My thoughts on the thing we saw

Nate Lewis is an amazing man. Simple as that.

At first I thought this would be just another alarmist weirdo talking about how "Were all gonna die, and theres nothing we can do." I was wrong. I do not feel that we as class understood the sheer magnitude of what he was saying when he said the word Terawatt. A terawatt is a ridiculously huge amount of energy, enough energy to power 10 billion 100 watt light bulbs. I am just purely amazed by the amount of power needed to fuel humanity. I found it compelling the way he introduced the facts and odd that there are so many alternative power sources that just simply can not provide the 13 TW we need to survive. The only feasible power source is in fact solar power.

The sun provides, as Nate Lewis said, about 600 TW of reasonable accessible energy. to put that HUGE number into scale. 600 TW is 6.0 × 10^14 watts, if you had a rope that was 6.0 × 10^14 MILLIMETERS (0.0393700787 inch) It would wrap around the world 1498 times! That is HUGE and that also means that the amount of power we can get from the Sun. but for me the question is, how do we turn that power into something that wont strain our infrastructure. I beleive he was right by saying that chemical energy is the way to go but that is much easier said than done.