“The factors that govern the rate of any particular nuclear reaction are the temperature and the densities of the reacting isotopes. The temperature at the centre of the Sun is about 15 million K and this enables nuclear reactions to take place that convert hydrogen into helium. However, at that temperature, it is a very ineffective process.
This statement may seem surprising — surely the Sun is a stupendous generator of energy! Well, it is in the sense that large total amounts of energy are generated but in terms of the power generation per unit mass it is not very impressive. The mass of the Sun is 2 × 1030 kilograms and its power production is about 4 × 1026 watts giving 2 × 10−4 watts per kilogram. By comparison, an average person of mass 70 kilograms generates and emits about 95 watts of heat radiation by chemical processes going on within his body, giving about 1.4 watts per kilogram, some 7,000 times greater than the solar value! It is indeed fortunate that the Sun is such an inefficient producer of energy. If it produced energy per 276 unit mass at the rate of a mammal, it would long ago have exhausted its fuel.”
“Perhaps the only objective measure of success in an evolutionary sense is survivability and on that basis, the cockroach and the shark come out well. They have been around for a long time — about 400 million years. It is also claimed that if man ever created a nuclear hell-on-Earth the best, and perhaps only, survivors on land would be cockroaches. They would carry forward the banner of future evolution, perhaps culminating in a few hundred million years in another kind of intelligent creature, perhaps one that knew how to survive with its intelligence.”
“Karl Marx stated in Das Kapital that “capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction”, but what he claimed applied to capitalism probably applies in a wider sense. For example, many of the world’s most beautiful places have attracted tourists, whose physical needs have been met by building concrete and glass hotels which by their very nature detract from the beauty that led to their construction.
Perhaps mankind has evolved with too large a brain — which will become the agency of its own destruction. Mankind, as a species, could have existed indefinitely with bows and arrows, windmills and the Black Death, but it may not be able to survive very long with nuclear weapons, coal-fired power stations and antibiotics.”
