[Coda]

Originally Posted by Potironette

I'll not ask about the last bit on computers, especially since I don't understand most of the words there ("integrated circuit," "CPU"/"processor," "circuit board," "silicon wafer," "fundamental quantum-scale limitations" [though for this one I guess I can just take away that modern technology is getting parts smaller and smaller and extremely close to some point where it can't work any smaller]).

Your takeaway there is correct.

Just a few bullet-point-sized definitions to help you round out some basic knowledge:

* "Silicon wafer" is exactly what it sounds like -- a thin sheet of silicon.

* An "integrated circuit" is a bunch of microscopic electronic components made from a single piece of silicon. It's called "integrated" because before they were invented you'd have a bunch of small parts (usually roughly cylindrical in shape) that you'd have to wire together.

* A "CPU" is basically the brain of a computer. Every computer has to have one. To give you an idea of just how complex they are nowadays, the CPU in an iPhone 7 has 3 billion individual components printed into it (imagine how small an iPhone is -- and the CPU isn't even the only chip in it!), and the CPU in an Xbox One has 5 billion.

I guess solar panels are only worth it with lots of space and lots of solar panels xD?

That's not completely true. It's all a question of what you're doing with it. If you have a small load that needs to have power no matter where it is, especially if it's going to be deployed somewhere you can't easily route mains power, then even a small solar panel is useful. Solar-powered traffic signals are pretty common, for example.

But yes, if you want to power something large, you need a lot of them. For large-scale solar electricity generation, it's more efficient to use mirrors to reflect sunlight to heat up water to spin a turbine.

...do solar panels connect to the same power outlets that receive electricity from powerlines or whatever else is generating power from outside? Because if they do, doesn't that mean installing solar power means both a lack of access to those power lines and that those sockets can't be used if it's been cloudy for many days and power stored in batteries ran out (would running out happen? Although I guess this depends on how many solar panels a particular household has)?

They do, although there's another stage that has to go in between -- solar panels generate direct current like a battery instead of alternating current like spinning-magnet generators do, so a device called an inverter is necessary.

But after that, yes, they do connect to the same outlets. However, it's actually not particularly difficult to combine multiple sources of electricity, so houses with both solar panels and city services electricity just have a power regulator that draws from the solar panels when the batteries have sufficient charge and smoothly transition over to city services otherwise. In especially sunny places such as southern California, solar panels can actually generate more power in the course of a day than the house will actually use (or at least, more than the batteries can store), so those houses can actually sell their generated power back to the electric company.