Timeline for What impact would a dragon the size of Asia have on the environment?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 18, 2019 at 8:29 | comment | added | Monty Wild♦ | Bacterial spores are effectively bacteria which have placed themselves into a special form of hibernation in which they can stay for years or even centuries. Energy consumption would be effectively zero. | |
| Jul 17, 2019 at 13:59 | comment | added | Damon | @MontyWild: That's demonstrably wrong, the opposite is the case (and easily verifiable), but I'm not going to argue much about it -- not only does it lead nowhere, but it is also irrelevant. As stated before, feel free to subract a few orders of magnitude -- half a dozen orders of magnitude if you will -- and the dragon produces as much energy in one second as Norway will consume in one year. Every second. At that scale, it really makes no sense to discuss whether a kilogram of body mass produces 1W or 0.0001W. It's all the same, it's an awful, devastating lot. | |
| Jul 17, 2019 at 13:41 | comment | added | Monty Wild♦ | @Damon, it actually doesn't take any energy at all for cells to remain alive. It only takes energy when the cells are doing things. | |
| Jul 17, 2019 at 13:11 | comment | added | Damon | @MontyWild: Not sure that is true. Square-cube sure does apply, but the base metabolism to keep cells alive remains the same per cell or per unit of volume. OTOH surface is (relatively to volume) much smaller due to SQL. Much like a baby will die from cold if you leave it unprotected in "actually not so cold" environment (metabolism cannot keep up with heat loss), our dragon would probably be searing hot since it has very little surface compared to its volume. Also, the dragon is not hibernating but woke as stated in the Q. | |
| Jul 17, 2019 at 0:34 | comment | added | Monty Wild♦ | Larger animals use less energy per unit mass than small animals because of the square-cube law, and cold-blooded or hibernating animals use less energy than active warm blooded animals. | |
| Jul 16, 2019 at 18:29 | comment | added | John Dvorak | "creature that outputs 10^23W" - spread across the size of Asia. Still awfully lot though. | |
| Jul 16, 2019 at 9:52 | comment | added | Damon | @Muuski: Well OK, feel free to subtract 3 orders of magnitude, that's still around 100 exawatts. Huh, I had to look that one up, didn't know what came after peta... | |
| Jul 15, 2019 at 18:23 | comment | added | Muuski | What if we instead used the metabolism of a hibernating animal? It's not fair to use the power output of a mammal which is on the move 16 hours a day. (Not that I think it will change much, just curious) | |
| Jul 15, 2019 at 16:46 | history | answered | Damon | CC BY-SA 4.0 |