Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet, 2021a

18 <strong>Human</strong> Factors 315
out that your effort is so small in the gr<strong>and</strong> scheme of things
that it cannot make a credible difference, <strong>and</strong> others will just use
more—offsetting your sacrifice. Do you believe that is correct? If
not, what argument would you offer in support of your decision?
8. Let’s say that the U.S. were willing to divert a one-time investment
of 10 qBtu out of its 100 qBtu annual energy budget toward building
a new energy infrastructure having a 10:1 EROEI <strong>and</strong> a 40 year
lifetime. How many qBtu will the new resource produce in its
lifetime, <strong>and</strong> now much per year? How many years before the
amount of energy put in is returned by the output?
9. If some country or the entire world committed to a one-decade
program to replace fossil fuels with solar photovoltaics at an
EROEI of 6:1 (Table 14.1; p. 232) based on a 36 year panel lifetime
expectation, what fraction of that region’s 49 energy would have to
be poured into this effort?
10. Imagine that we hit energy decline as a result of less energy
available each year in traditional fossil forms, experiencing 5% less
energy each year 50 A new renewable energy infrastructure effort
will require up-front energy, reducing the available energy even
further. 51 Imagine yourself as a politician wanting to get elected
after such a program has been started, <strong>and</strong> you think you can get
elected by pledging to kill the program. What is your pitch to the
voters to get elected?
11. The Milky Way has about 100 billion stars (10 11 ). If 50% of stars
have planetary systems, 10% of those have a rocky planet in the
habitable zone, 10% of those are in benign 52 environments, 0.1%
manage to produce life of some form, <strong>and</strong> 0.1% of those result in
intelligent life, how many instances of intelligent life might we
expect to emerge in our galaxy?
Hint: you never need to convert qBtu: it’s
just some energy unit.
49: . . . country or world, depending on the
chosen confines of the problem
50: ...asteep decline
51: . . . maybe by another 10% for a 40-year
plan at EROEI of 10:1 <strong>and</strong> a 40-year lifetime
resource
52: ...stable star without flares <strong>and</strong> cosmic
rays
Note that we have no solid underst<strong>and</strong>ing
of the probability that life emerges or that
having done so intelligent life will form,
so these numbers could be optimistic or
pessimistic.
12. What would it take, in your view, to overcome the collective
human failings summarized in Section 18.5? How do we crack this
predicament?
© 2021 T. W. Murphy, Jr.; Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Lic.;
Freely available at: https://escholarship.org/uc/energy_ambitions.