Your friend does not show any calculations just a number sitting in the
middle of a paragraph (1200 deg C) I would like to see his actual calcuations.
Here is why a meal won't burn you up. First, if you eat too much you store
the energy as fat rather than release it. If you use maximum human exertion
then the problem is different. The maximum caloric intake and output is 7000
Kcalories per day. (Kimberly A. Hammond and Jared Diamond,("Maximal
Sustained Energy Budgets in Humans and Animals," Nature, April 3, 1997, pp
457-462))
A 7,000,000 small calorie intake per day means emitting this much energy
through 1.6 square meters in 24 hours. 7,000,000 calories/1.6 meters^2 =
4,375,000 calories/m^2 must be emitted each day. There are 86400 seconds in
each day.
4,375,000 /(86400) = 50.6 calories/m^2/sec.
converting to joules
50.6*4.184 j/cal.=211 joule/cm^2/sec.
Dividing by the Stefan Boltzman constant
4th root(211/5.6697 x 10^-8) = 247 deg K
This is slightly cooler than I would expect (below freezing) so I think that
the surface area you cited above and which I used, is probably a little too
large. Using less than 1.6 meters squared for the surface area would
increase the temperature to a more reasonable level.
glenn
Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man
and
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm