Earth Hour

I got an email today. It said the following:

Hi Everyone

Earth Hour 2010 will take place on Saturday March 27, 2010 from 8:30 pm to 9:30 pm, wherever you are in the world. This is the invite for you to do your part by turning off your lights and minimizing energy usage during Earth Hour.
For more check it out at http://www.earthhour.org/homepage.aspx?o=ignore

Enjoy the darkness!!

I wrote right back! Here's my response!

Seriously? Didn't you take any physics? Energy can't be consumed, only converted. The way I see it, energy is bored most of the time and it's our job to entertain it. Imagine spending 2.4 billion years tied up in a hydro-carbon state and totally bored. They dig you up. Still bored. Truck ride to the hopper. Still bored. Loaded on the train. Still bored (but granted all this is better than the 2 billion years in the ground). Now you get to the coal fired power plant and the good stuff starts.

You get to be converted to heat and then excite some bored water molecule so much that it converts from liquid to gas. The water then "pays it forward" by spinning a turbine and helping some other poor schmoe out in the ether get to be converted into electricity, travel across a wire, converted again into light, then shot back out into the ether. Excitement for the energy in the magnetic induction. Excitement for the water molecule. Excitement for the kinetic energy in the turbine bearings getting converted to heat because of friction.

I'm not making this up. In physics they even talk about molecules getting excited as thing heat up because they get to move around more.

You want to do the earth a favor? For crying out loud! The whole darn thing is made of matter and matter is made up of energy (just ask those folks who split the atom). Do the earth a favor by doing your part (even though your part is small) in offering the earth a little excitement!

Get out there and convert some hydro-carbon!