
Saturday, August 11, 2018
XKCD - Expanded Hertzprung-Russell Diagram
Reminds me of the interesting factoid:  on a power-per-mass basis, our sun produces less Wattage than reptile metabolism.  (Reptiles!  Doesn't even approach mammals, an order of magnitude greater!)  But that surface area-to-volume ratio is important, and as the XKCD author pointed out previously, if you had a whole planet made of mammals, it would put out a fair amount of energy in an unexpected scale-dependent phenomenon, although metabolism would not continue - turns out where powering stars is concerned, fusion beats glycolysis or respiration.


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