One interesting thing from Geoffrey West's Scale: the whole human body uses 90 Watts. That's like a crappy lightbulb. Nature is efficient. Artificial things are nowhere near it.
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I never electricity properly. Does this mean we only have about 90 watts flowing through us at all times. And there aren't alternative forms of energy doing various functions? I'm pretty skeptical that all we do is powered by the equivalent of a lightbulb
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No it adds up. You eat ~2k calories a day which is ~2300 watt hour ~= 90 watt * 24 hours. Watt measures all types of energy, not just electricity. 90W Lightbulbs of course are extremely inefficient, but still.
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One trick is as living bodies scale up they get more energy efficient as most energy cells dissipate gets absorbed by the neighboring cells, until you collapse under your own weight. Life has to be efficient as up until recently almost all of it was powered by sunlight.
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