You're a ball of energy

"You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame 7 x 10^18 Joules of potential energy-enough to explode with the force of thirty hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point. Everything has this kind of energy trapped within it. We're just not very good at getting it out" (122)

In Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" I keep learning random facts. It's not the story line (if you can call it that) that makes the book interesting, it's the interesting facts like this one that stand out. After reading this one, it made me wonder why if we have so much potential energy, why I sometimes have trouble staying awake in class. If I could find out a way to get some of this energy to work in my favour that would be ideal. Another thought it triggered was that if everything (living and not living) had such a huge amount of potential energy, why it is such an issue to turn off a light when you're not in a room. In todays society where one day we have cell phones that can only make a call to the next where cell phones are mini computers, we can't seem to figure out how to get a bit of this potential energy from everything and anything and make better use of it.