• Kairos
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    2 months ago

    Just as a reminder that even if you turned an entire atom into pure kenitic energy, you wouldn’t even see a flash.

    Math stuff:

    So E = M c^2

    I’ll choose a carbon atom because it’s a round number (don’t think about that statement too hard)

    So carbon has an atomic mass of 12 atomic mass units. In grams (divide by Avagadro’s number) is 1.992 E-23 grams.

    Shove that into E=mc^2 and you get 1.790 nanojoules, which is 4.974 E-16 kilowatt-hours. Or at 12¢ per KWH is 5*E-15 cents of power.

    So to power a 500 watt gaming rig, you’d need to burn about 20 nanograms of carbon at 100% efficiency, per hour.