Physics Banter - View Single Post

**Randy Poe**

wrote:
I've discovered a new theory that might create a sustainable and
perpetual source of free energy for the world. The source is Air.

The human body is mostly made up of proteins and water. We get all of
those building blocks, and others, from the food we eat and the water
we drink. Our body is constantly using all of that fuel, not solely to
provide us with energy. It mostly uses all of the materials in our
diet to rebuild and replenish our blood, bones, and tissue. Every six
months all the cells in our body are rebuilt.

You can't go six months without eating or drinking, but you can go a
long time without food or even without water, at least compared to
breathing. It only takes a few minuets without air for a person to run
out of energy and die. So you have to ask yourself if most of the
energy we use is from breathing, or if it is from food and water.

You would have to ask yourself this only if you ignored what
was already known in great detail from the last few centuries
of biology and biochemistry.

We need the food and water to have a structure to or bodies, because
without water we would evaporate,

That's pretty funny.

Is that really what you think happens to a person who
dies of dehydration? They evaporate? Just sort of
vanish into steam?

and without food our cells would rot
away.

That's pretty funny too.

Without oxygen though we would have any power to even be alive.

Warning: it has been a couple of decades since I last saw
a biochemistry text.

I believe there may be a grain of truth here. The "power"
that fuels our chemistry is stored in a molecule called
ATP. The "TP" means "tri-phosphate". The body charges up
its batteries by making ATP. ATP becomes ADP (diphosphate)
and then AMP, and in the process the energy goes into
useful work.

ISTR that oxygen is involved in recharging the ATP.

If we ever understand exactly what the air we breath is doing to keep
us alive, because I don't think we do yet.

You might want to crack a biology book before making pronouncements
about what we do or don't know about biology.

We would have an unlimited
source of energy from breathing machines.

Well.... OK, suppose you had a big lump of synthetic
cells whose job was to take in O2 and AMP and put out
ATP. The energy is in chemical form. The body is good
at extracting chemical energy to do chemical work.

But our machines aren't really very good at converting
chemical energy like that into useful work.

The best way we have to do that involves taking oxygen
out of the air and using a self-sustaining heat reaction
to generate heat, which can then be used in various ways
(such as driving steam turbines). We call this form
of breathing machine a "fire". It's been known for a
few centuries. Unfortunately, it requires some solid
fuel, not just the oxygen. It requires something to
oxidize. We call this "burning up the log in the fire". It
isn't unlimited, you need lots of fuel. Forests get
flattened by cultures trying to live on fire alone.

I suspect the same is true of our bodies, as efficient
as they are. There is probably food consumed in the
process of charging ATP. O2 alone is only part of the
story.

You can literally see the
amount of power in the air every time lightning strikes the earth, It
is amazing.

But it isn't energy obtained from the air. Perhaps you
aren't aware of it, but there is another thing involved
in lightning storms, which we call by its technical name
"a thundercloud".

- Randy