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Today, we are answering the stupidest –
uhm, ok wait, the BEST and MOST AMAZING
questions from you – our viewers!
At kurzgesagt, we’re experts when it comes to
tackling stupid questions, and on top of our own,
we get hundreds from you on an almost daily basis!
So let’s very seriously and
scientifically answer some of them!
Question 1:
How many Jellyfish do you need to power Tokyo?
Tokyo is a hungry beast, gobbling up around
280 terawatt hours of electricity every year.
That’s more energy than these twenty countries
combined, and more than all of Australia.
Can we power Tokyo with our
innovative renewable energy source?
Some jelly species like Aequorea victoria or
Crystal Jelly contain fluorescent proteins
and glow in the dark. If you put one
of them in front of a tiny solar panel,
you’d end up with something like a microwatt
hour of energy. To meet Tokyo’s outrageous
energy demands, you’d need: a quintillion
three hundred quadrillion glowing jellies.
Hmmm...That’s too many. Can we use bigger ones?
How about Nemopilema nomurai, the
Nomura jellyfish! Really chunky boys,
weighing about as much as a piano and growing up
to 2m wide, they’re armed with around a thousand
spindly tentacles that grow up to four meters long
and help them suck up plankton from the water.
In recent years, their numbers have been
exploding, wreaking havoc on local ecosystems.
Using these fridge-sized jellies to power
Tokyo will finally give them something
more useful to do. They don’t glow in the dark
but jellyfish are kind of electric, aren’t they?
Unfortunately: no.
If you’ve ever been stung by a jellyfish
you know it feels like a painful electric jolt –
but the pain actually comes from hundreds
of nematocysts inside their tentacles,
tiny dart guns filled with venom.
So how do we get energy from jellyfish?
We’ll squeeze it out of them
with the power of piezoelectricity!
Piezoelectricity is an electric
charge that builds up in certain
solid materials like crystals or bone
when you stress and squeeze them.
For example, a quartz crystal is made up
of positive and negatively charged atoms
arranged in repeating pyramid shapes.
Their charges usually cancel each
other out. But if you apply enough pressure,
atoms shift out of place and the pyramids become
kind of wonky. Positively charged on one side
and negatively charged on the other – like a
battery. Together they add up to a charge across
the whole crystal. Piezoelectricity
powers sonar, times quartz watches,
and some nightclubs use it to keep the lights
on just from the stamping of dancers’ feet.
So, here’s the plan: we will create a
ginormous battery from jellyfish by harnessing
the hypnotic movements of Nomura’s
hundreds of long, thin tentacles.
First, we squeeze our jellyfish,
one tentacle at a time, into a kind of wetsuit
made from nylon-11,11: a cutting edge material
that has been optimized for power production and
has the same piezoelectric properties as quartz.
Next, we watch as each twitch of a tentacle bends
the tiny nylon nanofibers of the jelly suit,
converting its movements into electricity.
All we need to do now is to plug our jelly
into a current collector with a copper
cable to be utterly disappointed.
Even with around 1000 tentacles
wrapped in energy-generating nylon,
the electricity generated only adds up
to around 1 Watt, or 10 kWh per year.
Enough energy to run your laptop for twenty days.
Not bad, but we want to power Tokyo here!
We need more jellies! WAY MORE!
About 29 billion! Sounds like a lot,
and it is, but right now there are
27 billion chickens alive on Earth.
So it's mostly a matter of motivation on our part.
A single Nomura can produce millions of jelly
babies a month, and with enough plankton to eat,
they can grow from the size of a grain of rice
to the size of a person in less than a year.
If we want to breed a lot of them and fast,
all we need to do is to basically
empty the Pacific of plankton.
And of course we’ll need space to store
them all. Giving each Nomura a cube of
space measuring 5 meters on each side sounds
generous, but it barely contains the tentacles.
All those jelly-cubes add up to a tank that’s
about seven times the total volume of Mt. Fuji.
With all those tentacles and cables, our
biggest issue will be short circuits.
We need to insulate all 29 billion cables. And
don’t forget the tentacles themselves. Now, even
if the jellies get tangled up, we can maintain a
steady power supply for the good people of Tokyo.
In reality of course, our jellyfish powerstation
would be pretty difficult to maintain.
Nomura would probably die constantly and
need to be replaced. And the cost of building
this whole mess and killing the ocean
to feed them would be like spending
$1 million dollars to buy a single dollar bill.
We’re not saying any of this is a good
idea. But now we've done the math,
there's nothing to stop you from giving it a try.
Okay, bring on the next totally dumb,
– uhm, completely reasonable question!
Question 2:
What if it rained bananas instead
of water for a whole day?
Ok, so first, we tried to calculate what
would happen if for one day every single
rain droplet was now a banana. Turns out in
a storm, several million raindrops can fall
on a single square meter. Which stacks
quickly to the equivalent of a banana
asteroid smashing into the planet and killing
all life. While fun, this is a bit too much.
Instead let’s take the average volume of rain
that falls on our planet in a single day,
about 1.33 trillion tons of water – a massive,
wobbly orb of water 14 kilometers across.
Now let’s swap this water for bananas.
Each fruit weighs about 120 g, which will give us
a daily banana-fall of 11.1 quadrillion bananas,
weighing 1.33 trillion tons in total. If
we match average global rainfall patterns,
even the Sahara Desert would
receive around 15 trillion bananas.
If a medium sized banana has about 105
calories, 15 trillion Sahara bananas alone
could already feed the world’s population for
over two months. For the world as a whole the
calories of all rain bananas add up to a grand
total of 1.2 quintillion calories. With just
one day of banana rain we could go on feeding
everyone on Earth for over a hundred years.
Of course in reality, the banana
rain would be pretty catastrophic.
A banana falling from about 3000 meters,
the height of a mid-altitude rain cloud,
would reach a velocity of 240 meters per
second and strike the ground with the same
kinetic energy you’d get from dropping a
bowling ball off a 50 m building. And we
are dropping almost thirteen over eleven
quadrillion of them across the planet.
One of the rainiest and therefore worst affected
cities is London. It would face a storm of 21
billion bananas, or 2.5 million tons. The shower
of yellow death breaks roofs, shatters windows,
and decimates national monuments. Human
bones are no match for this monsoon,
so we’d need to take shelter from the
banana blitz inside or underground.
All around the world, cities and infrastructure,
rivers and rainforests are severely damaged and
clotted with a layer of banana smoothie
that’s already beginning to rot. Trillions
of mashed bananas are floating in
the ocean, clogging up coastlines.
Picture the aftermath of all the worst oil
spills and superstorms combined but way
worse and kind of everywhere. And our problems
are just getting started. The rotting banana
mush contains 160 billion tons of methane,
280 times our current annual emissions as
a planet. Methane traps around 28 times more
heat than CO2. Adding this much greenhouse gas
this quickly will lead to a catastrophic
and sudden spike in global temperatures.
Most ecosystems won't be able to handle it and
we’ll witness a devastating mass extinction event.
In short, Banana rain is an
apocalypse-level catastrophe.
Ok, hopefully your question has been properly
answered. It's time to wrap up for today – please
keep sending us your amazing questions,
even and especially if they are stupid,
we are collecting them and will
answer more of them in the future!
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