Originally posted by Rick
The biggest hole in the plot though has to be the body heat thing... I just can't help but think how it would take more energy to generate heat than just making a fire or something. I mean, unless they are feeding these people insanely nutrition packed vitamins, I don't think anyone will be generating much heat for long... And it would be far from efficient.
Well, my main gripe with using humans as heating pads is that the human body is an extremely complex organism. If you look at the food chain, it's basic science to realize that a more basic lifeform would require less fuel to survive.. Since we are such complex beings, we need a small amount of complex foods to keep going or a larger amounts of more base foods (Think plants) to live.
People don't require too much food to keep em going & they just recycled the dead so there was a constant replenishment of the energy source & their "fuel"
Now, what this equation is missing is the loss of energy throughout the food chain. If this hierarchy of People = Food = People could continue forever , it would be considered perpetual.. Which is quite literally impossible.
This plan might be possible until Human Beings are available (The ones already existing), but this supply would rapidly dwindle. And then, when you finally begin relying on babies to replenish your source of fuel, the supply would dwindle even more rapidly. It would be impossible to continue the "circle", because it would be terribly lopsided... More like a flat tire.
So, while this could be done. I'd give it a couple of years at the most because the heat that would have to be generated would require thousands upon tens or thousands of humans undoubetly, to work. And even the heat energy would be lost through conversion of heat to electricity, so that makes it even more difficult for this plan to work for very long, if at all.