The amount of joules per unit of times is POWER, measured in watts
Efficiency is a concept that has no units. Efficiency just looks at how many joules get wasted that isn’t the work you want to do.
However, notable is that nearly every physical process does not maximize efficiency when it maximizes power. This means you have to throw out power or reduce power to optimzed efficiency, which is the cost of pursuing efficiency to living systems.
Life’s goal is that life maximizes the rate, not the efficiency. The amount of waste product is generally not important.
Efficiencies free up resources to be utilized for whatever your civilization values.
Or you can simply grow your resources you’re exploiting.
Let’s say you have
Turtle species A that eats three pizzas a week.
Hare species B that easts three pizzas a week.
Turtles decide to order 2 pizzas and save $ off the budget and carefully manage the leftovers to reduce spending. If they went to the downward limit, they could save no more than 3 pizzas reduction.
Hares put 5 pizza restaurants on speed dial and throw the budget out and have a massive pizza party paid for with credit cards. There is not any upward limit to this growth.
Basically the more efficiently a civilization uses a resource, the higher overall consumption of that resource becomes. It also applies to production. (The more efficiently something is produced, the lower the cost and ultimately greater the consumption of it occurs)
The amount of joules per unit of times is POWER, measured in watts
Efficiency is a concept that has no units. Efficiency just looks at how many joules get wasted that isn’t the work you want to do.
However, notable is that nearly every physical process does not maximize efficiency when it maximizes power. This means you have to throw out power or reduce power to optimzed efficiency, which is the cost of pursuing efficiency to living systems.
Life’s goal is that life maximizes the rate, not the efficiency. The amount of waste product is generally not important.
Or you can simply grow your resources you’re exploiting.
Let’s say you have
Turtle species A that eats three pizzas a week. Hare species B that easts three pizzas a week.
Turtles decide to order 2 pizzas and save $ off the budget and carefully manage the leftovers to reduce spending. If they went to the downward limit, they could save no more than 3 pizzas reduction.
Hares put 5 pizza restaurants on speed dial and throw the budget out and have a massive pizza party paid for with credit cards. There is not any upward limit to this growth.
Who wins the life race?
Well, as we don’t exist with perpetual abundance and ecological overshoot routinely occurs.
And the hares suffer the same fate as the bunnies.
https://bsidneysmith.com/writings/essays/all-the-bunnies-in-the-meadow-die
You probably mean that the hares suffer the same as the tortoises.
But inverting that, the tortoises suffer the same fate as the hares, right?
So it’s not efficiency that matters. Here are two groups that pursue different efficiency optimums, and it makes no difference?
Are you familiar with Jevons paradox?
Basically the more efficiently a civilization uses a resource, the higher overall consumption of that resource becomes. It also applies to production. (The more efficiently something is produced, the lower the cost and ultimately greater the consumption of it occurs)
I’m familiar with Jevons as a demand side phenomenon.
I think the supply side is known as Wrights Law: costs drop when production increases?