And Counting...

 A  topic that could lead to many ideas for short pieces

and to start...

25,000,000,000

Number of the Week.

For folks who don't care for all those digits, especially the zeros, the Number of the Week is more conveniently written - 25 Billion.

Less conveniently, one could also say 25 thousand millions. And that's a lot.

Now it turns out that there's an interesting statistic involving 25 billion, in the field of energy.
Energy is frequently measured in kilowatt hours.

A kilowatt hour is 1,000 watts of energy maintained over a period of one hour.
So if you had a 1 kilowatt of energy, the electrical kind, then you could keep a 1,000 watt lightbulb shining bright for 1 hour. Or if you had 10 lightbulbs of 100 watts each, you'd get one hour of good light till the energy ran out.

Now try and imagine 25 billion kilowatt hours of electrical energy.
One way to do that is to imagine the world's 8 billion people. And you can then imagine each person in the world, man woman and child, rich or poor, each running a 100 watt lightbulb - then there would be enough electricity in 25 billion kilowatts for that person to keep the light on for a month at an hour a day.

Ahh, you say, but where would that energy come from?
Well it could be the electrical grid. In turn that energy might have come from a natural gas fired electrical plant, or from waterfalls (hydro electricity) or from a nuclear reactor.

But here's the neat thing.
In theory you could get that energy from a single kilogram of bananas. That's like 6 bananas.
Yup, just six bananas hold enough Energy to make 25 Billion kilowatts of electricity. It's just the conversion thingy that's the hurdle.

Know that this theory has wide spread acceptance in the scientific community. Virtually universal approval.
And the theory is most famously expressed by Albert Einstein's equation:
e=mC2  or energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the speed of light, squared.

And now to repeat the reveal.
One kilogram of bananas (mass) holds the energy of 25 billion kilowatt hours.

Society's mission should now be clear.
Let's find a practical way to get that energy out of the bananas.