Extremely ambitious and impressive. Very tempting, unfortunately too hard for me. I could only skim it, with envy and frustration.
14.1.1 pp. 607-608
An energy source of 10 kW is provided by a boiler consuming ≈ 2 kg/h of wood and ≈ 13 m3/h of air, equivalent to roughly 1 g/s of oxygen, in standard conditions. The power released in a rocket engine burning a mixture of liquide oxygen and hydrogen is of the same order as that of a nuclear reactor: several gigawatt, and during the 10 min that such motors typically operate, roughly 200 tons of oxygen are consumed. By comparison, the average power dissipated by an active animal of the size of a man, or in other words the quantity of energy that the animal must consume in food to keep alive, is a few hundred watts, corresponding to a food intake of the order of 2000 kcal/day.