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Relative Sizes

Sometimes I stumble upon numbers that change - and improve - how I understand the world. They will be added here as I find them.


Dec/15/2006
The Prices from Alternative Energy Sources
I tried to find the prices of different energy sources and compare fossil fuels against renewable energy. I don’t know how they calculate these numbers, but they should work as a rough overview.

Coal and nuclear power are the cheapest sources (2 cents / kWh). Nuclear energy is however by others considered very expensive. I guess with the potential disastrous but unlikely consequences, this is an excellent example of you being better off as long as what you are ignoring don’t happen.

Hydro and wind power are quite cheap too, and actually less costly than oil and gas at the current prices of those commodities. With hydro power it is a natural limit in the number of rivers, so that the marginal cost increases dramatically. The same is the case with spots suitable for wind power, but they are far from as scarce yet. And the technology is cutting the price, as the price has been cut with 80% over 20 years.

Solar and tidal energy is considerably more expensive, but will be competitive when the technology cuts the cost in half. These resources are almost endless too.

See the numbers and sources here.

I just can’t believe how much money will be made by the one who invents a way to extract the energy from nature at a competitive cost. And with the amount of money put into research I will be surprised if it doesn’t happen within a few years. Good bye oil profits.


Nov/24/2006
Ten Largest Stock Exchanges
Al Mabry has sent these numbers to Daily Speculations (collected from Wikipedia). The highly interesting list of the ten largest stock exchanges by market capitalization (in trillions [1.E+12] of US dollars)

New York Stock Exchange - $22.6
Tokyo Stock Exchange - $4.5
NASDAQ - $3.6
London Stock Exchange - $3.5
Euronext - $3.3
Toronto Stock Exchange - $1.83
Hong Kong Stock Exchange - $1.55
Frankfurt Stock Exchange (Deutsche Börse) - $1.4
Madrid Stock Exchange (BME Spanish Exchanges) - $1.1
SWX Swiss Exchange - $1.1

The total sum is $44.48 Trillion, which is about 38 times the annual global oil profit (roughly estimated in the post below). So a few decades with super profit on natural resources, and who would own the world? Or would reflexivity make a natural stopper for that?


Nov/15/2006
Oil Profits
How much money do the oil producers make? This is an extremely interesting question regarding reflexivity because most of the money they accumulate must in one way or another be invested. I therefore tried to find theoretical impacts on the world economy if all the money went to the same project.

If you made $40 per barrel and owned all the World's oil you could:
* Build six Moscow Federation Towers every day
* Take over McDonald's. Google and Exxon in half a year
* Fund the return to the Moon in a month
* Buy almost 800 M1 tanks every day
* Fund a month of war in Iraq from one and half day's profit

See the numbers: Web Page | Excel file.

Here is also a list of how much oil the average person in every country consumes. An EU citizen uses only half of what an American does. I don't know how the numbers are calculated though, but they are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

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