This means that the equivalent of 200 million horses are jumping up and down going nowhere. While human metabolic processes are far from 100 percent efficient in converting food energy to realized foot-pounds of work, humanity's ignorant, sheepish waste of both its muscle power and technological power is horrendous. But as operated, all the work that humanity gets out of its technology is 5 percent of the potential 100 percent energy consumed. Only one-twentieth of all the energy consumed by humanity produced physical work is either useful or wasteful. When humans discovered the petroleum, they wrongly assumed that it was absolutely free and belonged to the finder.
Humans take into account only the cost of pumping, processing, and distributing oil.
Fortunately, the Sun does not demand for all the energy that it delivers by radiation to Earth in the overall cosmic scheme, which is trying to make humanity a success despite its overwhelming ignorance and fear. Since realization and fulfillment of that responsibility involve evolutionary discovery by humanity of the cosmic stature of its mind and the inconsequentiality of its muscle, the planting of humans on Earth may not bear fruit. When Universe is developing important functional dependencies, she does not put all her embryos in the same locale. So poor is the probability of self-discovery by humans of the infinite potential of the mind and the relative triviality of muscle power that nature must have planted a myriad of humanity seedlings on a myriad of planets. The first manifestation that humanity may make good on this planet is the serious introduction of cosmic costing into the mainstream deliberations of Earthians.