Interesting, for the curious that's ~10 terawatts of Th-232, ~9 TW of U-238, ~4 TW of K-40 and ~1 TW of U-235. Plus about 5-15 TW of primordial heat left from t

Interesting, for the curious that's ~10 terawatts of Th-232, ~9 TW of U-238, ~4 TW of K-40 and ~1 TW of U-235. Plus about 5-15 TW of primordial heat left from the earth still cooling down from when everything got real hot about 4.5B years ago. I like the "New York's worth of bananas" unit (3e17 bananas), doing some back of the envelope math apparently if everyone ate one a year for 80 years we could significantly slow climate change [0] [1] [2] [3] [4]. [0] World electricity usage was apparently 23,900 terawatt-hours in 2019, which works to a constant 2.73 TW. If we can eliminate the mantle heat from K-40 that's 4 TW out of the way which would be lovely. [1] ~4.9e17 kg total K-40 in the mantle, so if every human dedicated themselves to eating them in a human lifetime of 80 years would take 4.9e17 kg K-40 * 1 banana/3.9e-9 kg K-40 /7.9 billion people/80 years = 1.9e17 bananas per person per year or 6.1e9 bananas per second, (very) roughly about one New York's worth of bananas per year, what's a couple tens of quadrillions of bananas between friends anyway. [2] If you somehow vaporized the K-40 content of the bananas as you ate them. [3] And managed to concentrate potassium directly from the earth's mantle into bananas. [4] I have no choice but to note that this whole idea would be... Bananas. I'm sorry.