How Much Energy do you Have?

How are you feeling, tired, lethargic, struggling to get yourself motivated to go to the gym? Let me help inspire you. Did you know you have all the energy in the world inside you right now? We all do. Let me explain.

A little while ago I wrote a piece on how fast we are travelling through the universe while we are sitting in our armchairs reading something like this on our phones. That article described the science which suggests we are spinning through space at between 1.2 and 3.0 million miles per hour (depending upon your perspective). Either way, that’s eye wateringly fast, and we don’t feel a thing.

That got me thinking, rather than looking outwards, what about looking inwards. Is there anything going on inside our bodies that is equally fast and equally mind blowing?

Well, yes, in fact there is.

The average human body contains approximately 30 to 50 trillion cells depending on factors such as age, size, and overall health. Each of these cells has a specific function. For example, we have skin cells, red blood cells, bone cells, liver cells, lung cells, and brain cells (which are optional for some of us). These cells run your body while you are thinking and doing other stuff. They breathe for you, they digest your food and drink for you (and get rid of the waste), they cool you down, they defend your body from bacterial or virus attack, they push your blood around your body, they stop the bleeding when you cut yourself, and they let you see, hear and think, and you don’t even give them a passing thought.

The human body is in a constant state of renewal, with some cells dividing rapidly (like skin and gut cells) and others rarely or never dividing (like neurons). On average, it's estimated that about 330 billion cells are replaced daily in the human body, which equates to roughly 3.8 million cells per second. And your body is super smart, it never gets any of these cells mixed up, you don’t get a toe cell suddenly growing on your nose, or a fingernail cell growing in your eye (which would be a pain). Can you get your head around just how amazing that is? If you had had to manage all of that activity consciously, you’d definitely be having a bad day (and very likely a short one).

It doesn’t end there either. Every of those cells contains on average around 100 trillion atoms. Each one of those 3.8 million cells that are replacing themselves every second is pulling in a 100 trillion atoms from the air you breathe, the food you eat, and the blood flowing through your veins to construct the new cell in exactly the right way so it can do the job it needs to.

The cells in your body perform millions of these biochemical reactions every second of every day, consuming 10 million energy molecules per second to meet your energy needs. Your body is a biochemical powerhouse, with about 100 quintillion to 1 sextillion biochemical reactions occurring every second just to keep you alive (that’s 1 with 21 zeros after it). To achieve all of this, your body operates as an incredibly efficient and highly complex thermodynamic machine that maintains a constant temperature of very close to 37°C. This process is so precise, if there is any deviation from that temperature either way, you are going to be having another very bad day.

How amazing is that, your body is continually doing all this work, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for your entire life just to keep you alive, and all you do is lay in bed all day.

The mind-boggling stuff doesn’t end there either. Take those 4 octillion (that’s a 4 with 27 zeros after it) atoms you are made of; each one is made up of 99.9999999999999% empty space. To help you visualise that, if you scaled up the circumference of an atom to the size of the dome on the top of the Vatican, the tiny electrons would be spinning around the edge and the nucleus at the centre would be the size of a pin head. So yes, you are made up of 99.9999999999999 % empty space (and you thought you were overweight). Wrap your head around that.

The nucleus in each of those atoms is spinning constantly at high speed and continues to spin…well forever. The atoms that make up our body were forged in the hearts of stars and scattered across the cosmos by stellar explosions over billions of years. They do not decay and will exist, spinning forever, for as long as the universe does.

There’s a lot of energy in those little atoms, potentially limitless energy, and there are a 100 trillion of them inside you. If you take the average mass of an adult human to be approximately 70 kilograms, then the combined energy of all those atoms calculated using E=mc2 is approximately 6.3 × 10¹⁸ Joules. That is equivalent to the energy released by about 1.5 billion tons of TNT, roughly 1,000 times the energy released by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It’s insane I know, all that energy is inside your body right now.

The weirdness doesn’t stop there. Don’t even get me started on how all those particles in your body are entangled with other particles all over the universe (but that’s one for another time).

With all that energy, maybe you should get up and go for a run?