Methane probably has more energy in it than gasoline. It has four high-energy hydrogen bonds while gasoline only has something like 2 per carbon, and the weight of a purely hydrogen and carbon hydrocarbon is pretty close to proportional to the number of carbons.
Hydrogen gas has a LOT more energy in it than gasoline per unit mass. They used to power the Space Shuttle booster rockets with it before they switched to solid state fuels (Think plastic explosives).
They might not have switched at all, except that they need oxygen to burn it with.
I think a lot of people underestimate just how much of the Universe's energy is in the form of light. As an analogy, I remember hearing about an early spacecraft with an early computer. It had a tape drive with reels of tape. When they played the tape, it rotated and the Spacecraft rotated in the opposite direction. To fix the problem they had to rewind to zero.
The point is that little effects can add up after a while. A star burning over a few billion years can pump out some serious mass in the form of light over it's lifetime. In theory, you could calculate the amount of energy released by the ratio of helium to hydrogen and similar factors, but I suspect that this way underestimates the true number because there will be many different pathways from matter to energy in this soup, and opportunities in the extreme heat in the center for mass values to make much larger jumps than would otherwise be possible.
I would be curious to see if this has been fully taken into account.
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Spring sucks.
Give me one good thing it does that's necessary, done well, and not redundant.
Um, integrate hibernate?
Methane probably has more energy in it than gasoline. It has four high-energy hydrogen bonds while gasoline only has something like 2 per carbon, and the weight of a purely hydrogen and carbon hydrocarbon is pretty close to proportional to the number of carbons. Hydrogen gas has a LOT more energy in it than gasoline per unit mass. They used to power the Space Shuttle booster rockets with it before they switched to solid state fuels (Think plastic explosives). They might not have switched at all, except that they need oxygen to burn it with.
I think a lot of people underestimate just how much of the Universe's energy is in the form of light. As an analogy, I remember hearing about an early spacecraft with an early computer. It had a tape drive with reels of tape. When they played the tape, it rotated and the Spacecraft rotated in the opposite direction. To fix the problem they had to rewind to zero.
The point is that little effects can add up after a while. A star burning over a few billion years can pump out some serious mass in the form of light over it's lifetime. In theory, you could calculate the amount of energy released by the ratio of helium to hydrogen and similar factors, but I suspect that this way underestimates the true number because there will be many different pathways from matter to energy in this soup, and opportunities in the extreme heat in the center for mass values to make much larger jumps than would otherwise be possible.
I would be curious to see if this has been fully taken into account.