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.
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.