Sunday, February 8, 2009

A Price for the Sun


Although the Sun does not generate a uniform amount of light throughout it's life and will continue to slowly brighten until it's death, about 5 billion years from now, we can still roughly estimate how much light will be produced between now and it's end and determine, in terms of energy costs, how much it would likely set one back to buy the Sun.

5.6216744275618786699008 X 10^40 joules of energy will be released in the form of light, by the Sun, in the next 5 billion years. Only one billionth of that energy will actually impact the Earth, so if our future successors require more energy, they might consider building a Dyson Sphere around our star.

This amount of eventual energy leaving the Sun can be converted to kilowatt hours (kWh) which registers:
1.561576229878299630528 X 10^34 kWh
If I were to expend this much energy at my home in the next month, the electric company would bill me approximately 2.1081279103357045012128 X 10^33 dollars, which although not very accurate for an estimate, people of today could reasonable expect to pay this, if the Sun were for sale.

I once heard that the combined sale price for everything on the surface of the Earth would be 1.0 X 10^15 dollars. That's quite a difference.

4 comments:

tashabud said...

Hi Jesse,
Hee, hee. You lost me there with all those strings of numbers, along with their exponentials.

Numbers are one of my weaknesses. My daughter will be graduating from college in May with a degree in EE. At one time, she was majoring in EE,CS,and CE, but now only majoring in EE. Along the way, she lost interest because she said that she's not learning anything from her professors. She really wanted to concentrate on robotics, but with the kind of professors she had, she just flat out lost interest.

Even now that she's going to get her EE degree, she doesn't even think she'd like to work as an Engineer anymore. She's just trying to finish it now just so she finishes a degree. What a shame. I think she's pretty burned out with too much academics.

I wish I had her smarts when I was still attending school.

Tasha

Anonymous said...

Interesting

tashabud said...

Hi Jesse,
Just dropped by to see if you have new posts.

Have a great day,
Tasha

Mr.Anonymous said...

very interesting