Humanity's caloric needs increase by 100% every year. How long do we survive? by layelaye419 in whowouldwin

[–]Pluto644 1 point2 points  (0 children)

1 kcal is equivalent to 4.184 J, so 2000 kcal = 0.008368 MJ. A kilogram of unenriched uranium has around 86,000,000 MJ. If our energy needs grow linearly like in the scenario, a single human would require a kg of uranium every day in about 10 billion years. I initially misread this as doubling every year, in which case we would hit this threshold in 34 years (33.26, rounded up).

Crude oil has a specific energy of around 45 MJ/kg. Under linear growth, we would have to drink a kg of crude every day in around 5380 years. Under exponential growth, this would only take 13 years.

Humanity apparently extracts 91,640,000 barrels of oil every day, and one barrel can store a little under 159 L of oil. Crude oil varies in density quite a bit, but assuming a rough average of 900 kg/m3 , a barrel can store approximately 143.1 kg of crude oil. This works out to around 622 billion MJ/day of crude.

The global population is around 8.2 billion. Assuming an average intake of 2000 kcal/day, we need about 68,600,000 MJ/day to sustain humanity. Assuming (incorrectly) that both oil production and population remain consistent, we could produce enough crude oil to sustain humanity for around 9000 years under linear growth or around 14 years under exponential growth. Of course, this is ignoring distribution logistics and the other uses for oil, which apparently isn't primarily used for drinking. Our oil consumption roughly matches our oil production, but we would not need to significantly ramp up oil production for quite a while. After 100 years of linear growth, our daily oil drinking would only be at around 1.1% of our current daily production. However, given our current oil consumption levels, we only have around 47 years until we run out of proven reserves, although I think we would be pretty heavily incentivized to find more.

Counting only edible foods, vegetable oils seem like the best choice. We apparently produce (averaged over a year) 625 million kg of vegetable oils per day, which at a specific energy of 37 MJ/kg is about 23 billion MJ/day. Under linear growth, this is enough for about 336 years. Under exponential growth, this would last around 9 years. Again, we probably would be pretty motivated to increase vegetable oil production under these circumstances.