Sense of humour?

I was prompted by the piece in the Guardian snapped above to ponder over breakfast this morning about how many heritage-eco protesters you would need to power treadmills which could generate as much power as a decent size, French built power station. I was mindful of the rather inefficient looking contraption which figured in a film about Oscar Wilde's time in Reading jail.

I got about as far as thinking that the heritage-eco costs of deploying what might be hundreds of thousands of such people and connecting them to the power grid might be quite large themselves. Then that asking Google's Gemini (of reference 1) would not be much use first because computers are not good at humour and second because Google's 'ism' detector (as in sexism, racism or pornography) might move into action and block the question.

At which point I moved onto the FT to find that the Indians have these troubles too, with the piece at reference 2 telling me of legally-mediated conflict of interest between an endangered species of bird and a large array of solar panels in a desert. I wonder if the Saudis have issues of this sort too - they are, after all, very keen on falcons and are, presumably, quite keen on preserving other birds for them to catch and eat.

To close, I thought I would ask Gemini after all with the prompt: 'how many eco-protesters on treadmills would you need to generate the same power as a mid range power station'. He plays it with a straight bat, tells me that I would need millions of protesters and concludes: 'while the idea of human-powered energy is intriguing, it's incredibly inefficient compared to established power generation methods. A focus on renewable energy sources and energy conservation is a far more sustainable and realistic approach to meeting our energy needs'.

Along the way he points out that: 'a fit person on a treadmill might generate 100-200 watts of sustained power. A mid-range power station produces hundreds of megawatts (millions of watts)'. Poking further, including enlisting the help of Microsoft's Copilot, I decide that the relationship between the power consumption of a treadmill in a gym and the power output of a person working a dynamo is too complicated for me. Quite possibly too complicated for Gemini. But I dare say the order of magnitude is about right. And I also get confirmation both of the value of these things as aids to disciplined, interactive learning - and of the pitfalls of relying too much on any of the detail.

So pretty good in a general way on the difficulties involved in large scale generation of power by humans on treadmills (or anything else of that sort) - but no sense of humour. Did not detect or chose not to react to my real motivation.

References

Reference 1: https://gemini.google.com/app.

Reference 2: Poor-sighted Indian bird flies into row over power lines in desert: Supreme court expected to reverse measures designed to protect endangered bustard from development - Chris Kay, Benjamin Parkin, Financial Times - 2024.