Okay, 59.9 years, really.

 I don't know what the rest of you think about while doing cardio, but my mind goes off in all sorts of directions.  Today's session on the recumbent bicycle led me to the following train of thought.

(There's a bit of a spoiler here, but bear with me.)

In Tron: Legacy, part of the plot is a plan by Clu, Kevin Flynn's digital doppelganger, to take over the physical world.  In order to accomplish this, he has assembled an army of "repurposed" inhabitants of Tron's computer world that he plans to transfer into the real world, presumably by reversing the process that brought Flynn, and later his son, in.

Okay, so far so good.  Now, as we all know, the great debate regarding Star Trek's transporter is exactly how the damn thing would work in practise.  After all, if it converts the people on the transporter pads into energy, e equals mc squared tells us that you end up with the equivalent of a pretty good sized atomic bomb going off down there in the heart of the Enterprise, which has to be a bad idea.

In this case, we're looking at the opposite problem.  Would it not take all of the energy in the Los Angeles power grid to create the mass of a person?    Let's see...Los Angeles uses about 3.9 million KW a year...that's about 10700 KW a day...1 KW equals 3,600,000 joules, so that's 38,465,753,424 joules a day...one pound of mass is about a 10 megaton atomic explosion*...one megaton is 4,184,000,000,000,000 joules...a two hundred pound man would be about 836,800,000,000,000 joules...divide by joules per day in LA...divide by 365 to convert days to years...no, I'm out of my depth here, that can't be right.  I end up with 60 years of the entire electrical usage of Los Angeles to create just one person from scratch, let alone an entire army.

Remember the cascade failure that shut down electricity for the entire North East area from New York to James Bay in 2003?  Imagine Clu's digital forces making their way up the datastream to the basement of Flynn's arcade, as breakers across the state - and the country -  flare white hot and explode under the stress of attempting to feed the creation of physical forms for the invasion force...

But, let's be honest here.  Higher math isn't my strong suit - in fact, after a couple of pints, I sometimes have trouble figuring out the tip for dinner.  If any mathematically inclined readers of this posting would like to take a shot at calculating the energy involved, I will be happy to correct my figures.

- Sid

* There's some fuzz factor there, I found different kiloton yields for a pound of mass online, but ten made the math easier.