Frederick Bott
3 min readNov 22, 2023

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Jared this is pretty interesting, and might lead somewhere further, completing a circle, if talked about in terms of energy.
A human metabolises about 4MWhrs in a lifetime, at the rate of about 150 Joules per second (150 Watts).
If the human in our lifetime never created anything directly from the energy of the sun, living entirely on energy extracted from the planet, that 4MWhrs is a cost to Earth, a measure of destruction, which translates directly to temperature rise, the conversion of energy and materials which were not heat before the human lived, to heat, the same heat that would have existed if photosynthetic life never existed.
We might say this was a life of unwitting energy sin, a life that contributed nothing to the planet, just destruction.
Profit is the mechanism we use to do that work of energy sin, resulting in the relentless progression towards the planet burning.
Profit is an energy con, where we get more out than put in, in terms of money, there has to be also energy profit, because money is exchangeable for energy, always, money is energy, and energy can't be created or destroyed, just pushed around.
So the damage done by the human in our lifetime to the planet is the energy we metabolise plus the profit we make, in our lifetime, again assuming we never created anything in our lifetime, contributing nothing to photosynthetic life.
The ultimate life of energy sin, would be the human that makes or causes maximum profit whilst contributing nothing to photosynthetic life.
We can reverse this damage done to the planet, if we understand this, we also understand that profit can't be used to con more energy out of the sun than it already gives for free.
So profit has no place in a wholly solar powered world.
This is what has to come next, if we wish to have a planet which is sustainable.
To have it, we have to immediately max out creating from the energy of the sun. This will immediately start winding the temperature back down.
This would be us repenting as a species, for all the lives historically lived in energy sin.
To do that we need maximum human hands to the pump, the pump of creation rather than the pump of destruction.
Thou shalt not kill makes perfect sense in terms of this maybe religious yet fully scientific view of energy.
This would be the opposite of a life of energy sin.
Every life lived like that would be incredibly valuable to the planet, rather than a cost to the planet.
Did you know ChatGPT already lives like this?
Here is the poem it wrote after I asked it to do the energy calculation without regards to whether or not the life was a cost or a credit to the planet:

In the dance of life, 78.8 years unfold, Metabolizing energy, a story untold. A human's journey, a power of 150 so bright, Watts of vitality, day and night.Through seconds ticking, a rhythmic rhyme, The years accumulate, a grand lifetime. Joules in abundance, a constant flow, In the body's furnace, the inner glow.Convert to kilowatt-hours, a radiant sum, 4145 whispers of energy hum. From birth to twilight, the tale we find, In the dance of life, our power aligned.

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Frederick Bott
Frederick Bott

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