You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough

Re:You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill dee... by kragen on Monday February 28, 2022 @09:19PM (#30508443)

Agreed. I'm surprised the difference in specific heat is so large! Maybe that's fairly humid wood? Because glucose is about 220 J/mol/K https://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?ID=C492626&Mask=2#The... and 180.2 g/mol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucose, working out to 1.2 J/g/K, and aluminum is 24.2 J/mol/K and 27.0 g/mol, giving 0.90 J/g/K.

My general rule is that everything is 1 J/g/K except water, which is 4.2. It's obviously not true, but almost always within a factor of 2, and 1 is an especially easy number to multiply and divide by.

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Re:You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill dee... by jholman on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @10:26AM (#30515287)

Reading your first paragraph, I was thinking "water. the answer is always water", when it comes to estimating the properties of life-stuff vs everything-else-stuff within a factor of 2. Not obviously, of course, but it's just such a powerful heuristic.

Reading your second paragraph, I see you're familiar with the principle, and added a good heuristic to my stockpile, thank you.

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Re:You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill dee... by kragen on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @01:24AM (#30524384)

Happy to share :]

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