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.
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.
Nah it only slows down the moon.
/s
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?
What he’s saying is essentially “inevitably, yes”.
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.
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.
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.
Our tech has increased monumentally in the last couple of hundred years. From horse drawn carriages and parchment, to reusable space vehicles and computers. If this rate keeps up for a billion years, that’s 5,000,000x such a technological leap. Of course, disease, war, environmental degradation or other stupid human social idiocy will likely slow this down. But I think we should be able to get off world before the earth is inhabitable. Getting out of the solar system before it’s inhabitable is much harder, but we have a lot longer.
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.