[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_internal_heat_budget#R...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_energy_budget#Earth's_...
Though I've got ... questions and concerns about how certain we are that there's no large-scale heavy-element fission occurring within the Earth's core.
I'd think that within the nickel-iron core, one might find even heavier elements, that those would have sunk through the primordeal (and one presumes, not-yet solid) inner core, and would tend to have greater radioactivity.
How to demonstrate this does seem something of a challenge. Decay products and/or neutrino flux, possibly?
- "...hypothetical georeactor at the center of the Earth having power greater than 2.4 TW at 95% C.L. is excluded"
https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.02257
(That physics paper counts more coauthors than neutrinos!)
And that's even before enabling Javascript.
(Javascript-enabled neutrinos will be a key feature of Web 6.0.)
(Oh, and thanks!)
Questions:
- How'd you find this? I'm suspecting something like "earth's core reactor neutrinos".
- I don't even know how to read/interpret the notation used to express neutrino counts. Though if we can divide 112 co-authors (including deceased) by annual detection rates we can come up with a neutrino-seconds equivalent of authors....
(That's a ... really low detection rate.)