Consuming Life's Power Stream

With respect to energy flow in biology:

Photosynthetic plants act as heat engines for us, converting solar heat radiation to available work, while we serve as information engines by thermalizing available work toward the creation of mutual information resources in our environment. The renewable-resource energy-per-unit-time available to life on earth (i.e. the life power stream, or LPS) is probably around 10^15 watts, much larger than man's rate of fuel/electricity energy production! It is interesting to note that the energy in a vegetarian meal requires about a nanosecond of our present day LPS, while the energy in a carnivore's meal requires perhaps a hundred times as much, even though the consumer gets the same thousand calories to work with in the end. Lastly, it is interesting to note that information engines like us, operating at room temperature with a caloric intake typical of humans, can produce no more than about 10^24 megabytes of such mutual (or correlation) information per day? I suspect that my actual rate of accomplishment, at least, is much less!

Information physics on the web.