Sort-of. Could also be considered air cooled because its our lungs getting rid of most of our heat.
The human body is a watercooled biological machinery
Submitted 4 months ago by Dremor@lemmy.world to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Comments
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Dremor@lemmy.world 4 months ago
A watercooled computer still uses air-cooling in the end. The difference is how the heat is collected and where it is dissipated.
I don’t know that much how the human body cooling system work, but the lungs could be considered as the radiator (as would the skin be).
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Yeah, but my point was that its a fundamentally different kind of heat transfer.
Its the difference between how an oven cools itself and how a power plant cools its self. With an oven, you vent the hot gas that is created through elsewhere, moving the gas and the heat away from its source. That gas (fluid) isn’t re-used. In a radiator, the fluid is re-used in the cooling loop.
A car or a power plant or the human ears are that second example. We’re heating a fluid (blood, radiator fluid, water, etc), to transfer heat to secondary fluid (air, more water, etc…). With a power plant, you have fluids in a circuit, transferring heat from one to the other. The primary cooling fluid doesn’t leave the circuit.
In the first example, we’re ejecting the hot gasses directly, and not re-using them as a fluid. This is more like a car exaust, or an oven, or human breathing.
Its in-out cooling versus around-and-around cooling. Humans (afaik) are primarily cooled through in-out cooling. We do radiative heat transfer and have organs adapted for that specifically, but its a very small amount of heat transfer compared to what we get from in-out cooling.
A car also has both radiative and in-out cooling. But it gets far more of its cooling from its radiator than it does through ejecting hot gasses.
Human cooling is mostly us throwing away hot gas, and we don’t reuse it. We get some cooling through our blood, but less than what we get through breathing.
candyman337@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
I mean, it’s both, like a car, but we call that water cooled
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I mean, thats kind of like arguing that the exhaust is the cooling system for the car, which, undoubtedly much heat is lost through the exhaust. But that isn’t the princpal way it loses heat; the radiator is, and the radiator is much more akin to say, our ears, which are external, and the fluid moves through (rather than being ejected).
someguy3@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Really? I thought it was skin.
LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world 4 months ago
We are more like huge societies of microorganisms that somehow work together and sometimes make mistakes like microorganisms do and confuse us.
Pilferjinx@lemmy.world 4 months ago
When you’re super high on shrooms and attain this realization, things get a little bit close.
LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world 4 months ago
That everything is just a bunch of microorganisms. That the cell REALLY is the building block of life.
blackluster117@possumpat.io 4 months ago
Ore wa Gundam da.
downpunxx@fedia.io 4 months ago
as pilot of my machine I deserve a comfy ride
nikaaa@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Yes, it’s pretty cool. Side notes:
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plants produce a literally electrical voltage across cell membrane when collecting sunlight. The solar panel is very much a technological copy of plant leaves.
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biology can be incredibly efficient sometimes. storing information in DNA takes just about 40-50 atoms per bit, and DNA is about 2.5 nm in diameter. For comparison, the finest structures in modern computers are 3-5 nm in size.
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since powering the whole thing is incredibly important, animals have one specialized cell (mitochondria) inside every normal cell, simply for the purpose to convert the energy from sugar into a usable form. Plants habe two of these specialized cells, with the other one’s job being simply to collect sunlight and turn it into usable energy.
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Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Water fueled also
Dremor@lemmy.world 4 months ago
We sure use water, but I don’t think it is used in the energy production mechanism.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Bioelectrical machine but yes.
reddig33@lemmy.world 4 months ago
It’s always strange to me how the body prefers 72 to 75 degrees F on the outside but 98 F on the inside. Anything approaching equalizing interior and exterior temperature results in heat-related illness.
Deadrek@lemmy.today 4 months ago
We basically run on tiny combustion engines. Exothermic reactions.
We aren’t a passive 98 degrees, we would be hotter if it wasn’t cool enough outside. Higher heat would cause different cellular structures to become misshapen, leading to system breakdown. I’d be like trying to run a cpu cooling loop with boiling water.
Dremor@lemmy.world 4 months ago
And I’d add to that that if our thermal dissipation is overwhelmed, our internal heat build up. To do that heat dissipation, we need to have an environment that suck out more heat out of us than what we produce. If the environment is too hot, the heat build up and as Deadrek says, our internal inner workings beak down.
That why we sweat. Water suck out a lot more heat than air, because it wants to saturate the ambiante air, and to do that it suck up our body heat to become steam. Rince and repeat (literally).
But once the air is to humid, it gets more and more difficult for our sweat to evaporate, which makes it ineffective. That why we can kinda survive in a 90°C + sauna (albeit not for long), but not in a 37°C (98°F) 100% humidity place like some tropical rainforest. At least, not without specialized acclimatation and survival techniques.
lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 4 months ago
(that’s 23 and 37 degrees, for the rest of the world)
Dasus@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Giggles in sauna
VulKendov@reddthat.com 4 months ago
Giggles in heatstroke if you stay too long in a sauna