redbird: me with purple hair (purple)
Redbird ([personal profile] redbird) wrote2004-04-21 10:43 pm

Refuting a fannish slogan

There is a free lunch. In fact, that's the only lunch there is. Most of us are at the main tables: 1 kW/m2, anywhere on the surface of the planet, converted into carbohydrates. A relatively few terrestrial life-forms, most of them single-celled, are dining at the heat-and-sulfide soup kitchen served forth by the planet's interior.

We don't cook it, we don't have to earn it, we just help ourselves to the meal that's been free for billions of years.

[identity profile] crazysoph.livejournal.com 2004-04-21 11:44 pm (UTC)(link)
Yeah! I like it!!

Crazy(keep on thinking, please! I like watching...)Soph

[identity profile] purplecthulhu.livejournal.com 2004-04-22 07:15 am (UTC)(link)
If Alan Guth, the inventor of cosmological inflation, is to be believed 'the universe is a free lunch'.

[identity profile] rysmiel.livejournal.com 2004-04-22 07:48 am (UTC)(link)
It's a scale issue. Think how many trillions of tons of hydrogen are busily turning into helium to keep that free luinch going.

[identity profile] skylarker.livejournal.com 2004-04-22 08:57 am (UTC)(link)
Of course, you have to give it all back again before you leave. :)