[Orcnet] expressing wide power range

[Keith Lofstrom]

I will be presenting Server Sky to the eComm conference next month.
I have 10 minutes, so I must use memorable and quickly absorbed
images and themes accessable to a mostly non-technical audience.

Non-technical brains understand ratios countable on fingers,
confuse power and energy, and parrot statements about trillions
of kilowatt hours per year, showing that they plainly don't know
how to calculate with such ridiculous units.

One difficult idea to express is the ratios of the power used by
world civilization (about 14 Terawatts), the power captured by all
plant life to make biomass (about 100 Terawatts) and the power
produced by the sun (380 trillion Terawatts).  Those are a heck
of a lot of orders of magnitude.  I want to make the point that
focusing on a few megawatts here or there will not achieve nearly
as much as solar-system-scale access to the sun.

One possible analogy in that range is the power of a digital watch
( about 1.5V x 1uA ) or a hearing aid ( 1.5V x 1mA ) to the thermal
power of a nuclear power plant ( about 3.3GW thermal to make 1.1 GW
electric ).   I can express that visually with a few pictures and
some animation (such as microbes battling over picowatts on the top
of a watch battery).

I could also make a surface area analogy ( comparing the space taken
up by an auditorium seat to the land area of the earth ), but given
that many people think solar farms the size of California are a good
idea shows that they don't understand large surface areas.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs