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Comment by epgui | Hacker News Reader

The per-volume claim rings alarms in my head.

If it produced a quarter of the heat of the human body per volume, its temperature would be lower as well (less than 37 degrees Celsius).[1] This is obviously not the case.

[1] Obviously heat and temperature are not the same, I know that. But when something’s temperature is higher than another thing’s, then heat is exchanged along that gradient. Meaning if the sun produced less volumetric heat than the human body, a human body placed within the sun would warm the sun and cool the human.

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Heat and temperature are indeed not the same.

For both the sun and a human on earth there are two processes going on:

1. Heat production per unit volume.

2. Heat loss per unit surface area.

The volume to surface area ratio for the sun is much larger than for the human, for a minor reason (the sun is a sphere) and a major reason (the sun's linear size is much bigger). So the equilibrium temperature of the sun in the same ambient outside environment is higher than the human's.

Your thought experiment about placing a human inside the sun would in fact work as you say, if a human body continued to produce heat once it had achieved thermal equilibrium with the surrounding plasma.

Yeah, this is a morbid analogy but if you got a bunch of people enclosed in a small area, the people in the middle will get so hot they will heatstroke, even if it's freezing outside. See the recent Korean crushing disaster.

Don't give them ideas, harnessing people power would solve all the major problems. Overpopulation, global warming, energy crisis,... Reminds me of that 'Mitchell and Webb - Kill all the poor' sketch.

Well, plant the idea that there is a fusion reaction going on in mitochondria at a very low scale. Throw in terms like "proton gradient", "electron transport chain" and create a science conspiracy.

There's no overpopulation problem, and no energy crisis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021%E2%80%932022_global_energ...

Energy was a bit more expensive than usual for a short while.

I guess you can call that a crisis.

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