Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by contravariant 1009 days ago
I remember a fast tennis ball being something around 100J.

So something like 300W for a human body seems like quite a bit of energy. But maybe it's not like poison where it's maximum amount per kilogram bodyweight, but it's more like the maximum for any particular kilogram of tissue.

But even when pelting someone with uniform light rather than physical objects, a 300W IR lamp would be pretty noticeably warm I think.

Anyway it was more than I thought. I was expecting some figure that could easily be dismissed as 'impossible to cause any physical effect, let alone harm'.

1 comments

Humans are watercooled so we can dissipate small amounts of heat with zero side effects. It's all about temperature. You can easily get an RF burn[0] if you climb a cell tower and get extremely close to the antenna, but nothing happens if you hold a wifi router or phone that's transmitting at max power

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_burn