A Princeton-led team has built a tabletop device that generates voltage directly from Earth’s rotation through its magnetic field. While the power output is orders of magnitude too small for practical electronics, the breakthrough suggests Earth’s spin could someday provide constant, fuel-free energy if the effect scales up. The team is now calling for independent labs to reproduce the results.
I bet harvesting the angular momentum of the planet would be completely safe for sustainability of life, who needs seasons anyway.
We already monitor the length of a day to figure out when to add leap seconds, if we do start using a significant portion, we’d know. (Of course, we know we are lighting the world on fire by selling LNG and letting people have private jets, and still haven’t stopped.)
I doubt we would manage to extract enough energy to affect seasons. The Earth is pretty massive.
We will be extinct way before that, we have around ~2100 at best, and decades before that life won’t be comfortable for most people.
they say its “free energy”, so i would imagine they would start scaling up the production by making more and more facilities. And even though we will fuck up the planet by that point and kill ourselves, if it still turns there is still a chance something new might evolve eventually. But if the planet doesnt even spin, it will likely turn into lifeless rock.
I can’t see this being useful; the amount of energy generated is just so far below what’s practical to use. An equivalent size of solar panels would be cheaper and provide orders of magnitude more energy even when it’s cloudy.
It’s an interesting idea though, and cool that they were able to harvest any power at all.
I didn’t bother to read the paper, but the article says the system produced “10s of nanoamps at 10s of microvolts”. I’ll just assume each of those values are “100”, since that’s the highest value you could describe as “10s” of something.
That works out to 0.01 nanowatts. For comparison the tiny solar panel on a solar powered calculator might produce 0.0075 watts, or 750 million times that amount of power.
In reality, since wattage is a multiple of volts and amps, lowering both of those figures from my highball estimate would massively decrease the wattage. The solar calculator probably produces billions of times more power than this 1 foot long cylinder.
So, i think its neat that they were able to measure an effect, but the article really should not even be mentioning power generation.
This.
That thing is at best a sensor, certainly not a power generation device.
The antenna in my phone likely “harvests” orders of magnitude more electricity when receiving signal.
Thermal seems like a better idea than this.
Still, i guess it’s good to know. But with our luck, billionaires will find a way to make the earth stop spinning.
Anything is a better idea than this. An unpowered LED in a regular room will generate more electricity from light shining at it. An unpowered speaker in a normal environment generates more electricity from the sound waves that fall on it. A phone’s antenna will harvest more energy from the signal it receives.
All of these options are horrendously bad and inefficient ways to generate electricity, and still all of them are orders of magnitude more effective than that thing.
Sounds like a great idea. Meet our popation’s power demand by helping to weaken the Earth’s magnetic field - which is currently busy protecting us from hostile-to-life electromagnetic radiation.
Oh great, I’m sure absolutely nothing can go wrong if you scale this up to meet humanity’s growing demand for electricity.
It’s free energy!There is already tidal power generation slowing down the Earth’s rotation, though not by much.
What about the propeller type generators that spin both ways? How would they slow down earth’s rotation?
Imagine scaling it up to infinite, like say you could get 30 million wind turbines tall enough to be directly in the jet stream. That’s going to affect other things. It’ll slow the jet stream or make it move. It’s resistance, and if you know your physics, you know that any kind of resistance is going to effect other things. Hell, large dams and tsunamis change the earths rotation. Yeah the effect is small with things like resistance power, but if you ratchet it up, and over time? Yeah, it’ll change things in unexpected ways. Maxing solar is of upmost importance.
Is It possibile to scale this effect to such a level that it would result in real problems being produced? What will be the amount of such turbines required to significantly modify the earth’s rotation in a dangerous way? Does the earth have enough surface to host such an amount of turbines?
Is It possibile to scale this effect to such a level that it would result in real problems being produced?
What he’s saying is essentially “inevitably, yes”.
What will be the amount of such turbines required to significantly modify the earth’s rotation in a dangerous way? Does the earth have enough surface to host such an amount of turbines?
But… none of us have a crystal ball. We can try to make good predictions, make choices based on reason, but ultimately, we’ll just have to wait and see.
The questions I pose are to understand whether what is saying is actually a threat or just some scaremongering.
I do not know the answers, but someone might and that would be interesting.
We can try to make good predictions
Yes indeed we can, and we should before we claim something will become inevitably a huge problem. There currently is no such problem, and such calculations should not be that difficult to do within our theoretical frameworks.
The questions I pose are to understand whether what is saying is actually a threat or just some scaremongering.
Well, only if it scares you 😉.
But seriously, I don’t think It’s really anything to worry about. It was pointed out that other forms of energy generation, like wind or tidal, or hydroelectric can have this same effect of slowing planetary rotation (Hydroelectric has actually had measurable effects on the rotational velocity, there were studies). Likewise, geothermal power accelerates core cooling (nominally). Which ultimately could also mean our demise. So we don’t really have better options.
But all of this is so long term, none of it would matter for hundreds of thousands of generations of humans. And to be quite honest, I will assert right now that in hundreds of thousands of generations, the human race will have both different means of power generation and different planets to live on. (Or we won’t still be around and it’s all moot.)
So no, no reason for anyone to worry about this, maybe ever.
As the earth rotates, the oceans follow the moon’s gravitational pull (and the sun’s, to a lesser extent). From an outsider’s perspective it is a lump of water always bulging towards the moon, and the earth rotates underneath this lump.
By placing a resistance to the free movement of the tides you are siphoning a very small amount of energy from the rotation of the earth as you are restricting the passage of the earth through that lump of water.
So it doesn’t matter if your generators spin both ways on the rising and falling tides, you are still restricting movement.
Islands, shores and land in general tends to resist the tides. Not just a little bit either. By that logic, the rotation of the earth was never sustainable to begin with.
Yes. It isn’t.
We are very lucky to be on a planet that has remained in a habitable state for almost a billion years. This is probably not common. We’re lucky to have a lot of negative feedback loops within our environment, different effects that seem to nudge the planet back to a habitable environment whenever things get out of whack, that’s probably why we’re alive and it’s probably just by chance…
But make no mistake, the planet will change over time and one of those changes will be that the speed of rotation will slow down, it’s slowing down as we speak.
The moon is one of those special aspects of earth, perhaps the most special thing about earth. There’s not another like it in our solar system, both so close and so large compared to the planet it orbits. As a result it affects us a lot more than most moons affect their planet; it does a whole lot to maintain a steady environment here. We know that it’s responsible for the tides, but those total gravitational forces are probably also responsible for changing up our core, keeping our core hot and liquid. And it’s our internal spinning liquid iron core that is responsible for our protective magnetic shield. And that magnetic shield prevents solar wind from stripping away our atmosphere. That spinning liquid core is probably also responsible for plate tectonics, the shifting of continents. And plate tectonics are probably the only reason that we have any heavy elements at all up near the surface, without that most modern technology wouldn’t be possible and life may not have even been possible.
Oh… so after billions of years, the Earth will be tidally locked with the Sun. If we start harvesting Earth’s rotational energy one way or another, we’re just speeding up the process. Anyway, that sounds about as bad as burning fossil fuels.
But I guess the takeaway I was trying to illustrate, is that we live on a habitable planet, but most planets only get these conditions for a short blip of time, we seem to have gotten it for a long blip, but it won’t last. We need to figure out how to live in the more hostile environments of space and other planets without the magic conditions of earth if we truly want to survive past this blip, especially if we’re shortening our time here by burning massive amounts of fossil fuels.
Hey, I realized that I should elaborate on what I was saying, so I was working on a big edit. Unfortunately you replied before I finished, but it’s there now.
Oh this will be fun! But I wouldn’t worry we going run out of drinkable water by 2040, so we don’t need to worry about this.
Futurama did it first, and it didn’t go well.
Blue blue shiny ball is fucked.
Nikolai Tesla theorized this 100 years ago. The plans that explain how his Wardenclyffe Tower was expected to work for data transmission were found, BUT he has said there was a secondary purpose for generating power from the Earth’s magnetic field and core rotation that he never detailed. I dont think they ever got that far, but he was clearly aware that the Earth’s magnetosphere was not the only generated sphere that was useful.
Pretty much what Tesla said.
Was this the energy source Nikola Tesla was talking about?
