The stardust is a given. As for sunlight, all the energy including somewhat arguably geothermal (using the suns gravity to help form the earth and I guess radioactive material being formed by other stars) comes from the sun and gets converted into chemical energy you eat so you're stardust animated by sunlight (mainly).

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[–] 27 points 4 months ago (6 children)

also, the continuous path from our mouth to our butthole is a glorified twisty straw

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago

    All of humanity is powered by a massive fusion reactor.

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  • [+] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    Where do you think the energy in the fossil fuels came from?

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  • [+] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    It comes from the sun. The plants get their energy from the sun and that is primarily what fossil fuels are made of. But even the bit that is from animals is still energy the sun sent to earth and plants consumed and stored and animals then ate. The entire world is powered by a fusion reactor that sends energy wirelessly over millions of miles.

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    [–] 7 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I don’t know how much but I’m sure at least some geothermal energy is due to tidal forces on the earth.

    Which would make some of it technically lunar power.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 4 months ago (-1 children)

    How did the moon get there? Would it be there if there was no sun? It's a shit argument I know but the moon and its mass is in some form due to the existence of the sun.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago*

    Only when a moon orbits around a planet faster than the planet spin on its axis, then only will this moon transfers its orbital energy to the planet.
    Our planet, by the means of tidal forces, transfers a small part of its rotating energy to the moon's orbital energy.
    ... in this process most of the rotation energy lost by the Earth is converted to heat.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago

    I'm a bunch of wave functions increasing entropy.

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    [–] 6 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I am what i eat and i eat enchiladas de mole con queso blanco y cebolla.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    yeah it depends on the level. we are earthdust and eat earthstuff to stay alive. Go one out and its sun. go another and its maybe black holes or at the very least the big bang which could be one more iteration. maybe membrane at that point and vibrating strings and such.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 4 months ago

    True, sometimes as a joke when I'm meeting someone for the first time I'll say "omg it's been so live since I've seen you, like nearly 13.8 billion years since we met last".

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Also we're chemical compounds, eating chemical compounds to produce more chemical compounds fighting off other chamical compounds to prevent them from converting our chemical compounds into their chemical compounds.

    This is the meaning of life BTW

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    Take it further. You process energy and also also made of energy.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    True statement. About equally true and useful as: you’re made out of shit and you eat shit to stay alive.

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  • [+] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] [S] 1 point 4 months ago

    Yup it's tossing off all that entropy and life is able to locally reverse some of it temporarily

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (3 children)

    So a coal plant is sort of running on solar power? Sure it took millions of years and a few extinction events to make that coal, but it’s technically renewable, right?

    If you could make the sun go boom in a supernova, nuclear power would be renewable too.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    Yes it's converted and stored solar energy and it is renewable if you wait long enough but not on any reasonable timescales for human society. The sun isn't big enough to become a supernova but if it did I guess you could argue if you wait long enough the material would most likely form other stars a few times until the stellar era of the universe winds down which will happen with or without any beings extracting energy to perform work.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah, it seems that the sun just isn't big enough for that sort of thing. As the universe is also expanding, the uranium we find in this system is probably locked in here until the heat death of the universe.

    If you could expect the elemental cycle to continue forever, you could argue that the elements of nuclear waste would eventually end up in a star which would recycle them into new uranium. The expanding universe makes that highly unlikely, so even in extremely long time scales, nuclear power isn't really renewable at all.

    If the big crunch hypothesis turns out to be true, there would be an infinite cycle of new universes, and that would make every element renewable in extremely long time scales. However, the ultimate fate of the universe isn't particularly clear at the moment, so who knows really. For the time being, I'll just assume that the heat death is the most likely outcome.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 3 months ago

    Yes in the long term there's no such thing as renewable energy since entropy always increases. It's a misnomer that only has meaning in small human timescales.

    Yeah if the big crunch is accurate and the universe is eternally expanding and contracting then all energy is renewable. Although this is way way outside the scope most normally have in mind when speaking about renewable energy.

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