if we're going to talk about practicality - it doesn't need to be as tasteless as that - it reminds me of the ultra endurance swimmers sucking hot oil through a tube. You can just make some delicious fried or oily snack, like crisps or chips or sauteed spinach, or fried what-have-you. ...but even a shot of oil is more healthy, pleasurable and hygenic (assuming you burn it all) than filling your tank with petrol :)
- jlebrech 9y ago
  you can pay obese people to lose weight, but you can't have something like that everywhere.
  - zdkl 9y ago
    Stairs on one side and something like a waterwheel on the other. Charge less than a gym and sell it as partially powering whatever local association/charity could do with a break. Credit me when it's a thing heh
    - govg 9y ago
      Proceeding along this train of thought, they've already made a TV show episode out of it : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
    - davnicwil 9y ago
      I know this is a joke, but I wonder if this concept - a gym where the machines generate power - actually could be a thing. It's greener in a pleasantly 'immediate' way - i.e. you could quite literally be keeping the lights, music system, etc on at the gym :-) And what's more, assuming power costs are a non-trivial overhead, it could even result in lower membership fees. If somebody opens a gym like this, sign me up!
      - jlebrech 9y ago
        that would be cool, you power the batteries and those batteries light up the gym and power the usb sockets the the user's phones.
      - gambiting 9y ago
        The gym that I go has machines that are almost all self-powered, with the exception of things like thread mils for obvious reasons. So if you jump on a stationary bike none of the electronics will turn on unless you start pedaling, and to get the fan going you have to pedal for a minute or so first.
      - 9y ago
- 300bps 9y ago
  You're right that it doesn't make economic sense. It also doesn't make scientific sense. First of all, human power releases tons of carbon dioxide just like burning fossil fuels does [0]. Second of all, modern society currently depends on burning millions of years of stored sunlight energy in a matter of centuries (i.e. fossil fuels). Human power doesn't begin to compare. Bang Goes The Theory (BBC show) did an entire episode on this. It's shocking how many bicyclists were needed to run a tiny household [1]. --- [0] http://www.livestrong.com/article/402142-how-does-exercise-affect-breathing/ http://www.livestrong.com/article/402142-how-does-exercise-a... [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vPxuuB_ZBuk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vPxuuB_ZBuk
  - scarmig 9y ago
    The carbon that humans exhale is already part of the carbon cycle. So equilibrium CO2 concentrations don't change, so it's not an issue pollution wise. (This is assuming you didn't use a bunch of fossil fuels to create and transport food in the first place, and you're instead using human/animal power to do that.)
    - kristjansson 9y ago
      However, using humans as power source would increase the amount of food consumed, and co2 exhaled, so this analysis would need to take at least that incremental co2 into account.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - ouid 9y ago
        Whether a human eats the plant or it decomposes naturally, the same amount of carbon dioxide is released.
        erroneousfunk 9y ago
        That would be fine if humans simply walked around consuming plants that would have otherwise decomposed and there were no other resources associated with food production. Unfortunately, agriculture is a major driver of deforestation (and forests are excellent at actually sequestering carbon in the ground). It also requires trucks, boats, and planes to haul supplies to farms, work the land, move water around, and transport the produce to stores. You have processing and packaging that rely on fossil resources (paper, plastic, metal cans...) That doesn't even touch on the impact of meat production, which is several times worse for the environment. Food consumption is absolutely not carbon neutral. You're far better off taking public transportation to work (if available) than walking or riding a bike, if you care about the environment.
- tinus_hn 9y ago
  Note that people pay to waste their energy in gyms.
TulliusCicero 9y ago
> For extra motivation, all exercise machines in our prototype human power plant are facing a jacuzzi & shower where girls are invited to encourage the boys to flex their muscles and generate more power. Of course, the gender roles could be reversed, but during the first experiments we discovered that this is less energy-efficient. Girls don't seem to get motivated by guys in jacuzzis, at least not to the extent that guys get motivated by girls in jacuzzis. Clever, but I'm guessing many will find this creepy or 'problematic'.
- dualogy 9y ago
  Very likely. So?
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  I don't see how acknowledging and using differences in psychology between men and women would be problematic. Could you please explain why you believe it would be?
  - nicky0 9y ago
    Have you never read feminist literature? Everything is 'problematic'.
  - skywhopper 9y ago
    To the extent they are describing observed behavior, it's not problematic. However, stating generalizations in a flip, cliche-confirming way _can_ be problematic, inasmuch as it reinforces the negative stereotypes. In this particular example, I certainly have no problem believing that it's true that among contemporary college-aged individuals from American and European cultural traditions, that on average the men would be more motivated to work out harder by the chance to see scantily clad women in a jacuzzi than the reverse. But that's extremely unlikely to be true for _all_ men or _all_ women. I would doubt that it's true for homosexual individuals. I would doubt that it's true for people raised in cultures that aren't so open to the display and ogling of near-naked humans, or contrariwise, cultures wherein the display of near-naked human form is not so sexualized. This statement would be a cute aside between two people who share a similar cultural background. But in a semi-scientific article describing a utopian vision of power generation, it feels out of place to me. From a global point of view, it's narrow-minded. The generalization given is not true of all cultures. From an individual point of view, generalizations about men and women who do share our culture tell us nothing about the individual in front of our face, who may or may not personally fit in with the profile. From a camaraderie-building point of view for residents of the building, making decisions about how to run the residents' responsibilities based on sexual objectification of other residents is probably not going to build a healthy local culture. And from a purely practical point of view, ignoring individual preferences and motivations is a great way to get substandard performance from everyone. Maybe the chance to see the girls in the jacuzzi would motivate the guys more than the girls, but I am betting it's unlikely to be the best strategy to get the best performance out of each individual man and woman. The point is, it's a mistake to embrace these generalizations as universal truisms. They are anything but. And relying on them leads you to make poor and sometimes hurtful assumptions about other people.
TulliusCicero 9y ago
Makes sense that they'd try this in the Netherlands. The Netherlands has a very high mode share of active transportation (walk/bike). For example, the walk+bike mode share in Amsterdam is 56% (chart includes other cities in Europe): https://charts.datawrapper.de/JsIir/index.html#embed https://charts.datawrapper.de/JsIir/index.html#embed By contrast, most US cities are well under 10%. Even LA, which has pretty excellent weather overall, is only at 4%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share
- hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
  LA is a bad example, as it's also notoriously a car-centric city that is unfriendly to walkers/bikers. Better example would be something like Portland.
  - TulliusCicero 9y ago
    > a car-centric city that is unfriendly to walkers/bikers 1. This is true of nearly all cities in the US, and 2. This feeds into my point about cultures favoring physical activity or not. LA's geography/weather is great for walking and biking. What holds it back are intentional design decisions borne out of culture.
  - emj 9y ago
    But it's cheap to build bicycle infrastructure so LA can get there too.
mtempleton 9y ago
>If students have to generate their own power, they are much less likely to waste it. How far would students go to reduce their efforts? Would hot showers go out of fashion? The article's discussion of human power and incentives to use it beg the point to be made about the right way to fix the tragedy of the commons market failure with atmospheric pollution (and all the other problems with fossil fuels as well). There are so many ways to reduce energy consumption that government regulation can't possibly legislate and adequately regulate (and it's barely even trying at the moment). For example, I try to make a point to bike, walk, take the stairs, use efficient driving habits, and try to often take cold showers. I admittedly do this primarily because I like the exercise, the cold water is more refreshing and better for my skin, I save money, but as as an added bonus I feel some satisfaction that I consume less fossil fuels. But I would do all these things more if I saved more money from it. And taxing bad things is better than taxing good things (like income and investment). I think this is one of the things we will look back from the future and think, what were people thinking--they taxed jobs when they could have taxed something like environmental destruction? What? But American politics are what they are. Our public transport across the country varies, but generally it is laughably bad, and that's just another example of an extremely low hanging fruit to grab.
- ptaipale 9y ago
  The tragedy of taxing bad things is that if the taxation works, and the bad things (e.g. pollution) start to go away, then the government loses tax revenue. And for the government, that's worse than any pollution. So we see all governments going through loops and hoops to tax something bad, and at the same time regulate so that a sufficient amount of that bad thing still happens so they wouldn't lose the tax money.
  - jfoutz 9y ago
    Of course, this can be limited by requiring funds for a specific purpose, such as mitigating pollution. While far from perfect, gas tax going to pay for roads is a decent feedback loop. Tax 'bad' thing, to pay for education about or mitigation of 'bad' thing. the feedback loop solves itself.
  - 9y ago
LoSboccacc 9y ago
well, no: unless the whole campus is also built without machinery, you're trading upfront energy (building with more insulation, building the additional power storage retrieval distribution system etc) with the ability to sustain the building with low energy later on also, James May tried to plug gym machinery to an electric car, the human output is just too low for electrical appliances - think not laptops, but washing machines, vacuum cleaners etc.
singularity2001 9y ago
No
verytrivial 9y ago
I think people are missing the fact this is being run by an art collective. It is trying to ask questions and show what sort of compromises people might need to make if/when other energy sources are off the table. I love it.
- ars 9y ago
  > when other energy sources are off the table Hu? Where do you [they] think the human power comes from? It comes from food - you could just burn those plants for fuel, and skip the useless multiple conversion. What does flowing the energy through a human accomplish? It certainly doesn't change the energy source.
  - verytrivial 9y ago
    I understand the Haber process. I don't think most people know of or care about it. The point their making here is without the magic of current energy supplies things get very weird and difficult, even then you try really hard.
- hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
  As an art project, it's neat. But when it starts to sound like it actually believes its claims that human power can provide the energy needed for modern society, then you can't help but roll your eyes. Right off the bat, the sentence "Unlike fossil fuels, human power can be a clean energy source, and its potential increases as the human population grows." This is utter bullshit. The modern food supply is dependent on huge amounts of fossil fuels and mined minerals to create fertilizer. Much more oil just goes into feeding a human than you'd ever get out of him.
codeulike 9y ago
The post-global-warmjng sci fi novel The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi deals with this scenario: all energy is measured in calories and workers prepare clockwork springs that store energy to power devices. It's a great novel, too.
- pja 9y ago
  Which is wildly unrealistic of course. There’s no material that can take the tension such springs would have to cope with. Lots of SF books ask you to take one or two impossible things as givens in order to tell the story of course, but this one pushed things a little far for me. The repeated "lets rape the sex bot again" scenes didn't help either. Funny how when she gets her revenge, that’s not described at all, just the aftermath. But we get page after page of lascivious detail on her abuse. Frankly, it left a really bad taste & I didn’t want to read anything by the author in question ever again.
  - zero_intp 9y ago
    The very technology of the spring winding is a McGuffin in the story.
no1youknowz 9y ago
Yes of course. Rick and Morty covered that in this episode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CyMqQBO8w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CyMqQBO8w
- cube00 9y ago
  ...and it's blocked.
- ubersoldat2k7 9y ago
  And Black Mirror too.
  - threepipeproblm 9y ago
    Referring to the episode "Fifteen Million Merits". IMO it's one of the greatest dystopian works ever.
- snarfy 9y ago
  And the Flintstones.
- rusk 9y ago
  IIRC Soylent Green had the characters cycling a stationary bike to generate power for their living space.
Turing_Machine 9y ago
"Most work, however, we carried out ourselves." "a human needs to be motivated in order to produce energy." Historically, "ourselves" was equivalent to "members of a disfavored ethnic group and/or social class" and the "motivation" was provided by guys with swords, whips, pistols, etc. I'd rather not see routine slavery/serfdom come back, thanks.
- OldSchoolJohnny 9y ago
  They specifically address your point; you didn't read it.
  - seandougall 9y ago
    But they don't, unless I missed it, address the death toll of large-scale, human-powered construction projects like the Panama Canal (5,609 dead). To me it reads like a romanticization of brutal working conditions, and waving aside the issue of slavery by saying "but we can make it fun!" doesn't really help.
  - Turing_Machine 9y ago
    No, they don't, and yes, I did. Bikini babes aren't going to make someone pick cotton by hand in the Alabama sun for 12 hours a day. That job won't ever be "fun" and "exciting". To be blunt, it sucks major ass. Handwaving doesn't count as "specifically addressing". Sorry.
GeorgeRichard 9y ago
> Each student in the human powered Van Unnik student building is responsible for generating the electricity that’s used in his or her individual room. No elderly or physically disabled students need apply.
- threepipeproblm 9y ago
  You think it's eevil for people to generate their own power, because not everyone can do it?
dualogy 9y ago
Pff, "modern society". Most hunting populations have been calculated to yield 10kcals of food for every 1kcal of expenditure --- our fancy modern fuels OTOH result in more like 1kcal food yield per (non-edible of course) 10kcal expenditure. Not exact figures of course but the difference is that profound. "Human power" thus "wins", then --- but not to "run modern society", of course.
- jackmott 9y ago
  citation needed
  - semi-extrinsic 9y ago
    I don't think so. Only 10-20% of the energy we get from food can be used for manual labour, and that's neglecting rest and sleeping periods. If what GP is saying wasn't true, hunter populations wouldn't be able to survive. This is also why reduced calorie intake is much more effective than increased activity if you want to lose weight.
  - rsynnott 9y ago
    I think the fatal flaw in the argument here is that the hunted animals are seen as a magic free resource; in reality of course they're a limited resource taking up valuable land, and we could never sustain 7bn people or anything like it in this way.
    - dualogy 9y ago
      How's that a "flaw", I wasn't advocating one thing or another. Of course 7.4 billion and growing cannot feasibly all enjoy the bountyful abundance of game and leisurely pace of our pre-neolithic ancestors (or North-American natives etc) =) It's still a plus to acquire just another added perspective on fuel yields for different types of human societies and lifestyles
- prodmerc 9y ago
  That doesn't seem right - surely a modern animal farm yields more food per energy expended than a group of hunters?
spodek 9y ago
One of the more thought-provoking articles I've read in a long time. If you think they're dreaming, I suggest reading it nor for engineering detail, but to try out their perspective. Most people would answer 'no,' leave it at that, and not reach some interesting perspectives they did. Not that it goes into engineering detail, but for the creativity, thoughtfulness, and, most importantly, change in perspective from the predominant views of: we must produce more power! ... we must not change our way of looking at things! I use my rowing machine regularly, which creates resistance through a fan and wind resistance. If it used a generator, I could power most of my apartment's electrical needs. Maybe not my refrigerator, which I shouldn't use when it's cold outside. Most of my electrical bill is fixed costs and taxes, not my electrical use, so a little less power and I could drop my contract. Articles like this one get me thinking that way. If you keep extending how little you can use and what the world would be like if we had to work for our power instead of lazily flicking a switch and not caring about externalities, it's very interesting. Not to mention what it would do to our declining physical fitness, growing obesity, increasing disconnect from nature, and probably mental fitness too. I bought a hand-powered washing machine a while ago and it did the job fine until it broke. Sadly, our culture doesn't promote great solutions that reduce consumption. I'd be happy to wash my clothes under my own power and other things like that if well-built ones were available. I can solve some things myself, but it's a lot easier when solutions are on sale. There are thousands of options for plug-in washing machines and only one or two hand or foot powered. I'd love to see people engineer solutions that work and endure. This article isn't trying to solve all global power problems, but I bet its authors feel something like Stallman when he started writing GNU utilities, which people probably saw as tilting at windmills. Or even Torvalds writing the kernel, though Stallman's platform made his project more plausible to help. By the time people started Wikipedia, they could look back and build on several successful models. Or maybe like Feynman considering how much room there was at the bottom. Contemporaries probably said they were crazy and didn't see the point. I, for one, support people thinking along these lines and seeing how far they can take us -- beyond engineering solutions to new ways of thinking about ourselves in the context of nature. I bet a lot further than most of us suspect.
- jackmott 9y ago
  if you keep extending how little you can use the answer is obviously yes, but then it isn't modern society. you could.more efficiently harness the sun than growomg plants and eating them then working out anyway, so this whole approach fails to make sense at any level.
solotronics 9y ago
from the perspective of an engineer this is stupid. humans can not generate anywhere near the power we consume currently. if you want to experience life as a 5th century serf go ahead
peterwwillis 9y ago
You can motivate people to do manual labor a lot of ways, but this does not mean they will like it. Fear of death is a good motivator. "Hey, let's have fun working out!" is not a good motivator. On top of this, the premise is crazy. They want to have two societies: one that produces technology with non-human-generated power so the other society can use that technology to live on human-generated power.
sunbuntu 9y ago
No, but we might be able to make a modernish (circa 1800) with small-scale wind, small hydro and sailing ships. It is likely, solar with storage, wind and other renewables will power the world in 2040.
King-Aaron 9y ago
How much energy would that same human provide when dried, burned and used as heat energy to power a turbine? I mean, I ask for no other reason than curiosity.
- frankus 9y ago
  About 70 kWh. https://what-if.xkcd.com/105/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/105/ (Hey, you're the one that asked)
  - King-Aaron 9y ago
    There truly is an XKCD for everything
frankus 9y ago
Once you get past the point of "energy I would have expended anyway for exercise/to relieve boredom" you run into the fact that humans just aren't a very good way of converting resources (food and the energy/minerals needed to grow it) into mechanical energy. The modern food system is woefully inefficient at converting primary energy into food calories and the human body isn't all that great at it converting food into mechanical work. Useful amounts of heat are even more elusive. Toasting a slice of bread might take a half hour of vigorous exercise. I'm pretty sure it would take more energy to heat a jacuzzi than one could extract from a dozen people showing off in front of it.
frankus 9y ago
What this misses is that we don't really have any way of "generating" power aside from nuclear reactions. It's all converting from one form to another. In the case of "human power" it's extracting energy from plants and animals that we kill. Wait but Why has an excellent deep dive on this: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html#part1 http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-lif...

69 points by MaurizioPz 9y ago

This will never, ever make economic sense. Human labor is orders of magnitude too valuable to waste on power generation. A fit man can, in an hour, produce about 400 watt-hours of electricity, worth about $0.05; his labor would be worth at least $10 in a developed country. In the unlikely event that all modern technology ceased to exist, we would revert to using animals and wood for power, like they did in the 1700s.

brohee 9y ago
Someone producing 400W for an hour is not a fit man, it's a star endurance athlete. It's the kind of power top performer in tour de France can provide.
- ptaipale 9y ago
  Indeed. At a local nuclear power station there's a visitor center where one can experiment how to generate electricity with an exercise bike. With moderate power you can power a tablet computer or an incandescent light bulb, but the water kettle comes on only with actual athletes, and even then, the small light bulb goes off, and even a professional cyclist can't sustain that power for longer than a brief moment. It's just pointless to generate electricity by human power. It's not pointless to ride a bike.
  - diziet 9y ago
    Yes, as a benchmark an 80kg male rider that's an athlete but not a pro (say cat1 or cat2) can produce maybe 1200-1300 watts for 10 seconds, and maybe 400 watts or so for 5 minutes.
- pipio21 9y ago
  Not to mention that a Tour de France Athlete is consumed during the Tour. You need to accumulate reserves for at least three months in order to last 23 days of effort.
  - jackmott 9y ago
    they could do 400 watts for one hour a day indefinitely though.
    - thrownblown 9y ago
      Bradley Wiggins in the most recent hour record attempt averaged 440 for an hour. 440 watts for a world hour record. 350 watts for one hour, once a day, would be challenging to maintain for one week.
- workerIbe 9y ago
  On a good day my house uses 8kwh, I suppose I'd qualify as an endurance athelete after pedaling 20hrs a day for a bit.
- dmurdoch 9y ago
  It takes an Olympic Cyclist mashing until he has to lie down just to make a piece of toast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ
Asooka 9y ago
Not to mention that muscle is really really bad at energy conversion. We would be better off designing bacteria to turn plant matter into gas.
masklinn 9y ago
> A fit man can, in an hour, produce about 400 watt-hours of electricity That's not "a fit man" that's a trained and fit cyclist, good marathon runners (2h15) were measured at an average 300W over the run[0], a fit adult might reach 200W.h over an hour or two, over long periods of time (e.g. an entire workday) you won't get much more than 100W.h if even that, an average fit labourer would be around 75W.h. And that's mechanical in all cases, not electrical, you then have to factor in conversion losses. While a large rotary generator is ridiculously efficient (98~99%) it doesn't scale down that well (you'll be at about 80~90% at the generator output) following which you still need to remove the losses from the voltage regulator, battery, and possibly AC converter. And then you still have the issue that your base energy sources (people) is not really efficient at converting food to mechanical energy in the first place. Frankly, you'd be better off with a team of draft animals powering a big crank/wheel (with a flywheel for regulation), the average draft horse can produce ~740W (1hp) sustained. There's a reason why they (and oxen and other beasts of burden) have been used until engines became a thing. [0] http://running.competitor.com/2016/11/photos/understanding-running-power-marathon-via-stryd-data_158787 http://running.competitor.com/2016/11/photos/understanding-r...
- baddox 9y ago
  Yeah, I was humbled by the claim that a fit man can produce 400 watt hours in an hour. I was recently struggling to hit 550 watts PEAK doing row machine intervals for 10 minutes.
  - Someone 9y ago
    That's not surprising. If you do 550W consistently during 6 minutes, you do 500m splits of 1:26 (http://www.concept2.com/indoor-rowers/training/calculators/watts-calculator http://www.concept2.com/indoor-rowers/training/calculators/w...), or a 2000m in 5:44, which is 'only' 6 seconds from the world record (http://www.concept2.com/indoor-rowers/racing/records/world/2000 http://www.concept2.com/indoor-rowers/racing/records/world/2...), and would probably draw the attention of most Olympic rowing teams, even if you can't row at all currently (for the larger boats, it is easier to learn a strong man who is willing to do a 2k that fast to row than to make someone who can row that strong and/or that motivated to compete) ('Only' because you need to do 580W to gain those six seconds. 2% faster = 6% more power)
mowenz 9y ago
This is True, but just for genetating and selling electricity on a market. By contrast, Cycling or taking stairs can still make great economic sense, or even much better sense, than driving, when deciding to produce or purchase energy.
- photojosh 9y ago
  I sold our 2nd car, and just ride to work now. But if we just compare human fuel aka food with vehicle fuel, it's actually more expensive to ride! But it's all the other costs of owning a car that make it so much more expensive: depreciation, licensing, registration, maintenance, blah, blah.
  - mowenz 9y ago
    Hmm depends on which fuel you choose to fill up with. Assuming we choose the cheapest option, a litre of clean burning canola oil can carry you 91km assuming 30 calories/km and 2750 calories/litre @ <$2/L that's a lot better than a car even before ownership and other per mile costs. But most people are in an unwanted caloric surplus so it's really even better than this for those people.
    - photojosh 9y ago
      I'm in Australia, and in our car it works out to about A$0.13/km in fuel. So yeah, you're right there. I choose not to drink pure canola oil because reasons. But if I did, my ride to work would be fueled by 30mL - so I could maybe just start taking a shot in the morning and a shot in the evening. Yummy.
      - mowenz 9y ago
        Haha - well if we're going to talk about practicality - it doesn't need to be as tasteless as that - it reminds me of the ultra endurance swimmers sucking hot oil through a tube. You can just make some delicious fried or oily snack, like crisps or chips or sauteed spinach, or fried what-have-you. ...but even a shot of oil is more healthy, pleasurable and hygenic (assuming you burn it all) than filling your tank with petrol :)
jlebrech 9y ago
you can pay obese people to lose weight, but you can't have something like that everywhere.
- zdkl 9y ago
  Stairs on one side and something like a waterwheel on the other. Charge less than a gym and sell it as partially powering whatever local association/charity could do with a break. Credit me when it's a thing heh
  - govg 9y ago
    Proceeding along this train of thought, they've already made a TV show episode out of it : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
  - davnicwil 9y ago
    I know this is a joke, but I wonder if this concept - a gym where the machines generate power - actually could be a thing. It's greener in a pleasantly 'immediate' way - i.e. you could quite literally be keeping the lights, music system, etc on at the gym :-) And what's more, assuming power costs are a non-trivial overhead, it could even result in lower membership fees. If somebody opens a gym like this, sign me up!
    - jlebrech 9y ago
      that would be cool, you power the batteries and those batteries light up the gym and power the usb sockets the the user's phones.
    - gambiting 9y ago
      The gym that I go has machines that are almost all self-powered, with the exception of things like thread mils for obvious reasons. So if you jump on a stationary bike none of the electronics will turn on unless you start pedaling, and to get the fan going you have to pedal for a minute or so first.
    - 9y ago
300bps 9y ago
You're right that it doesn't make economic sense. It also doesn't make scientific sense. First of all, human power releases tons of carbon dioxide just like burning fossil fuels does [0]. Second of all, modern society currently depends on burning millions of years of stored sunlight energy in a matter of centuries (i.e. fossil fuels). Human power doesn't begin to compare. Bang Goes The Theory (BBC show) did an entire episode on this. It's shocking how many bicyclists were needed to run a tiny household [1]. --- [0] http://www.livestrong.com/article/402142-how-does-exercise-affect-breathing/ http://www.livestrong.com/article/402142-how-does-exercise-a... [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vPxuuB_ZBuk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vPxuuB_ZBuk
- scarmig 9y ago
  The carbon that humans exhale is already part of the carbon cycle. So equilibrium CO2 concentrations don't change, so it's not an issue pollution wise. (This is assuming you didn't use a bunch of fossil fuels to create and transport food in the first place, and you're instead using human/animal power to do that.)
  - kristjansson 9y ago
    However, using humans as power source would increase the amount of food consumed, and co2 exhaled, so this analysis would need to take at least that incremental co2 into account.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - ouid 9y ago
      Whether a human eats the plant or it decomposes naturally, the same amount of carbon dioxide is released.
      - erroneousfunk 9y ago
        That would be fine if humans simply walked around consuming plants that would have otherwise decomposed and there were no other resources associated with food production. Unfortunately, agriculture is a major driver of deforestation (and forests are excellent at actually sequestering carbon in the ground). It also requires trucks, boats, and planes to haul supplies to farms, work the land, move water around, and transport the produce to stores. You have processing and packaging that rely on fossil resources (paper, plastic, metal cans...) That doesn't even touch on the impact of meat production, which is several times worse for the environment. Food consumption is absolutely not carbon neutral. You're far better off taking public transportation to work (if available) than walking or riding a bike, if you care about the environment.
tinus_hn 9y ago
Note that people pay to waste their energy in gyms.

TulliusCicero 9y ago

> For extra motivation, all exercise machines in our prototype human power plant are facing a jacuzzi & shower where girls are invited to encourage the boys to flex their muscles and generate more power. Of course, the gender roles could be reversed, but during the first experiments we discovered that this is less energy-efficient. Girls don't seem to get motivated by guys in jacuzzis, at least not to the extent that guys get motivated by girls in jacuzzis. Clever, but I'm guessing many will find this creepy or 'problematic'.

dualogy 9y ago
Very likely. So?
TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
I don't see how acknowledging and using differences in psychology between men and women would be problematic. Could you please explain why you believe it would be?
- nicky0 9y ago
  Have you never read feminist literature? Everything is 'problematic'.
- skywhopper 9y ago
  To the extent they are describing observed behavior, it's not problematic. However, stating generalizations in a flip, cliche-confirming way _can_ be problematic, inasmuch as it reinforces the negative stereotypes. In this particular example, I certainly have no problem believing that it's true that among contemporary college-aged individuals from American and European cultural traditions, that on average the men would be more motivated to work out harder by the chance to see scantily clad women in a jacuzzi than the reverse. But that's extremely unlikely to be true for _all_ men or _all_ women. I would doubt that it's true for homosexual individuals. I would doubt that it's true for people raised in cultures that aren't so open to the display and ogling of near-naked humans, or contrariwise, cultures wherein the display of near-naked human form is not so sexualized. This statement would be a cute aside between two people who share a similar cultural background. But in a semi-scientific article describing a utopian vision of power generation, it feels out of place to me. From a global point of view, it's narrow-minded. The generalization given is not true of all cultures. From an individual point of view, generalizations about men and women who do share our culture tell us nothing about the individual in front of our face, who may or may not personally fit in with the profile. From a camaraderie-building point of view for residents of the building, making decisions about how to run the residents' responsibilities based on sexual objectification of other residents is probably not going to build a healthy local culture. And from a purely practical point of view, ignoring individual preferences and motivations is a great way to get substandard performance from everyone. Maybe the chance to see the girls in the jacuzzi would motivate the guys more than the girls, but I am betting it's unlikely to be the best strategy to get the best performance out of each individual man and woman. The point is, it's a mistake to embrace these generalizations as universal truisms. They are anything but. And relying on them leads you to make poor and sometimes hurtful assumptions about other people.

TulliusCicero 9y ago

Makes sense that they'd try this in the Netherlands. The Netherlands has a very high mode share of active transportation (walk/bike). For example, the walk+bike mode share in Amsterdam is 56% (chart includes other cities in Europe): https://charts.datawrapper.de/JsIir/index.html#embed https://charts.datawrapper.de/JsIir/index.html#embed By contrast, most US cities are well under 10%. Even LA, which has pretty excellent weather overall, is only at 4%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share

hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
LA is a bad example, as it's also notoriously a car-centric city that is unfriendly to walkers/bikers. Better example would be something like Portland.
- TulliusCicero 9y ago
  > a car-centric city that is unfriendly to walkers/bikers 1. This is true of nearly all cities in the US, and 2. This feeds into my point about cultures favoring physical activity or not. LA's geography/weather is great for walking and biking. What holds it back are intentional design decisions borne out of culture.
- emj 9y ago
  But it's cheap to build bicycle infrastructure so LA can get there too.

mtempleton 9y ago

>If students have to generate their own power, they are much less likely to waste it. How far would students go to reduce their efforts? Would hot showers go out of fashion? The article's discussion of human power and incentives to use it beg the point to be made about the right way to fix the tragedy of the commons market failure with atmospheric pollution (and all the other problems with fossil fuels as well). There are so many ways to reduce energy consumption that government regulation can't possibly legislate and adequately regulate (and it's barely even trying at the moment). For example, I try to make a point to bike, walk, take the stairs, use efficient driving habits, and try to often take cold showers. I admittedly do this primarily because I like the exercise, the cold water is more refreshing and better for my skin, I save money, but as as an added bonus I feel some satisfaction that I consume less fossil fuels. But I would do all these things more if I saved more money from it. And taxing bad things is better than taxing good things (like income and investment). I think this is one of the things we will look back from the future and think, what were people thinking--they taxed jobs when they could have taxed something like environmental destruction? What? But American politics are what they are. Our public transport across the country varies, but generally it is laughably bad, and that's just another example of an extremely low hanging fruit to grab.

ptaipale 9y ago
The tragedy of taxing bad things is that if the taxation works, and the bad things (e.g. pollution) start to go away, then the government loses tax revenue. And for the government, that's worse than any pollution. So we see all governments going through loops and hoops to tax something bad, and at the same time regulate so that a sufficient amount of that bad thing still happens so they wouldn't lose the tax money.
- jfoutz 9y ago
  Of course, this can be limited by requiring funds for a specific purpose, such as mitigating pollution. While far from perfect, gas tax going to pay for roads is a decent feedback loop. Tax 'bad' thing, to pay for education about or mitigation of 'bad' thing. the feedback loop solves itself.
- 9y ago

LoSboccacc 9y ago

well, no: unless the whole campus is also built without machinery, you're trading upfront energy (building with more insulation, building the additional power storage retrieval distribution system etc) with the ability to sustain the building with low energy later on also, James May tried to plug gym machinery to an electric car, the human output is just too low for electrical appliances - think not laptops, but washing machines, vacuum cleaners etc.

singularity2001 9y ago

verytrivial 9y ago

I think people are missing the fact this is being run by an art collective. It is trying to ask questions and show what sort of compromises people might need to make if/when other energy sources are off the table. I love it.

ars 9y ago
> when other energy sources are off the table Hu? Where do you [they] think the human power comes from? It comes from food - you could just burn those plants for fuel, and skip the useless multiple conversion. What does flowing the energy through a human accomplish? It certainly doesn't change the energy source.
- verytrivial 9y ago
  I understand the Haber process. I don't think most people know of or care about it. The point their making here is without the magic of current energy supplies things get very weird and difficult, even then you try really hard.
hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
As an art project, it's neat. But when it starts to sound like it actually believes its claims that human power can provide the energy needed for modern society, then you can't help but roll your eyes. Right off the bat, the sentence "Unlike fossil fuels, human power can be a clean energy source, and its potential increases as the human population grows." This is utter bullshit. The modern food supply is dependent on huge amounts of fossil fuels and mined minerals to create fertilizer. Much more oil just goes into feeding a human than you'd ever get out of him.

codeulike 9y ago

The post-global-warmjng sci fi novel The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi deals with this scenario: all energy is measured in calories and workers prepare clockwork springs that store energy to power devices. It's a great novel, too.

pja 9y ago
Which is wildly unrealistic of course. There’s no material that can take the tension such springs would have to cope with. Lots of SF books ask you to take one or two impossible things as givens in order to tell the story of course, but this one pushed things a little far for me. The repeated "lets rape the sex bot again" scenes didn't help either. Funny how when she gets her revenge, that’s not described at all, just the aftermath. But we get page after page of lascivious detail on her abuse. Frankly, it left a really bad taste & I didn’t want to read anything by the author in question ever again.
- zero_intp 9y ago
  The very technology of the spring winding is a McGuffin in the story.

no1youknowz 9y ago

Yes of course. Rick and Morty covered that in this episode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CyMqQBO8w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CyMqQBO8w

cube00 9y ago
...and it's blocked.
ubersoldat2k7 9y ago
And Black Mirror too.
- threepipeproblm 9y ago
  Referring to the episode "Fifteen Million Merits". IMO it's one of the greatest dystopian works ever.
snarfy 9y ago
And the Flintstones.
rusk 9y ago
IIRC Soylent Green had the characters cycling a stationary bike to generate power for their living space.

Turing_Machine 9y ago

"Most work, however, we carried out ourselves." "a human needs to be motivated in order to produce energy." Historically, "ourselves" was equivalent to "members of a disfavored ethnic group and/or social class" and the "motivation" was provided by guys with swords, whips, pistols, etc. I'd rather not see routine slavery/serfdom come back, thanks.

OldSchoolJohnny 9y ago
They specifically address your point; you didn't read it.
- seandougall 9y ago
  But they don't, unless I missed it, address the death toll of large-scale, human-powered construction projects like the Panama Canal (5,609 dead). To me it reads like a romanticization of brutal working conditions, and waving aside the issue of slavery by saying "but we can make it fun!" doesn't really help.
- Turing_Machine 9y ago
  No, they don't, and yes, I did. Bikini babes aren't going to make someone pick cotton by hand in the Alabama sun for 12 hours a day. That job won't ever be "fun" and "exciting". To be blunt, it sucks major ass. Handwaving doesn't count as "specifically addressing". Sorry.

GeorgeRichard 9y ago

> Each student in the human powered Van Unnik student building is responsible for generating the electricity that’s used in his or her individual room. No elderly or physically disabled students need apply.

threepipeproblm 9y ago
You think it's eevil for people to generate their own power, because not everyone can do it?

dualogy 9y ago

Pff, "modern society". Most hunting populations have been calculated to yield 10kcals of food for every 1kcal of expenditure --- our fancy modern fuels OTOH result in more like 1kcal food yield per (non-edible of course) 10kcal expenditure. Not exact figures of course but the difference is that profound. "Human power" thus "wins", then --- but not to "run modern society", of course.

jackmott 9y ago
citation needed
- semi-extrinsic 9y ago
  I don't think so. Only 10-20% of the energy we get from food can be used for manual labour, and that's neglecting rest and sleeping periods. If what GP is saying wasn't true, hunter populations wouldn't be able to survive. This is also why reduced calorie intake is much more effective than increased activity if you want to lose weight.
- rsynnott 9y ago
  I think the fatal flaw in the argument here is that the hunted animals are seen as a magic free resource; in reality of course they're a limited resource taking up valuable land, and we could never sustain 7bn people or anything like it in this way.
  - dualogy 9y ago
    How's that a "flaw", I wasn't advocating one thing or another. Of course 7.4 billion and growing cannot feasibly all enjoy the bountyful abundance of game and leisurely pace of our pre-neolithic ancestors (or North-American natives etc) =) It's still a plus to acquire just another added perspective on fuel yields for different types of human societies and lifestyles
prodmerc 9y ago
That doesn't seem right - surely a modern animal farm yields more food per energy expended than a group of hunters?

spodek 9y ago

One of the more thought-provoking articles I've read in a long time. If you think they're dreaming, I suggest reading it nor for engineering detail, but to try out their perspective. Most people would answer 'no,' leave it at that, and not reach some interesting perspectives they did. Not that it goes into engineering detail, but for the creativity, thoughtfulness, and, most importantly, change in perspective from the predominant views of: we must produce more power! ... we must not change our way of looking at things! I use my rowing machine regularly, which creates resistance through a fan and wind resistance. If it used a generator, I could power most of my apartment's electrical needs. Maybe not my refrigerator, which I shouldn't use when it's cold outside. Most of my electrical bill is fixed costs and taxes, not my electrical use, so a little less power and I could drop my contract. Articles like this one get me thinking that way. If you keep extending how little you can use and what the world would be like if we had to work for our power instead of lazily flicking a switch and not caring about externalities, it's very interesting. Not to mention what it would do to our declining physical fitness, growing obesity, increasing disconnect from nature, and probably mental fitness too. I bought a hand-powered washing machine a while ago and it did the job fine until it broke. Sadly, our culture doesn't promote great solutions that reduce consumption. I'd be happy to wash my clothes under my own power and other things like that if well-built ones were available. I can solve some things myself, but it's a lot easier when solutions are on sale. There are thousands of options for plug-in washing machines and only one or two hand or foot powered. I'd love to see people engineer solutions that work and endure. This article isn't trying to solve all global power problems, but I bet its authors feel something like Stallman when he started writing GNU utilities, which people probably saw as tilting at windmills. Or even Torvalds writing the kernel, though Stallman's platform made his project more plausible to help. By the time people started Wikipedia, they could look back and build on several successful models. Or maybe like Feynman considering how much room there was at the bottom. Contemporaries probably said they were crazy and didn't see the point. I, for one, support people thinking along these lines and seeing how far they can take us -- beyond engineering solutions to new ways of thinking about ourselves in the context of nature. I bet a lot further than most of us suspect.

jackmott 9y ago
if you keep extending how little you can use the answer is obviously yes, but then it isn't modern society. you could.more efficiently harness the sun than growomg plants and eating them then working out anyway, so this whole approach fails to make sense at any level.

solotronics 9y ago

from the perspective of an engineer this is stupid. humans can not generate anywhere near the power we consume currently. if you want to experience life as a 5th century serf go ahead

peterwwillis 9y ago

You can motivate people to do manual labor a lot of ways, but this does not mean they will like it. Fear of death is a good motivator. "Hey, let's have fun working out!" is not a good motivator. On top of this, the premise is crazy. They want to have two societies: one that produces technology with non-human-generated power so the other society can use that technology to live on human-generated power.

sunbuntu 9y ago

No, but we might be able to make a modernish (circa 1800) with small-scale wind, small hydro and sailing ships. It is likely, solar with storage, wind and other renewables will power the world in 2040.

King-Aaron 9y ago

How much energy would that same human provide when dried, burned and used as heat energy to power a turbine? I mean, I ask for no other reason than curiosity.

frankus 9y ago
About 70 kWh. https://what-if.xkcd.com/105/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/105/ (Hey, you're the one that asked)
- King-Aaron 9y ago
  There truly is an XKCD for everything

frankus 9y ago

Once you get past the point of "energy I would have expended anyway for exercise/to relieve boredom" you run into the fact that humans just aren't a very good way of converting resources (food and the energy/minerals needed to grow it) into mechanical energy. The modern food system is woefully inefficient at converting primary energy into food calories and the human body isn't all that great at it converting food into mechanical work. Useful amounts of heat are even more elusive. Toasting a slice of bread might take a half hour of vigorous exercise. I'm pretty sure it would take more energy to heat a jacuzzi than one could extract from a dozen people showing off in front of it.

frankus 9y ago

What this misses is that we don't really have any way of "generating" power aside from nuclear reactions. It's all converting from one form to another. In the case of "human power" it's extracting energy from plants and animals that we kill. Wait but Why has an excellent deep dive on this: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html#part1 http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-lif...