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bzbarsky | 3 years ago

Heat and temperature are indeed not the same.

For both the sun and a human on earth there are two processes going on:

1. Heat production per unit volume.

2. Heat loss per unit surface area.

The volume to surface area ratio for the sun is much larger than for the human, for a minor reason (the sun is a sphere) and a major reason (the sun's linear size is much bigger). So the equilibrium temperature of the sun in the same ambient outside environment is higher than the human's.

Your thought experiment about placing a human inside the sun would in fact work as you say, if a human body continued to produce heat once it had achieved thermal equilibrium with the surrounding plasma.

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hatsunearu|3 years ago

Yeah, this is a morbid analogy but if you got a bunch of people enclosed in a small area, the people in the middle will get so hot they will heatstroke, even if it's freezing outside. See the recent Korean crushing disaster.

trompetenaccoun|3 years ago

Don't give them ideas, harnessing people power would solve all the major problems. Overpopulation, global warming, energy crisis,... Reminds me of that 'Mitchell and Webb - Kill all the poor' sketch.